[nfbwatlk] Italian bill would fund 'sex assistants' for the disabled

[Philip Blackmer]

I had been intending to post this to the list for some time now.  I wish I
had sent it in just before the convention so I can see how much conversation
is sparked by it.  Oh well... This is real not a joke article from the
Onion.  For those who are interested it came from Life Site News at
www.lifesitenews.com.


sex assistants’ for the disabled 




? italy , sex assistants


ROME – Italy’s Senate is considered a bill introduced in April that would
mandate the government to offer “sexual assistants” to people with physical,
mental or cognitive disabilities.

The bill, which would bring Italy in line with other EU countries, proposes
that these “assistants” should be male and female professional “sex workers”
who would help their clients gain “erotic, sensual or sexual experience and
better address their internal energies” in order to help them “discharge
dysfunctional feelings of anger and aggression.”

Disabled Italians will be eligible for government-funded “sex assistants”
through the Ministry of Health. They must have reached the age of majority,
have completed the “compulsory education” program, signed a code of conduct,
and be certified as to their “psycho-sexual suitability” by the local health
authority.

The arrangement cannot “be the subject of a contract of employment,” the
bill adds, but it “may be subject to cooperative self-employment
cooperative.”

The bill’s explanatory note calls for the provision of “suitably trained”
persons to help disabled people “to explore their own body through acts of
intimacy and masturbation.”

“Many people with disability can not independently maintain interpersonal
relationships,” the explanatory note says, “because of a condition of
reduced self-sufficiency in terms of mobility or because of a physical
[condition] differing from the dominant aesthetic models that are considered
attractive."

“In some cases, you add the impossibility of reaching satisfactory
self-masturbation practices.” This situation, it adds, “can produce a state
of affective and relational marginalization.”

The note cites a 1987 decision by the Constitutional Court that stated,
“Sexuality being one of the essential ways of expression of the human
person, the right to dispose it freely is undoubtedly an absolute individual
right, which must be included among the subject positions directly protected
by the Constitution and framed as the inviolable rights of the human person
that Article 2 of the Constitution is required to guarantee.”

The bill, brought forward by Sen. Sergio Lo Giudice is being supported by
Italian disability group Accordabili, which held a “day of study” in Fasano
on June 13 for “industry insiders” on the theme, “The frontier of sexual
assistance for the disabled. Issues and reflections.”

Italian supporters are saying that the “poetic” term being adopted for the
sex assistants is not prostitute, but the neologism, “accarezzatrice” which
roughly translates to a woman who caresses or strokes. At the time the bill
was introduced in the Senate, Ansa.it, the Italian edition of Vanity Fair,
and many other Italian news outlets started covering the story of a novel
promoting the idea, “L’Accarezzatrice” by Giorgia Würth, a Swiss-Italian
actress and television presenter.

“Often you compare it to a prostitute. The difference lies in training:
courses are of two years with doctors, psychologists and sexologists that
make the person able to interface not only with the disabled client, but
also with doctors and families,” Würth told the newspaper Il Fatto
Quotidiano.

Sen. Lo Giudice is one of Italy’s most prominent homosexual activists and a
cosponsor of the controverisal “anti-homophobia” bill. He was elected to the
Senate last year after serving from 1998 to 2007 as the national president
of Arcigay, the country’s leading homosexualist lobby group that has strong
ties to the EU-funded ILGA Europe. Lo Giudice remains honourary president.

If the Senate passes the bill, it would bring Italy into line with laws in
Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. The European
laws have inspired activists in other countries as well, including Canada,
where a wheelchair-bound man in Quebec urged the province to fund ‘sex
assistants’ last year.