Disability, Handicap and Sexuality

Abstract

In preceding chapters, we have taken a broad and sometimes specific look at acquired disability, from disease processes or drugs or psychological disturbances. In this chapter, we can consider the boys and girls, or men and women of the adult community, who have been born with motor or sensory handicaps, or disabilities of communication, or varying degrees of intellectual retardation. The traditional and sometimes persisting view of sexuality, in congenital or birth-injured citizens, is one of absent sexual drive, low sexual interest and absent sexual outlet. They are - to quote George Lee - merely seen as contented invalids with only spiritual interests. Such a view, until very recent years, led to a conspiracy of silence over any sexual problems or expressed sexual needs, whether the handicapped citizen was kept at home or was mobile in a limited way, or lived in residential homes or in hospital care settings. This suppression of information, or anxieties or experience of sexual frustration, was exacerbated in citizens who were unable to relocate from a wheelchair or a bed.