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AAP
AAP
Politics
Dominic Giannini

The human cost of neglecting people with a disability

Survivors of abuse and neglect told harrowing stories to the Disability Royal Commission. (Bianca De Marchi/AAP PHOTOS)

HARROWING ACCOUNTS OF ABUSE, NEGLECT AND DISCRIMINATION AT THE DISABILITY ROYAL COMMISSION:

* Children with a disability going through the criminal justice system have been locked in cells for 22 to 23 hours a day, were deprived of sunlight for up to several weeks and had no interaction with other detainees

* "Sometimes you've just got to put it in its box, lock it away and just carry on ... or else you're a blubbering mess, you'll never get anything done" - Dominik, a man in his mid-50s with quadriplegia, describing being bullied at school for being a "spastic" and being unfairly suspended

* Later in life, a faculty dean at university asked why he had chosen to study, saying: "you're a cripple, you can't write"

* Sherry's brain-damaged son Iain, born in the 1960s, was left alone around water in a group home despite being unable to hold himself up. An hour after telling a worker he couldn't be left unsupervised, she got a call saying her son had drowned

* "When people are aware that there's a pool of money that they can tap into … it just turns people into green-eyed monsters and their humanism goes out the window" - Kat, in her 50s and lives with a degenerative muscle atrophy disease

* "There was a lot of alcohol and drugs, a lot of criminal activity going on around me, a lot of violence. It wasn't very good for a kid" - an unidentified Indigenous person with a disability

* "I was laid up in the bed and I was left there and they knew that I was a quadriplegic, but, then again, the nursing staff just presumed that I was just a drunk Aboriginal" - name withheld

* "Because of this trauma she basically did not know or understand how to be a mother, she was not blessed with the positive genetics and opportunities to turn things around and break the cycle of trauma and violence" - Etana, who experienced periods of psychosocial disability, describing the impact of intergenerational trauma on her mother who abused her

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