DISABILI-DIT

disabilidit Words by Alexandra SudlowHaylett and Shona Edwards

Earlier this year, as a bystander, I reported an incident to Safer Campus Community regarding a persistent and concerning case of harassment within the disability community.

This harassment continued for so long because the young neurodivergent victims gave the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt as the perpetrator was also neurodivergent. The victims of this abuse felt unsure about their own interpretation of social cues. They struggled to describe their discomfort and identify what the panicked, stomachdropping feeling in their stomach meant.

The fact is, if someone makes you uncomfortable, for any reason, even if you’re not sure how, and even if you think they don’t MEAN to make you uncomfortable… that is not okay. You deserve to feel safe. Good intentions don’t negate one’s negative impact. But it’s so hard to even recognise that these behaviours are unacceptable when you have so much doubt and fear. We know the University of Adelaide has a history of sexual harassment, and we need to pay attention to how that impacts the most vulnerable members of this community, for whom the doubt and fear are overwhelming.

My experience of making a formal complaint as a bystander made me very aware of how difficult that process is. I could not, in good conscience, tell my disabled and neurodivergent friends to submit a formal complaint like mine because the experience was so disorienting, isolating, and alienating. I don’t say this with the intention of dissuading you from reporting, but to prepare you – you will need support. The difficulty I felt was not unique to my case, but an institutional problem. Sara Ahmed’s 2021 book Complaint! gave me the language I needed to describe this experience, and to define the internal and external ‘difficulties’ that I felt myself up against.

Lesson 1: By requiring victims and bystanders to submit individual complaints and placing the burden for collecting evidence and administrating the complaint on the complainer, complaint processes atomise and isolate the complainer. This teaches us that complainers are kept unaware of the existence of other complainers. Lesson 2: The absence of other complaints can make it even harder to recognize there is something to complain about. This teaches us the importance of bystanders and validating that the behaviour isn’t acceptable. Lesson 3: Those who most need to complain are those who cannot afford to complain. This teaches us about the importance of solidarity from allies who do have the capacity to speak up.

The most important lesson is this: The process of submitting a complaint is retraumatising.

When a complaint relates to ableist discrimination of harassment, lodging that complaint requires the disclosure of one’s disability status. Disclosure itself risks exposing us to further discrimination – and if your experience of filing a complaint is a negative one, you may never report again.

Complaints can end up being about how complaints are handled. The administrative burden of collecting evidence of the initial incident(s) and how they are handled snowballs.

For disabled and neurodivergent students, internalised ableism is the first voice we hear that tells us ‘no’, that tells us ‘it wasn’t a big deal, get over it’. It is often the things you need to complain about that make it difficult to complain. External voices are internalised as doubt. Ahmed’s book validated my experience and made me realise that there is so much internal work to do before you can trust your own judgment. It is even more work to speak up, and even more work to make a complaint and to continue on afterwards with unsatisfying (if any) outcomes.

Where should we turn when we hit those internal and external barriers? We must turn to each other and to the disability community.

There is so much power in hearing each other and being heard. The feeling of being able to name what is happening to you can empower you and others. We cannot do the work of complaint alone. Sometimes we only recognise that something happened to us when we hear it from someone else. Knowing it happened to a friend, we can identify not only that it happened, but that it was wrong.

The Disability illness and Divergence Association is committed to fostering spaces and communities where students can can find comfort in each other and speak about the difficulties, harassment and ableism they have faced. It is our responsibility to be in dialogue with the equity group we represent. It is also clear that the solution to the problem of complaint policies will never come from within the institution: the solution will come from us, together.

Our events are informed by the theory of critical love and a politics of the disabled body that moves in action with others. As Ahmed teaches, “...to listen with a feminist ear is to hear who is not heard, how we are not heard”.

When students come forward to us, we know how to listen, because we’ve been there too. We understand the bigger context of trauma and fear. Unlike the university’s grievance advisors, we bring our whole, disabled selves to our role as witness and listener. Serving as witness to student’s stories of mistreatment and neglect is an act of respect for their suffering and their right to be heard.

Ableism is reproduced when it goes unseen and unheard. We must start seeing and hearing it!