I’m so sorry that these things have happened to you. Abuse can and does happen in special education and it absolutely must stop. We need inclusion, not seclusion. Thankfully, there is currently a push for more inclusion, reducing and eliminating restraints. I do not encourage students to be passive. Rather I want them to be taught skills to be able to speak up for themselves and lead fulfilling, happy lives. It is not your fault and I’m so sorry you have been treated in ways you did not deserve.

Special education, whether in the context of schools, residential treatment or institutions, is in and of itself a cause of trauma. Special education creates an environment with an ever-present threat of seclusion, restraint, humiliation and other forms of abuse. Until this is addressed, terms like “trauma informed care” are nothing but jargonic baby-babble. Any reasonable person would know that the environment created is traumatic. It is done anyway because it makes unwanted children easier to control. Special education is a dumpster society throws unwanted children into.

The passivity, limited behavior, dependency, lack of agency and continual state of depression and torpor caused by institutionalization syndrome are all very desirable traits to a system that only sees many disabled children as future facility residents. Those that escape that fate are left to clean up the mess on their own. The social, emotional, intellectual, academic and other deficiencies we’re left with are not acknowledged as anything but character defects society tells us we ought to “take personal responsibility” for, while giving us precisely no resources or support to effect such change. We’re thrown away and then told it’s our fault. We get to live on in a glass cage and watch other people enjoy living. That is re-traumatizing and it’s been every single day of my life.