Violence can happen everywhere in the lives of young people with cognitive disability. Young people with cognitive disability, family members, and workers talk about what needs to change. Services need to work together to help young people with cognitive disability. Others need to know about and respect the culture of young people with cognitive disability. Others need to respect young people’s choices on whom they want to love. Young people with cognitive disability can be helped to understand what is violence. Services can change what they do so that they can keep young people with cognitive disability safe. Young people with cognitive disability say that there should be ‘nothing about us unless it is led by us’.

This chapter explains what this book is about. Becoming an adult is different for everybody. Young people with cognitive disability can find it hard to get the right supports to become an adult. Many young people can experience violence and abuse. This book tells the stories of young people with cognitive disability from different backgrounds. Family members and practitioners also talk about stories of young people with cognitive disability.

This chapter looks at the Department of Child Safety and the criminal justice system. Child Safety often didn’t understand that a young person had a cognitive disability. Sometimes young people with cognitive disability were abused while they were in Child Safety. Young people with cognitive disability often did not get much help when they left Child Safety. Parents with cognitive disability often had their children removed from them by Child Safety. Some young people were abused by police. Young people with cognitive disability who went to prison didn’t get much help. They also found it hard when they left prison.

This chapter explores what we know about violence against young people with cognitive disability. It looks at what can make it more likely that young people with cognitive disability are abused. It’s hard to really know how many young people with cognitive disability have experienced violence. Young people with cognitive disability can be harmed by workers, family, or friends who are meant to help them. Abuse can happen in many places. Services and society need to learn how to keep young people with cognitive disability safe. We need to make sure young people can make decisions for themselves.

Family, friends, partners, and pets can help young people with cognitive disability as they become adults. Some young people with cognitive disability had families who spoke up for them and helped them when times were hard. Some young people with cognitive disability had partners who helped them feel good about themselves. Friends could help young people with cognitive disability leave abusive situations. Professionals can do more to help young people with cognitive disability make friends and be part of their community.

Young people with cognitive disability, families, and practitioners reported many acts of violence against young people. The violence included physical abuse, sexual assault/abuse, neglect, exploitation, emotional and psychological abuse, and domestic and family violence. Young people were abused by other young people with disability, family members, partners, practitioners, and services. Young people in this book found the strength to speak up and tell their stories of violence.

This chapter tells Amethyst’s story. Amethyst is an Aboriginal and South Sea Islander young woman with cognitive disability. Amethyst is not her real name. Amethyst was abused many times as a child and a young adult. Her story can tell us a lot about what needs to change for young people with cognitive disability. We need to understand that abuse affects a person’s whole life, their family, and their world.

Becoming an adult involved lots of changes and challenges for young people with cognitive disability. Many services, and sometimes families, judged young people badly because they had a cognitive disability. Young people needed help to be independent, but this wasn’t always given to them. Some young people were lonely and found so-called friends who abused them. Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander young people and young people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds needed others to understand and respect their culture. LQBTIQA+ young people wanted love and acceptance as they became adults.

This chapter looks at services and focuses on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Services don’t always recognise what young people with cognitive disability can do. They can neglect young people with cognitive disability. This can lead to violence and abuse of the young person. This chapter looks at how young people with cognitive disability found support from NDIS agencies. Young people with cognitive disability had trouble getting onto the NDIS. Professionals, families, and young people needed to fight to make sure supports were helpful. The NDIS must get better for all people with disability.

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

Chapter 7, which serves as the conclusion, describes the important role of the “mild thesis” in obscuring the history of slavery in Dutch New York. The chapter argues that the mild thesis is largely incorrect, and that slavery in New York was harsh and violent. Yet, more than previous historians, I point to the nuance of why the mild thesis came into being, and what it is not entirely without merit. Memories of slavery in Dutch New York came from those who viewed it positively and remembered its final years, when legal protections for the enslaved had been built in to the system.

Chapter 1 establishes the context and extent of Dutch culture in New York to demonstrate that Dutch slavery in New York was distinct and extensive. This chapter provides a demographic argument for the importance of Dutch slaves in the history of New York slavery. This chapter combines an argument drawn from census data with anthropological observations about the nature of violence and mobility in Dutch New York slavery.

This chapter explores the many forms of bondage in the early English tropics, showing how difficult it can be to even define slavery from a global perspective, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. There was a blurry line between slavery and other conditions of bondage or subjugation, but the English gradually developed a more consistent approach to non-European enslavement across the tropics. By the 1680s, one particularly inflexible and brutal genus of racial slavery – forged in the Caribbean – had outcompeted most other forms of slavery and became the default in the English empire. This chapter highlights the difficulty in defining slavery and shows overlapping elements in bondage systems in the English tropics. It argues that one of the reasons that English slavery became more draconian and permanent than most other forms of slavery was that the English took steps in the comprehensive slave codes passed in the Caribbean to deny the subjecthood of the enslaved.