A SOCIAL WORKER SUFFERS

Social workers are a great fountainhead of political correctness so there is a certain justice in their suffering from its effects. Here is an account by a trainee social worker of the results for her personally of PC failure to confront reality

"My supervisors are... moving in a new client for me - she who will be called 'R', a 24 year old, six-three, 95kg, clinically depressed, epileptic, mildly intellectually disabled Samoan girl. Which should be heaps of fun! She steals. She lies. She starves herself. She hoards her medication for days, then overdoses. She's self-harming, with lovely grid patterns carved into her arms and legs. She's passive aggressive. And then, if confronted in any way, shape or form on the wrong day, she's just plain aggressive, and has regularly put support workers through windows, down stairs, and face first into walls and her fists.

My being given her is supposedly a compliment - they wouldn't foist her on me if they "didn't think I could handle it." Thing is, nearly everyone who has worked with my service longer than I have has been her support worker at one time or another. None of them could 'handle her' for very long, and some of them have been doing this shit for forty years. Poor sad bastards.

I think there is something really wrong when your employer says to you "when you work with (this person), she will attack you. You will get hurt."

If she's hurting so many people, then why are we still working with her? Why hasn't she been put somewhere? I must sound heartless, but I didn't sign up for this to be someone's punching bag, and I think it is irresponsible of my employers to put their staff in harm's way. Am I wrong, or just being naive, here?

.... I found out that R has Hepatitis B. Now, that doesn't bother me at all, per se. What bothers me is that my employers weren't going to tell me, because of privacy laws. I mean, sure, I support privacy rights for our clients. But what about the company's duty of care towards me? My boss told me that only the clients have the right to tell me (or not tell me, as the case may be) themselves whether or not they have these types of diseases. Now, faced with situations involving blood and bodily fluids, I take the ol' universal precautions, because I am not an idiot. However. This particular client has a long history of cutting both herself and her support workers. If I end up in an emergency situation where both of us have open wounds (and she will in all likelihood be in very close proximity to me, hitting me) then I'm pretty fucked, aren't I. I know, even if they had told me about her Hep B it won't change a goddamn thing if things come to crisis point, but I'm really pissed off about the whole thing. Is that the only thing she has? If she was HIV+, would they tell me that? I'm in a position where it is likely I will get hurt. It is likely my blood will be spilt at the same time as hers".



"RETARDED": GOOD SLANG BUT VERY INCORRECT

"Thanks for your inquiry regarding Let's Get it Started/Let's Get Retarded," wrote communications director Chris Privett. "The Arc did publicly call for the song's lyrics to be changed, which included writing several letters to record company executives. We hope our actions played a role in getting the lyrics changed, but as we never heard any response from the record company or the group's management, we're not sure whether they planned to make the change anyway or whether we convinced them that the language was offensive."

The one thing I remember with the "bad usage" example is that none of the mentally disabled adults I worked with really knew or cared on the rare occasions people called them names--and these were people who expressed every emotion. Their minds were occupied with more important things, like enjoying the day at hand and not being condescended to or coddled. Much of the uproar over the word "retarded" is secondhand offense--people taking offense because they believe others will be offended.

In Arc president Lorraine Sheehan's letter to Ms. Lohan regarding her "retarded" usage, she said, "There are few more deeply wounding words than these." (I can think of a few worse words offhand, having spent my career in newsrooms, but decorum prevents going into detail here.) The civilized world agrees, though, that it's not nice to be mean to mentally retarded people. (Though PC dictates that professional white males are still fair game, baby--have at it!)

Ms. Sheehan goes on to say, "People with mental retardation and developmental disabilities aren't looking for special treatment or sympathy." Agreed--so why single them out in a PC cage? My childhood best friend had cerebral palsy, epilepsy and mild retardation. Her very cool attitude was one of: "Yep, I'm retarded. So what do you wanna do after school?" Far from being picked on, she was the first to tell someone if he was acting stupid. Instead of quibbling over the words used to define her condition, she showed other kids that the condition didn't define her. Changing the words wouldn't have changed her condition, anyway.

So in an effort to promote integration, we instead wind up engulfing the mentally disabled in a web of political correctness. Those with good intentions get snapped at when they use the term "mentally retarded" as opposed to "developmentally disabled" or "handicapped" versus "differently abled," fueling a war of words and driving focus away from the true issues at hand. When you expend so much effort drawing up a correct label for someone, it ratchets up the importance of that label and sends their individuality down a notch."

Political correctness draws up rigid distinctions instead of blending differences into one harmonious pot. PC relegates a person's worth to the weight of the words used to describe him. PC assumes people have all the resiliency of whipped cream and will be scarred by words that they might not originally find offensive, but PC has told them that they're offensive. Even the Oscars are PC now: It's not "the winner is . . .," but "the Oscar goes to . . ."

PC is awash in schools, where competitions occur without a winner being crowned and districts increasingly ban dodgeball (though maybe Muqtada al-Sadr was the emotional victim of one too many pelts in school). One study even pooh-poohed the games of duck-duck-goose and musical chairs, suggesting they inflict emotional damage. Last year, Los Angeles County asked computer vendors to avoid all use of the technological terms "master" and "slave" in product labels and descriptions (terms that describe systems that are under the control of others). Apparently, a county employee felt oppressed by the computer and complained. The county missed the cost-saving complaint-resolution technique of giving the complainer a pack of Post-It Notes with directions to slap them over any offensive words on the blasted oppressive computer."

More here.