Content note: This piece discusses sexual abuse, restraint, institutional abuse, and the disbelief of a disabled child. Please look after yourself. This documentary tells one child's story; but it is not, in any meaningful sense, only one child's story. It is emblematic of the danger of being a disabled young person in the special education system, and of what happens when the systems meant to protect that young person decide, repeatedly, that their word doesn't count. Autistic children frequently experience abuse, and they are frequently disbelieved on the basis of their disability. That is not a side detail in Dominic's story, it is the mechanism that let everything else happen. Before I go any further; independent of the emotional weight of this story, my opinion as someone who watched it is that none of the abuse Dominic experienced was sufficiently investigated, either by the school or by the police. The victim here is Dominic, and he deserves the justice needed to close this chapter of his life. How It StartsThe documentary opens in 2010, the first time Dominic and his family visited Baston House and met Anna Kennedy. By his father Mark's account, the visit made it sound as though the school would provide everything Dominic needed. They were happy, Dominic was happy. The opening really captures the pain that Dominic and his family have been through. The film starting with hope and trust is doing deliberate work, because everything that follows is a slow account of that trust being worn away. The TurnDominic describes, in his own words, what it was like when staff changed; they started to look less like people supporting him and more like sentries. That word choice does a lot of work. A sentry watches you, contains you. That is not the language of care, and Dominic knew the difference even if the adults around him didn't want to hear it. The original deputy head was fired. The new deputy head started using restraint on Dominic almost immediately, despite there being no prior need for it. Dominic describes a restraint in which all four limbs and his head were held down. His father Mark describes frequent, unexplained bruising. Dominic also describes being locked in a cupboard by staff, and says he is claustrophobic. The trauma of what he has been through is apparent throughout, not stated once and left behind, but visible in how he tells the rest of the story. The Sexual AssaultDominic was sexually assaulted by another student. He felt his experience was ignored, he ended up trying to address the assault himself, because no one else would. The details of the abuse are described as very graphic in the documentary, I'm not going to relay them here, but they are resonant of the risk faced by vulnerable young people in institutional settings where power runs almost entirely in one direction. Mark states that he tried to talk to Anna Kennedy about the abuse, and it was ignored. Dominic has tried, and failed, three separate times to start a criminal investigation. He was told he "won't be believed because he's Autistic." Sit with that sentence for a moment, because it is the whole argument of this documentary in ten words. Not "the evidence is unclear”, not "there are procedural barriers", he was told, plainly, that his disability was the reason his account of his own abuse would not be taken seriously. That is epistemic injustice made completely explicit, the kind that usually hides behind more careful language. Here it didn't even bother to hide. Power, Reputation, And The Question Nobody's AnsweringMark talks about feeling trapped by two things at once; Baston House's institutional reputation, and Anna Kennedy's public profile as an autism advocate and celebrity. That combination is a pattern that recurs wherever powerful reputations sit on top of vulnerable populations; the more publicly someone is seen as an advocate, the harder it becomes for the people in their actual care to be believed when they say something has gone wrong. Reputation becomes a kind of institutional armour, and it's the young person inside the system who absorbs the cost of that armour holding. Dominic felt there was no point talking to anyone, because he didn't believe anyone would believe him. Given everything that had already happened to him, that wasn't paranoia. Mark also wants to know why Anna Kennedy resigned a month after he started raising complaints. The documentary doesn't hand you an answer to that, it leaves the timing sitting there, which is its own kind of statement. Mark calls on others to come forward, even if they only have doubts rather than certainty. That's a meaningful thing to ask for, because disclosure doesn't usually arrive fully formed, it arrives as a nagging feeling that something wasn't right, and those feelings get dismissed just as easily as direct accounts do if nobody creates space for them. What Dominic Actually WantsDominic wants accountability for what happened to him. Not for it to be quietly filed away or for it to be managed, or reframed, or absorbed into an institution's PR. Accountability. Institutions are very good at producing the appearance of a response (an internal review, a statement, a departure dressed up as unrelated to the complaints that preceded it) without ever producing the thing a survivor is actually asking for, which is for what happened to be named honestly and answered for. Why This Isn't Just Dominic's StoryI said at the start that this is emblematic, and I mean that precisely. Autistic children are disbelieved at higher rates when they disclose abuse, and that disbelief isn't incidental to their disability, it's frequently justified by it. "He won't be believed because he's Autistic" isn't a rogue comment from one bad actor. It's a sentence that could only be said out loud because the person saying it correctly predicted that the systems around Dominic (the school, and then the police, three times over) would prove them right. That's the part worth sitting with after the credits roll. The failure here wasn't a single missed report or one bad member of staff. It was a set of institutions, educational, reputational, and legal, that each had the chance to investigate properly and each, in their own way, declined to. Dominic is still waiting for that to change. If this piece has raised anything difficult for you, please be gentle with yourself. You don't have to carry it alone. The Documentary Baston House: Dominic's Story by Georgia De Gidlow will be available to the public soon. You're currently a free subscriber to NeuroHub Community Journal | Newsletter | Announcements. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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