Soizic

‘If you are disabled then, by definition, it is okay for you to be hurt.’

Soizic is in her 40s and has cerebral palsy and complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Growing up, her brother hated her because he was embarrassed to have a sister with disability. At school, children pushed her into animal faeces, chased and hit her and put her on the monkey bars and pulled on her legs.

Soizic told the Royal Commission her teachers contributed to ‘the normalisation of violence, harassment and abuse’ of a person with disability.

‘If the teachers hadn’t been so complicit in everything that was happening with the school, I wouldn’t have learnt that it was alright to actually be treated like that.’

Teachers warned her to ‘get used to it’ as she would be ‘discriminated against and treated badly’ her whole life.

‘It’s expected and therefore accepted, or at least kind of tolerated. We figure that it’s inevitable that disabled people are just going to suffer. And, I mean, the overall impact has been absolutely catastrophic. I actually think that if I hadn’t been abused, I would have had a completely different life.’

Soizic said she was raped and sexually abused several times as a young adult.

‘And then, once you layer in the abuse on top of disability and all of a sudden, my body’s not just something that’s contemptable, now it’s actually also become a crime scene.’

She ‘wound up further isolated and excluded’ and struggled for years to get adequate supports. Today she has far more support.

‘I’ve got NDIS funding and I’m very fortunate and I can get my therapy and that’s fine. But there’s a limit to what you can get.’

Soizic has a nurse support her for several hours a day, but finds it’s much harder to receive assistance and care for her trauma.

‘Because the mental health system is broken and there’s not enough money for everybody to get the therapy that they need.’

She believes this comes back to the ‘worthiness’ society places on individuals.

‘There’s an issue of us viewing disability as something that comes out of neediness. It’s an able-bodied world and we’re just going to try and tweak around the edges as best we can for disabled people. You know, that second-class citizen thing, and we should be grateful for what we get. I’ve certainly had that experience in the NDIS.’

Soizic has overcome huge barriers of ‘systemic ableism’ to have a successful career.

‘I’m just grateful to have a seat at the table at all in a world that fundamentally does not belong to me.’

But she said a lot more needs to be done to make work and public places accessible to people with disability. She can’t access many education and health settings in her wheelchair.

‘We’re 18 per cent of the population. Every single place in society should be a disability setting.’

Recently she was at a rehabilitation hospital and ‘couldn’t find the disabled loo’. Then she realised that ‘every single toilet in that building was a disabled toilet’, so there was no need for signage.

‘Part of me did not want to leave that toilet. I felt more dignified and seen and part of that community at a hospital than I feel anywhere else in my life, except my own house.’