Deplorable

From Milwaukee County First:

“Deplorable.”

That is the word that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quotes County Board Supervisors and mental health advocates having used to describe Behavioral Health Division Director John Chianelli’s excuses for how a female patient at BHD was allowed to be repeatedly sexually assaulted and impregnated.

From the article:

Milwaukee County’s top mental health administrator intentionally houses female patients with men known to be dangerous “because the presence of women reduces the likelihood of the men being violent,” according to a county supervisor’s letter obtained by the Journal Sentinel.

John Chianelli, administrator of the county’s Behavioral Health Division, told county supervisors during a closed-door session last month that segregating men and women would result in more violence.

“It’s a trade-off,” he said. “Putting 24 aggressive male patients into a male-only unit would increase the level of violence in the unit.”

These comments were made in a closed session in which members of the County Board questioned Chianelli regarding the reports of repeated sexual assaults being allowed to happen.

The Board apparently thinks that the main reason for these sexual assaults are simply because patients are in co-ed units. Chianelli is feeding into these perceptions by trying to say that sexual assaults of female patients is an acceptable trade off for a higher level of physical aggressions if they were housed in an single-gender unit.

They are both wrong.

Read the rest here.