How one mother’s outrage became a public archive of harm.
When this website first started, the project carried a kind of purity—a strict sense of order, a moral centre that orbited one unambiguous injustice, which was the use of collective punishment in public schools, and more specifically, its use against my daughter, who is both autistic and ADHD, and who never deserved to be punished in this humiliating way.
My moral indignation was immense, unwavering, and hot; it came from the marrow and it came from the truth, because everything about that practice reeked of cowardice and institutional cruelty, and when I discovered that our school district would not take a stance, would not say clearly that collective punishment is wrong, would not defend the rights of children to be treated as individuals rather than scapegoats or collateral damage, I had nowhere to put those feelings except here.
And so I did the only thing I know how to do when I am faced with a sea of institutional bullshit—when I am confronted by those who would rather sit comfortably than stand righteously—I found a way to tell the truth to as many people as possible, as clearly as I could, for as long as I had breath.
See related:
- Collective punishment is not evidence-based
- Collective punishment does not effectively improve behaviour
- Punishing an entire group fails to teach accountability and damages trust between educators and students
Data and righteous fire
In those early days, I scavenged the Internet like a researcher possessed—I read every article, policy brief, public statement, and academic paper I could find on collective punishment, its history, its legal status, and its harm, determined to prove that I was not just angry but correct, not just grieving but justified.
I read everything I could from organisations like Inclusion BC and the BC Human Rights Commissioner, clinging to the facts the way one might cling to the side of a lifeboat—because when systems are indifferent to your child’s pain, the truth can feel like the only form of safety still available.
See related:
- Why are neurodivergent students more likely to be harmed by collective punishment?
- BC Human Rights Tribunal findings
- Reconciliation demands an end to collective punishment
- What replaced the strap in Canadian schools
- How it broke me open: the unbearable clarity of seeing things as they are
The big lie of scarcity and the suffering it creates
What I came to understand—and what changed the direction of my work entirely—was that the suffering of my children was neither incidental nor accidental; it was structural, budgeted, and approved.
It was green-lit in committee rooms in Victoria where officials sit in temperature-controlled offices, parsing spreadsheet line items and congratulating themselves on “historic investments” while those of us in the provinces live the downstream consequences of those decisions in emergency rooms, family counselling offices, and funeral homes.
From that place of clarity, I began to write what would become my series on The 123s of Engineered Scarcity—a framework for understanding how suffering is manufactured, allocated, and justified in public education policy.
See related:
- Engineered famine in public education
- The scarcity script
- Debility vs. disability
- What would it really cost to fix the problem?
A mother’s descent into systems, strategy, and survival
At some point, I stopped being able to tell where my personal grief ended and my political analysis began, because they had become the same work.
So I created the advocacy letter generators, and from there I developed the Advocacy Toolkit, a library of thirty concrete strategies tailored to the timeline of school advocacy, because I no longer wanted any mother to feel as alone, overwhelmed, and under-resourced as I had once been.
See related:
- Don’t get stuck in working-it-out purgatory
- How to lodge an education appeal in British Columbia
- Maybe tomorrow: reflections on goal post shifting and the economics of access
- Resources for the revolution
Back to where I began: the punishment of being disabled in public school
Eventually, I circled back to where I began—the question of collective punishment—and when I tried to narrow my gaze again, I realised I could not.
Because by then it was clear to me that our entire education system as a whole is a form of collective punishment for families with disabled children, a form of structural discipline in which every child who cannot fit the narrow frame is made to suffer for a budget that refuses to flex.
See related:
- The slow boil: Delayed support and collective punishment
- The moral cost of leaving children in fight-or-flight
- You’re not wrong: Reflections on motherhood and advocacy
Rage, rot, and the unbearable mask of composure
From that truth emerged another thread in my work—a meditation on maternal rage, gaslighting, lip service, goalpost shifting, and the deep psychological toll of sitting in meeting after meeting where I have had to perform politeness in order to preserve a relationship with someone who is currently harming my child.
I have come to believe there needs to be a place on the Internet where women can say these things aloud, in full sentences, without apology or softening, and know that they are not monstrous—they are simply alive.
See related:
- Poise as pedagogy
- Disgusted by my advocacy
- Insults I could have slung
- All sorts of other diatribes on maternal rage
Mapping the harm
At the point I realised that this was a sweeping, coordinated form of collective punishment targeting neurodivergent and disabled children, and their families, I poured myself into mapping the harm—carefully, relentlessly, almost like drafting testimony for a future tribunal where I might be asked to explain just how thoroughly and irrevocably our experience of public education destabilised our lives, reordered our days, and altered the emotional architecture of our family.
- The moral cost of leaving children in fight-or-flight
- Just when it starts working, they take it away
- The bait and switch: What inclusion really looks like at the VSB
- She graduated and this is what she learned
- She called the police and the principal told them not to come
- Drawn and quartered: Sibling trauma, institutional containment, and the erasure of care for families with multiples
- Double the love, double the discrimination
- How schools misuse disability designations to deny support
- Gaslighted by proxy: how schools grant coercive power to the quietest parent
- Not sick. Not fine. Not supported. Sexism in Vancouver School Board.
- Apparently, starving yourself isn’t a serious mental health condition in VSB
- I only asked for gentleness: on parenting a PDA child in a punishing world
Convening harm: what accessibility committees reveal
And just when I thought I had emptied the vault, I remembered that horrible Accessibility Committee experience—an experience so riddled with tokenism, erasure, and institutional manipulation that I wrote a 140-page internal report about it and never shared it with a single soul.
That memory prompted me to begin a new series on how not to run accessibility processes, because true accessibility is impossible in a culture that fears truth-telling, and no committee can ever redeem harm it refuses to name.
See related:
- We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
- Barriers in the process mirror the barriers we named
- Performative accessibility in BC public education
- Our goals are not the same
Building infrastructure for truth, advocacy, and collective memory
I have come to believe that what began as a personal reckoning has become something far larger—a living infrastructure for truth-telling, for mutual aid, and for a politics of refusal that does not compromise its clarity to soothe the fragile egos of institutions.
I carry with me a meticulous archive, thousands of pages deep, scattered across notebooks and folders and backup drives, filled with fragments of poems, advocacy drafts, FOI’s, and angry shreds of paper scrawled in the heat of meetings I was forced to endure. And now, at last, I am ready to excavate and share more of that record with those who need it most.
The website I am building is not just a place to name harm—it is a growing network of strategic tools, anchored in lived experience that aims to empower families across British Columbia and beyond. I am continuing to develop prewritten templates for different advocacy scenarios, offering practical resources for parents who are exhausted, out of time, and still committed to protecting their children. I am expanding the site to offer searchable, tag-based catalogues of content that span every school, every district, and every province, because no one should have to navigate harm in isolation, and no district should be allowed to shield itself in silence.
The more I read and re-read old conduct codes, the more convinced I become that these documents—supposedly neutral and procedural—are in fact the nexuses through which enormous, systematised harm flows. And so I am continuing my neurodiversity-informed policy reviews of these codes of conduct, because that is where much of the gaslighting begins, where the plausible deniability is manufactured, and where the door to both impunity and invisibility is kept ajar.
I am still not sure where it all leads, but the writing is getting faster, the ideas are sharpening, the connective tissue between past and present is strengthening, and the excitement I feel is real. There is a quiet joy in drawing together pieces I once thought were broken. There is power in publishing what was once hidden. There is a community forming around this work, and I am grateful for every person who has reached out to say: I thought I was the only one.
So I will keep writing. And I am only just getting started.
