Open Society

The Colorado task force plans to suggest clarifying the definitions of abuse and neglect under the state's mandatory reporting statute. Mandatory reporters should not "make a report solely due to a family/child's race, class or gender," nor because of inadequate housing, furnishings, income or clothing. Also, there should not be a report based solely on the "disability status of the minor, parent or guardian," according to the group's draft recommendation.

"Mandatory reporting disproportionately impacts families of color" — initiating contact between child protection services and families who routinely do not present concerns of abuse or neglect, the task force said.

The task force says it is analyzing whether better screening might mitigate "the disproportionate impact of mandatory reporting on under-resourced communities, communities of color and persons with disabilities."

The teachers and medical providers making the reports frequently suggested that the county human services agency could assist Lovelace's family. But the investigations that followed were invasive and traumatic.

"Our biggest looming fear is, 'Are you going to take our children away?'" says Lovelace, who is an advocate for the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, an organization that lobbies for the civil rights of people with disabilities. "We're afraid to ask for help. It's keeping us from entering services because of the fear of child welfare."

an alternative phone number, or "warmline," for cases in which callers believe a family needs material assistance, rather than surveillance.

New York state introduced a warmline to help connect families with resources like housing and child care.

"Mandatory reporting is another form of keeping us policed and surveillanced by whiteness," says Jihad, who as a child was taken from the care of a loving parent and placed temporarily into the foster system. Reform isn't enough, she says. "We know what we need, and it's usually funding and resources."

None of the caseworkers who visited the family ever mentioned the waiver, Lovelace says. "I really think they didn't know about it."

‘Crip time for me is reflected in the ways that many normative milestones in my life were delayed or missed out altogether. The opportunity to ‘bend’ time meant that I was able to go to university later in life and graduate with a PhD. Crip time aligns with the flexibility associated with being self-employed and allows me to cultivate my work around my interests.’ (Team member, Cripping Breath)

Our relationships to such technologies, then, contest discourses that define breathing as the ultimate independent and autonomous act (see Abrams et al. 2021).

In contexts of ableism, which ‘denote broad cultural logics of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence’ (Whitney et al. 2019: 1478), to breathe by yourself is to be fully human. Yet one only has to look to posthuman disability studies to counter such fallacies, and learn how interdependencies with a network of technologies, non-human animals, and other entities enable more expansive, relational and nomadic engagements with the world (Whitney et al. 2019).

In Cripping Breath, rest, recuperation and recovery time considers how we are thinking about ethical pacing and ways of working together.

We aim to challenge breathing as an autonomous and natural function that is framed as central to our humanness and ability to live, the absence of which brings us close to death (see Solomon 2020).

‘Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen on time, recognising how expectations of “how long things take” are based on very particular minds and bodies….’

Respiratory failure, and other forms of progressive respiratory impairment, bring about a strange relationship to time. They are quite often clocks that cannot be stopped and which clash with neoliberal-able timelines (see Goodley and Lawthom 2019).

Walker said the real story of the term “neurodiversity,” wherein a community coined the word, is “inspiring” and one that people should know.

Haim Ginott