BOOK REVIEW

Learning Difficulties and Sexual Vulnerability:A Social Approach

By Andrea Hollomotz

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011. Cost: £19.99, Pages: 192.

Andrea Hollomotz has produced an interesting and

insightful book, based on her research with 29 adults

with learning disabilities. After the introduction, she

begins with an overview of the history of policy and

service developments for people with learning disabili-

ties throughout the 20th century and up the current time

(the context is mostly that of the UK, but would be of

interest and relevance to other similar, Western, coun-

tries). Hollomotz makes the assertion that because we

lack knowledge about the causes and circumstances

relating to sexual violence against people with learning

disabilities, we make assumptions about their inherent

risk: ‘we do not know exactly who has what to fear

from whom in which situations, but owing to the high

incidence of sexual violence against this population we

know that there is something to fear’. This is expressed in

the label ‘vulnerability’ (p.34). Hollomotz presents an

ecological model, which invites readers to understand

both the social and individual factors in the formation

of risk of sexual violence. The book critiques elements

of the principles and practices of adult protection and

safeguarding interventions, which, it is argued, are

guided by notions of individual vulnerability and

actively carried out by practitioners on behalf of people

with disabilities who are passive. Rather than being

overly dependent on others for protection (which, as

Hollomotz points out, is often an ineffective strategy),

she emphasizes fostering positive social and sexual rela-

tionships, attempting to increase the social status and

public image of people with learning disabilities and

taking all possible steps to increase self-esteem, self-con-

fidence and self-determination. One of the book’s

strength’s is that it systematically unpicks some of the

mechanisms that help to create and reinforce a sense of

sexual vulnerability.

The chapters which report the experiences of people

with learning disabilities themselves are, inevitably, the

most interesting. Hollomotz makes a strong case that

formal sex education, and discussing sex informally

with people with learning disabilities, are protective fac-

tors when it comes to reducing risks of sexual violence.

There were some generational differences in the people

she interviewed (with the younger people being better

informed than their older counterparts) and some of

what they reported was in line with other similar

research: e.g. three quarters had some sexual experi-

ences, yet one-third believed all sex to be dirty or bad;

and whilst all could name sexual body parts for their

own sex, a quarter couldn’t name those for the opposite

sex. Although I have read much of the literature on sex-

uality and people with learning disabilities (and written

a fair bit of it too) I was still moved, and shocked, by

some material in this book, e.g. a woman with learning

disabilities having to keep her vibrator in the locked

medication cabinet and have staff sign it in and out.

Such are the indignities some people with learning dis-

abilities are subjected to in the 21st century.

The book is very well written; scholarly, yet easy to

read and I would thoroughly recommend it. My one

complaint is that it does not contain a copy of the inter-

view schedule or the three vignettes used in the

research. Including these would have made the research

process more transparent and enabled researchers in the

future to replicate or build on the existing research.

Michelle McCarthy

Tizard Centre

University of Kent

Canterbury, UK

(e-mail: michelle.mccarthy@kent.ac.uk)

Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities 2012, 25, 288

� 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 10.1111/j.1468-3148.2011.00645.x

Published for the British Institute of Learning Disabilities