ABSTRACT
This chapter is based upon in-depth interviews with eight visually impaired women who spent all or most of their school days in a particular residential school for visually impaired girls in the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter is also based upon my own memories of the school which I attended as a pupil for four years between the ages of nine and thirteen. Although the interviews were wideranging, all of the women spoke at length about the continual physical, psychological and emotional abuse perpetrated by the care staff who were in charge of them outside school hours. The history of disabled people in Britain is centrall y one of segregation and isolation. This was crystallised in a statement by Vic Finkelstein, a major figure in the disabled people’s movement, to John Swain. In the late 1970s, on the way to a seminar entitled ‘The Problems of Integration’, referring to the integration of disabled children in mainstream schools, John Swain suggested to Vic Finkelstein that, ‘this sounds as if it will be interesting’. His response was, ‘Not at all.
