Flynn and Harris

Flynn is blind and has a hearing impairment. Now in his mid-40s, he told the Royal Commission he considers his life a fortunate one. He has a partner and a couple of children, he has a career, he owns his own home and he has a good NDIS package. But there has been discrimination and abuse along the way, and Flynn wants to shine a light on the treatment he and his peers have experienced.

Flynn said it’s common for blind children to have great difficulty developing spatial concepts – how objects or locations relate to each other in space. He was openly criticised for this by teachers and family.

‘I grew to dislike orientation and mobility instruction intensely, and for years after having finished school, I refused to get help from mobility services because of the patronising attitude of instructors who did not have any empathy with my difficulties … there was an attitude of judgement and even scorn.’

Even now, as an adult, he avoids unfamiliar places and won’t catch public transport unless he knows the route very well. He doesn’t typically go places just for his own pleasure.

‘I feel restricted, and I know that others who have not had these difficulties have this freedom. If these issues had been addressed much earlier in my childhood, I might have overcome these fears.’

When Flynn was at school, he witnessed other students being routinely belittled, criticised and judged. One such student, Harris, was, and still is, a good friend of Flynn’s. Harris is blind and has a bone condition. The fragility of his bones made it difficult for him to move quickly and confidently. Flynn remembers teachers constantly telling Harris to hurry up.

‘I can say with certainty that the reason Harris had so many accidents which resulted in broken bones and a long stint in a wheelchair was that teachers were always telling him to “hurry up”, and deliberately making him walk faster than he physically could. He has never had an accident as a result of his own activity. It has always been because some teacher pushed him beyond his limits.’

Flynn said there were other kids like Harris – kids who ‘could have done very well at school and maybe even enjoyed it, if they had been respected for the unique ways in which they needed to learn’. He wonders how much more they could have achieved ‘if their confidence had not been shattered by the emotional abuse that they endured from people who should have known better’.

Flynn said there was another problem during these years.

‘From a very early age, the message that my parents and I received from the professionals was that there is a blind world, and a sighted world … You had to be successful in the sighted world to gain any credence in this life.’

From school, Flynn went to university. He struggled to cope but managed.

Then, one day in the mid-1990s, he attended a social gathering of predominantly blind people at the home of the woman he would eventually marry.

‘At this gathering, I began to discover that there were other people who were blind who truly embraced their identity as people who are blind … They functioned in the way that they saw fit, including happily socialising with each other with no guilt or shame, telling jokes that only people who are blind would understand, singing and laughing and partying in our own unique way.’

Flynn said he hopes we can develop ‘much better systems of determining who should enter the special education profession, so that we can weed out those who are in it for the power’.

‘I think it is essential that counselling and supervision be mandatory for people aspiring to be special education teachers, and [that there be] an assessment of the suitability of candidates to enter the profession.’

The ignorance of the people he has encountered in professional roles still astounds him. ‘I can only hope it was ignorance, and not deliberate belittling of people who relied on them to reach their full potential back when they were vulnerable.’