It is very hard to read the Times’s lead story today about the alleged sexual exploitation of a young autistic woman with the consent of her carers, a court and the local council. Perhaps I have an excess of sensibility, but it made me feel ill. The case, if accurately reported, strikes me as being in the Rochdale/Rotherham league of sexual abuse, except that instead of the female victim concerned being a young girl, she is autistic, 23, with severe learning difficulties and an IQ of 52.
The story is as follows:
‘A young autistic woman was allowed to have sex with numerous men because her carers were said to believe that high-risk encounters with strangers might help her to “learn from her mistakes”… [She was] repeatedly exploited during a court-approved two-month trial period this summer in which random men were permitted to visit her Manchester care home between 10am and 4pm each day.
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