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The mildly retarded child or adult of today might have been seen as intelligent a few hundred years ago when only the privileged could read. Handicap (mental/multiple), where it is not accompanied by severe brain damage, is a relative term and state (Stokes 1987). Now that there is a context of care, housing and education we have the luxury to consider emotional meaning. However, there is great concern among professionals about how to deal with what Sheila Hollins (1988) has aptly termed the “three secrets”: handicap, sexuality and death. It is the link between the first two that I want to concentrate on here. As a culture we find it hard enough to look at difficult sexual areas within the ordinary population, witness our late ability to see sexual abuse. There is an even greater fear of looking at sexual issues and handicap together, although there has been important progress since 1981 when the Crafts (1981) linked the philosophy of normalisation to the increasing provision for sex and social education.
The connection of handicap and sexuality has been a painful one for several hundred years. At the root there is anger and fear that the sexual and pro-creative connection between a man and a woman could lead to a damaged offspring. In the same way the illegitimate have had to carry social and cultural fantasies about wild unlawful sexuality, so the handicapped carry, stamped on their features, the mark of what is feared as “bad” sexuality. Binet's turn of the century IQ scores showed that most prostitutes and convicts belonged to the deprived group who made up the mildly mentally handicapped range. The shock this caused led to views like Walter E. Fernald's (1912) when he said to the Massachusetts Medical Society, “feeble-minded women are invariably immoral and if at large usually become carriers of VD or give birth to children who are as defective as themselves”. We have seen one logical outcome of that view in the enforced sterilisation that was permitted this yea