'People don't have an idea what caring for a disabled person entails'

Her experience of the brutal reality of everyday abuse came as her two daughters grew up. Lizzy, now 17, and an actor, has Asperger's; Emily, 14, has autism with learning disability and epilepsy. Strangers would come up to them in the street and vent their fury at Clark's "inconvenient" offspring, or her "lack" of parenting skills. People behind them in the supermarket queue would say: "That child needs a good slap," she recalls. Others would simply stare, point, or jeer.

"Hate crime always begins with hate speech," says Clark. The systematic bullying, ignorance and institutional neglect that, for example, led Fiona Pilkington to kill herself and her disabled daughter, began because that behaviour was "normalised", she believes, by the casual acceptance of disablist abuse.

Full article HERE

This blog appears to be following a certain trend at the moment, but let's face it it's an important issue.

I brought up before how Lindsey often suffers abuse both online and in the street for the way she is, the way she acts sometimes, and for numerous other small things.

As both her husband and carer, I experience similar problems and I also have to deal with the fallout afterwards. People truly don't understand the amount of work that goes into caring for an individual that has a disability, whether or not that disability is physical or mental.

A lot of the abuse, as I've stated before, tends to focus around Lindsey's invisible disability or the fact that people deem it as an "excuse" for Lindsey not to work. This repeated abuse aimed at both her and myself leads to large breakdowns in private, and has even lead to Lindsey's self-harming when it has gotten really bad.

Nobody else witnesses this. She takes the abuse, puts on a brave face, and doesn't show much emotional response until we get home. The same goes for myself, I ignore it in public, but it destroys my will to live and any sort of love for humanity I have.

I just thought this was worth reposting here, given it sits well with what I've recently discussed.