Some 35 students at the Hawaii Center for the Deaf and Blind were sexually assaulted since 2007 by a group of other students who called themselves “the Ringleaders,” according to a lawsuit filed today in Circuit Court.
The class action suit was filed by attorney Michael Green on behalf of the mother of one of the alleged victims, who is identified only as a minor male who is deaf.
“For many years, the school had had a problem with certain students, some of whom called themselves the Ringleaders, who on an ongoing basis bullied, terrorized, assaulted, robbed, sodomized, raped …and/or sexually attacked students who were younger and smaller,” the suit charged.
Police last week said they are investigating the allegations.
School administrators and a counselor had knowledge of the alleged attacks as early as 2007 but allowed the Ringleaders to continue at the school and continue their assaults, according to Green’s suit.
When the state, which operates the school, took no effective action against the victimizers, they were “emboldened and their wrongful conduct continued,” the suit said.
Sex assaults allegedly occurred in school bathrooms, the indoor swimming pool and the woodshop.
“At one point, a young girl on a school bus in the presence of other students was coerced into giving oral sex to a member of the Ringleaders who filmed the act on his cell phone” and laer showd the video to others, according to the suit.
Named as defendants are the State of Hawaii, which operates the school, the school administrator and a counselor.
Really Scary is the fact, Disability Rights Center can not be expected to file a suit against the State whenever deemed necessary on a client’s behalf. Where does that leave most of us people with disabilities needing justice? Out in the freezing cold, without!!! We do not have the funds to file law suits on social security, our only blanket. That is why we go without and are grossly socially oppressed behind the empty storefront windows of Legal Aid and Disability Rights Center, both of which only operate as a defense mechanism if people with disabilities get in trouble with the law. These tools are not available to us to use as a means to file law suits against discrimination of civil suits when people wrong us. In this regard, the ADA is still NOT fully constitutionally employed when the people protected under the ADA have no recourse against wrongdoing in an abled society.
Worse yet, Imagine this if you will:
You are a child of 9 yrs of age-male or female. You cannot hear. You cannot see. Because of these disabilities, you have a very difficult time speaking and what comes out is only a moan or groan signaling pleasure or pain.
Your parents send you to a school to help you and have you live on the campus. One day, you are sitting in a chair in a hall and feel the heat of what you come to know as “sun” when you are viciously grabbed, yanked from your chair, your clothes ripped from your body while you try to defend yourself against an unknown, unseen, unheard attacker, and worse things, unimaginable things follow. You feel hollow when its finally over.
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