A violent assault by four men in an empty lot left Belo Miguel Cipriani totally blind at the age of 27 years. Today, almost two decades later, he is a successful author, accessibility consultant, and entrepreneur. He prefers not to think about the night in 2007 when his attackers shattered his sense of belonging in the world, leaving him feeling lost and alone. The love of his family and support from many others he met afterward helped him to again find his place in the world.
Yet, he often has been brought back to that night by the insistent inquiries of strangers who ask about his blindness. In an email interview, Belo told me that people he meets during his daily activities “always want to know if I was born blind and if there is a cure for what I have.”
And Belo is not alone. Virtually every person with a visible disability, such as blindness or paralysis, is asked intimate questions about their disability (Nario-Redmond, 2020; Olkin et al., 2019).
Mia Mingus, a disability advocate and author, referred to such intrusive questioning as “forced intimacy.” Mingus (2017) defined forced intimacy as “the common, daily experience of disabled people being expected to share personal parts of ourselves” with nondisabled people.
Belo described the traumatic event that caused his blindness in his book Blind: A Memoir. He told a story of betrayal by former friends who beat him into unconsciousness. A kick to the face initiated his descent into the dark depths of total blindness, and he developed PTSD as a result. For years, intrusive questions from strangers activated traumatic memories of the assault: “Many times I found myself panicking late at night in my room when someone forced me to recount my assault.”
For Belo, the psychological impact of forced intimacy is especially destructive when people ask their questions in a cold and callous manner. He described one such episode:
I went to a birthday party once and sat next to a woman who worked …as a nurse. She kept pushing me for details…. She put her hand on my head and said, “So the kick was right here…Now I see how your retinas detached.”
Such an insensitive interrogation can resurrect the original trauma.
But how can the expectation that a question should be answered feel coercive? It feels coercive when the questioner responds negatively to a refusal to answer the questions. Belo said that, for him, the coercion was strongest in work situations:
At the office…, my push back on people’s questions was received as aggression…. Because I didn’t share my blindness story with co-workers, people saw me as angry and didn’t recommend me for projects.
In fact, the antipathy that followed his refusal to give in to forced intimacy motivated Belo to go into business for himself. It seems that many nondisabled people view their intrusive questions as simple “getting-to-know-you” questions. They interpret refusals to answer as almost pathologically oppositional.
Belo has worked hard to learn how to respond to strangers asking intrusive questions. He told me that it “took me years, and many hours of therapy to learn to set boundaries with nosy taxi drivers and agents at airports.”
But he knows many disabled people who still struggle continually with forced intimacy because:
[They] haven’t learned to set boundaries with people. Most of them don’t go out much and keep to themselves because the questioning by strangers on the streets triggers their conditions, which in many cases is PTSD.
Implicit Bias and Forced Intimacy
The discussion so far suggests that nondisabled people engage in forced intimacy because they mistakenly believe they are asking about mundane matters. But another reason they engage in forced intimacy involves the influence of social stereotypes.
Social stereotypes are overgeneralized and simplistic sets of beliefs about the characteristics of social groups as a whole. For example, the stereotype for blindness includes attributes such as incompetent, unemployed, dependent, and helpless (Ricker, 2023). People may also use stereotypes to infer the personality traits, social status, and other attributes of individual group members (Baumeister, 2007).
We learn social stereotypes through cultural transmission beginning in early childhood (Devine, 1989; Farago et al., 2019). Because of this early exposure, stereotypes eventually become so well learned that they are brought to mind with no conscious effort at all. This effect is known as implicit (or unconscious) bias (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995).
By the start of adolescence, we have developed the cognitive ability to evaluate the accuracy of stereotypic beliefs (Steinberg, 2005). We may, at that point, construct personal beliefs that are more complex and (presumably) more moderate than stereotypic beliefs. For example, we may decide to include in our personal beliefs the fact that many blind people live independently and are employed in a variety of professions.
If we want our personal beliefs to guide us during social interactions, we must exert conscious effort (i.e., use selective attention) to suppress the unconscious responses produced by implicit bias (cf. Devine, 1989). But selective attention is limited: We can pay attention to only a small amount of information at any one time (Baddeley, 2020).
According to the social psychologist Michelle Nario-Redmond (2020), for many sighted people, talking with someone who is blind is an unfamiliar situation that exhausts our supply of attentional resources. As she stated, “Ironically, when people exert a lot of effort to suppress unwanted thoughts and feelings, their intentions can backfire—bottled-up feelings slip out in the form of inappropriate comments, intrusive inquiries, or overzealous aid.”
Perhaps the best way to reduce the harmful effects of forced intimacy is to make nondisabled people aware of the problem. I encourage you to share Belo’s story with others.
Belo has another solution: “This is why I sometimes tell people I was born blind so that they leave me alone. It seems this answer calms them.”