March 28th, 2007
THE EDITOR
The Province of PEI wants to track the sex lives of Islanders with disabilities. Every year they ask at least 1,100 people with a disability ‘Are you sexually inappropriate?’
There is no legitimate reason for this prurient question. The people asking the question are not doctors, nurses, psychologists or psychiatrists. They are even asking pre-pubescent children this question or at least their parents.
If you apply to the PEI government for your driver’s license, they don’t ask about sex. If you go to any PEI hospital for treatment, they don’t ask you about your sex life. You don’t get asked this question anywhere like financial assistance, or highways, or property tax, or agriculture.
All the government departments have no interest whatsoever in your sex life, other than the Disability Support Program. They want to know so bad they will refuse to give you a wheelchair or a walker unless you tell them the answer.
Three groups of parents filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission on this question. We filled a Privacy Commissioner complaint too. CBC TV covered the story with other media and you’d think that would be the end of it.
Oh no, when the Province has a prurient interest in your sex life, they don’t give up easy. In the Social Service and Seniors filing with the Privacy Commissioner, the DSP says “each question has some unique purpose, to determine the severity of the disability’. They go onto to state the sex question ‘indicate a clients understanding of what is socially acceptable…’ That’s just baloney for ‘we want to know’.
When did Islanders with disabilities become sex criminals or incompetent wards of the state? We are free people whose privacy and independence is being invaded by the Province.
I racked my brain trying to figure out the reason they want the sex information. Why do government officials want to know about the sex lives of Islanders with disabilities? Is it to satisfy secret sexual fantasies? Is that why they pick on the weak, the disabled to ask these questions?
There is a fetish called Abasiophilia ‘a psychosexual attraction to disabled people. Is the reason the Province wants to ask these questions, someone has a fetish?
What other reasons are there for this gross invasion of Privacy and Human Rights? We should petition to move DSP to Highways. They seem like nicer people.
Ed: this was published earlier in a longer version as
Sex lives of the disabled
