GimpGirl Community’s current Second Life sim will be closing as of May 11, 2013. In June, we will have a new Second Life space set up and will notify everyone when it opens! Until then, we will be taking a break after May 11 from regular scheduled meetings, so our last meeting for a few weeks will be the Hang Out Hour on May 8. We will announce the next meeting as we get closer to opening our new space on Second Life. In the meantime, you can get involved on Facebook and Twitter, or reach us on our website contact form.

A reminder to all current vendors and tenants: Our current Second Life sim will be completely shutting down as of May 11. Don’t wait until the last minute to save all of your objects! If you have anything on our parcel that is irreplaceable, please take it into your inventory as soon as possible. All vendor spaces and apartments will completely disappear on or around May 11. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns that we can assist you with.

Women with disabilities account for over 20% of the general population (Office on Disability Prevalence…, n.d.), and experience rates of abuse 1.5 to 10 times higher than women without disabilities (Sobsey, 1988). However, shelters are largely inadequate to support the needs of women with disabilities who want to escape violence. According to a study by Nosek, Howland and Young, 83% of shelters offered or made referrals to temporary wheelchair accessible housing, 47% provided interpreter services to deaf or hard of hearing individuals, and only 6% offered assistance with caregiver services (1997). Additionally, even if services are available, staff only receives disability awareness training in 36% of shelters (Nosek, Howland & Young, 1997). When a woman contacts a domestic violence service, she often ends up having to educate the staff about disability. She may even end up emotionally supporting the staff through the awkward exchange of dubious information. The dearth of services – combined with a profound lack of access to information — often leaves women with disabilities feeling like there is no escape.

The absence of support for such accommodations for women with disabilities is largely because the general population is unaware of the rates of abuse this demographic experiences. The dearth of information is simply an outcome of this severe lack of awareness. People have no idea that rates of violence can be up to 62% over a women’s lifetime, and much higher for women with severe learning disorders (Nosek, Howland & Young, 1997). Women with disabilities — from every demographic — experience higher rates of abuse than women without disabilities.

When a woman with a disability experiences domestic violence, the perpetrator is usually an intimate partner, family or caregiver (Nosek, Howland & Young, 1997). Economic constraints or lack of independent ability to leave a violent situation puts women with disabilities at a severe disadvantage. They can be completely at the mercy of those around them, and without a safety net of other family assistance or community services, women with disabilities have no way of escape. Unfortunately, shelter services are notoriously incapable of handling accommodations — such as wheelchair access, sign language interpreters, caregivers and other disability specific needs — required by domestic violence survivors with disabilities.

Violence is often a crime that takes the path of least resistance. Women with disabilities are easier to control economically, physically and emotionally due to a myriad of reasons, such as stereotypes, their potentially lowered ability to make money (due to practical or systemic constraints), and dependence on inherently problematic institutions and social services. They are often raised with heightened forms of infantilization and pedestalling. “Good” girls and women with disabilities are compliant, grateful, and constantly happy, while often simultaneously being treated like a burden to those around them. If disabled from birth, that may be all a woman with a disability will expect of herself. They are “easy” targets for perpetrators of violence, especially because of their limited ability to escape the situation.

In order for the deeper issue of awareness of violence against women with disabilities to change, people would have to face the facts behind violence against women in general, as well as deeply ingrained stereotypes about people with disabilities. “Good” people would never dream of perpetrating violence or rape against women with disabilities, predominately because they do not view women with disabilities as sexual or threatening. They do not understand that abuse and rape are not about who deserves it, mainstream stereotypes of sexual attractiveness, or the ability of the person being abused to defend themselves. It is about control, and vulnerability only makes control easier.

A woman who needs assistance may have no idea where to find support when she experiences domestic violence. It is the responsibility of shelter agencies to provide this basic information to women with disabilities, even if there are no services available. Women with disabilities are often put in the position of having to fight through a maze of bureaucracy to find out that there are no supports available – effectively revictimizing a woman already in crisis. Even knowing what is not available allows an individual to allocate precious energy to workable alternatives. This information is vital to someone seeking assistance, and the lack of information only adds to the profound silencing women with disabilities in this situation experience.

Women with disabilities face rates of abuse that are 1.5 to 10 times greater than women without disabilities in any demographic (Sobsey, 1988). Yet, they often do not receive the same supports that women without disabilities in domestic violence crisis receive. They face the same violence in profound isolation and silence, with less ability to protect themselves. When they do reach out to find a safer situation, women with disabilities are met with confusion and a severe lack of information on what little services are actually available. This should not be acceptable in the domestic violence support community – a community that was founded on feminist principles to assist women seeking safety and alleviate the silencing that often accompanies abuse.

s.e. smith also wrote about this issue on the This Ain’t Livin’ blog earlier this month: Access Denied: Crisis Centres and Disabled People. Check it out!

Bibliography

Nosek, M.A., Howland, C.A., Young, M.E. (1997). Abuse of Women with Disabilities: Policy Implications. Journal of Disabilities Policy Studies.

Office on Disability Prevalence and Impact Fact Sheet. (n.d.). U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Retrieved February 29, 2012, from http://www.hhs.gov/od/about/fact_sheets/prevalenceandimpact.html

US Department of Justice. (2002). Americans with Disabilities Act Questions and Answers. Retrieved March 9, 2013, from http://www.ada.gov/q%26aeng02.htm#Public

Sobsey, D. (1988). Sexual Offenses and Disabled Victims: Research and Practical Implications. Vis-A-Vis.

In February we celebrate GimpGirl Community’s 15th anniversary. We’ve come a long way since it was founded in 1998, however our mission remains the same — to support the lives of women with disabilities. We could not do this without the support of our members.

To mark this celebration we would like to ask you to submit your thoughts to us on what GimpGirl has meant to you. It could be a memory, a poem, a piece of creative writing or art work. We will showcase them on our website, Flickr, Second Life, Facebook and Twitter. We are also planning a celebration (details to come) where we will showcase some pieces and show art work in our Second Life gallery and on Flickr. We ask that these be submitted by 28th of February.

You can email your entry to us using the contact form on our website or add pictures to our Flickr group. You can also comment on this post with your memories. What is your first memory of GimpGirl? What is your favorite memory since being part of the community? We look forward to reading them!

A common barrier faced by many women with disabilities is finding a gynecologist with an accessible office and the knowledge and flexibility to work with complications associated with various disabilities. Some time ago GimpGirl members got together to start a list of gynecologists that they had personal experience with and knew to be accessible. Not surprisingly, the list was not very long because of the relative rarity of accessible gynecologists.

However, we are constantly looking for more feedback to expand this list to include other states within the United States and other countries. This information is a vital tool to help other women finding doctors and facilities that they can work with. If you have personal experience with a doctor or facility you would recommend, please take a few minutes to anonymously fill out the Accessible Gynecologists Survey so we can make that information available to everyone!

If you don’t personally have anyone to recommend, consider passing on this information to your friends. Thank you to everyone who has helped gather this information!

The following article was written by volunteer and member Ricky Buchanan. In the process of learning to meditate, Ricky ran into some complications in terms of instructions geared towards an able-bodied audience and wanted to share the lessons learned in the process of adapting those instructions.

Guided meditation tapes often have directions that can be hard for some people with disabilities to follow. Does this mean you can’t use those tapes, or can they be adapted?

Mostly the only thing that matters in meditation, honestly, is your state of mind. All the rest – physical position, breathing, and most of the things you’re asked to imagine in a guided meditation – is all there to set up an environment that encourages your mind to be meditative.

Here’s some suggestions for adapting guided meditations:

Most guided meditation tapes want you to sit on a straight backed chair with your feet on the floor. This is completely optional – you can sit or lie in whatever way feels best for you, regardless of what the tapes say. It can help your brain if you have a specific position that’s just for meditation because your mind will get used to “I’m in this position so I should feel meditative now” but you don’t have to. If you have a tendency to fall asleep during meditation then sitting up might be easier for you because it’s a lot harder to fall asleep sitting up, but that’s the only advantage to sitting rather than lying down.

If the tape says to pay attention to how a body part feels, or to move it a little, and you don’t have that body part or you can’t feel or move it, then just pick a different part of your body. Something close by will probably work, depending on the guided meditation. Alternatively, try just *imagining* what it might feel like, if you prefer. This might mean slightly moving your knee joint instead of wiggling your toes, or paying attention to the muscles in your shoulders instead of feeling your fingers tingle. Or it could mean imagining your toes relaxing, even though you can’t actually feel them.

If the guidance says to take deep breaths and you can’t control your breathing or it’s inadvisable to take deep breaths then you can just pay attention to your regular breathing. Similarly, any instructions on breathing in or out a certain way, such as “in through your nose and out through your mouth” can just be ignored or you can just breathe more slowly or deeply. You’ll find out what works for you fairly soon.

Instead of paying attention to, say, your tummy rising and falling for breathing you can pay attention to any different place in your body where you can perceive your breath moving – whether it’s your nose, your throat, your chest. Or you can even just put your attention on the synchronised sounds your vent makes, if that works for you.

If the guidance says to pay attention to your whole body, for example to feel yourself sinking into the mattress as you relax, again you can just pick a part of your body that works for you or you can imagine in. You could pay attention to your neck relaxing and your head sinking into the mattress, or you could just imagine your whole body sinking into the mattress and what it might feel like.

One guided meditation series that I’m following started asking me to look at something for the first minute or two of the session, so I’m just “being aware” instead of actually using my vision. This wouldn’t work for a guided meditation that was specifically focussed on looking at things but for one like mine where it’s just a passing section of the introduction it works well.

If you have a lot of pain in a particular part of your body then you might just include that in your meditation or you may want to ignore that part of your body and work around it as described above. Or you might use some combination of these techniques – there are specific meditations which are great for those with chronic pain but it’s also fine to just adapt any other meditation.

If the guided meditation is asking you to imagine a scene and that doesn’t work for you then just adapt it. Most specific things in most guided meditations don’t have to be exactly-as-described to work – if your guided meditation includes a scene of you walking down the beach but you’ve been a long-term wheelchair user it might work better if you imagine wheeling down the accessible promenade right beside the beach. If your guided meditation says to watch the sunset but you’re blind then by all means imagine the setting sun warm on your skin.

You’ll know by the end of the first time you listen to that meditation whether your adaptions worked OK and if there was any issues you can imagine differently. I once mentally “changed” a guided meditation that asked me to imagine carrying a heavy ball by imagining the ball was very light, but the meditation went on to say the heaviness of the ball represented something important. So the next time through I just imagined a heavy ball and a trolley to transport it – imaginations is wonderful like that!!

Most importantly, don’t stress about it! You pretty much can’t do guided meditations “wrongly” no matter how your movements and thoughts do or don’t match what’s on the tape. If something doesn’t work for you then change it around or find a different guided meditation tape, that’s cool too.

Today marks the 14th anniversary of GimpGirl Community! We have taken many forms in the last 14 years, but our mission has always remained the same: to bring together women with disabilities in the spirit of mutual support and positivity. That single mission brings together individuals with many different disabilities from a variety of countries and backgrounds to share our commonalities.

Our community’s administrators and facilitators have always been women with disabilities who volunteer their time because they believe that our community should be strengthened from within by people who understand the lived experience of being a woman with a disability.

We have also grown through the support of many others. Indeed, it is through volunteerism, in-kind donations of services, creative management of available resources and the use of open source and free to use online tools that we have survived and flourished.

Do you have any stories, anecdotes or favorite memories of your time with GimpGirl? We would love to hear from you on your experience of the last 14 years!

Every now and then we like to spotlight organizations other than our own that in some way support the voices of women with disabilities. Check out Sins Invalid!

What is Sins Invalid?

Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility (aka “Sins”) is a San Francisco/Bay Area based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. For the last five years, our performance work has explored themes of sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body to sold-out audiences.

What people say…

The world of enforced and embodied norms constricts all of us, regardless of where we identify on the spectrums of sexuality, gender, or ability. In this project, people with disabilities are engaging in the wholeness of our bodies and our sexualities. When people experience our shows they are deeply impacted:

“I am moved beyond words, moved to an emotional state that I can’t quite explain. Thank you for making this space possible!” – audience member 2011

“You are brilliant and beautiful and help me remember that so am I.  Thank you.” - audience member 2011

“What makes Sins Invalid so powerful is that it thoroughly succeeds artistically and erotically, separate from the impact of its political message. Sins Invalid challenges its audience to think about sexuality, beauty, and disability in new and expanded ways. But Sins Invalid is also, quite simply, a hot, arousing, sexually charged evening of thought-provoking, imaginative sexual entertainment that only happens to be entirely by and about people with disabilities.” - David Steinberg, SFGate

Want to support Sins Invalid and their upcoming movie project? Visit their Kickstarter page and help them reach their goal by February 14th! Can’t donate? Just help by spreading the word to friends!

One of the focuses of GimpGirl Community is to spotlight the work and voice of women with disabilities. Below is three amazing poems from Margie Suarez. Want your work featured? Contact us and let us know!

My name is Margie Suarez. I am working towards a Masters in creative writing.  My favorite poet is Maya Angelou. I would like to thank my family and friends for encouraging me to continue writing.

I’m not a Lovey-dovey Girl

I’m not a lovey-dovey girl.

That’s why,
when he agreed to be my hands
that first time I shooed away the butterfly infestation in my stomach.

When I revealed that cutting up food was a lost cause,
I didn’t let our hands touch when he passed the plate back to me.

When we eat,
he’s become expert at tucking a napkin in my shirt without
grazing what’s underneath.

Him in jeans and a grubby sweater is art.
I don’t look up anymore when he leaves (I promise).

Our dogs are both named after Yankees.
We agree that I’m the loud one.
The one thing we can’t agree on

is whether I’m worthy of his love.

At Becco

If I asked, would you feed me?
No. You’d let me starve
before seeing my mouth open,

watering for something
I thought I’d never have again.

There’s nothing to be scared of.
Don’t worry, it’s just spaghetti.

Rocking in Limbo

My hands tremble if I hold a book open for too long.
I bend paperbacks so that I can easily pick them up
when they decide

to jump.

My binders are filled with the
handwriting of others because the only thing I can write
with any speed or clarity is

my name.

I’ve given up on spaghetti.
It refuses to twirl around my shaking fork.

The only thing I can’t work around is the back spasm
that has changed into a knot.
It is a slight but persistent reminder.

I’ve been sitting too long.

I lean forward, back.
The embarrassed bridge of my hips are out on display.
My legs jump at the rustling of paper.

They search for a way out of the position that they’ve been put in.

In our previous article, Caregivers and Relationships, we gave a very broad overview of managing paid caregivers¹ and various other relationships. Relationships are more than just managing caregivers and other people in your life. In long-term romantic relationships, particularly, there are many factors involved in creating a healthy and safe emotional space to help the relationship to continue. People with disabilities have long been unfairly characterized as being a burden to society, and this characterization carries over into any relationship where there is an expectation of equality. Even individuals themselves struggle to find their own worth and sense of equality within this relationship dynamic.

…

Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.

Since the launch of our new website earlier this month, many of you might be wondering how to engage with our awesome community of women with disabilities outside of this website. Take a moment to look to the right of this post (on our website), where you will find a collection of icons (under “Follow Us!”) for various social media and online tools that GimpGirl uses. Each of these icons link to our specific group or page. They are a great way to find us around the Internet!

On Facebook, we have an amazing, active forum for posting links, sharing stories and ideas, and discussing various relevant topics. Outside of our weekly meetings on Second Life and our Chat Room (IRC), our Facebook group is probably the best way to connect with other women with disabilities.

What if you just want to keep track of blog posts or events? Twitter is our largest group, and is a great way to keep track of links to relevant news topics and GimpGirl’s events. You can view our Google calendar to see upcoming events, as well as subscribe to the calendar to see the event times in your time zone and sign up for notifications when events are getting close. If you use an RSS blog reader, you can add our RSS feed. If not, you can also follow our various groups and communities on FriendFeed or our blog posts on LiveJournal.

Our Flickr community is a must-see, with member pictures, event snapshots, and various works of art. On LinkedIn, you can network with other women with disabilities on employment and other professional matters. If you would like to buy various items with our logo on them, visit our Zazzle store (hosted by NoPityCity).

So, what are you waiting for? Connect with us and join the conversation!