Irene Torices

Irene Torices works with people with disabilities, their families, and the professional community around them to ensure they can exercise their sexual and reproductive rights in an informed, free, responsible and healthy way. Confronting strong social taboos that inhibit open discussions of personal issues involving sexuality, Irene is leading a broad social transformation by changing public attitudes, public policy, educational and health services, and care available to people with disabilities and their families.

Irene is championing the rights of persons with physical and intellectual disabilities to free and healthy sexual expression. She founded the Interdisciplinary Educational Group on Human Sexuality and Attention to Disability (Geishad) to provide specialized attention and integral solutions to the disabled, their family members and professionals, and to serve as a platform for educating public, private and state institutions engaging these communities. Through education and advocacy, training, counseling, and professional therapy, Irene is tackling a subject that strongly and detrimentally affects the welfare and well-being of Mexico’s disabled communities.

Irene and Geishad offer specialized clinical therapy with a multidisciplinary team of sex therapists and professors of disability and sexuality. They are giving individuals with disabilities not only the feeling that their sexual expression is healthy and normal, but also the agency to take control of this aspect of their lives.

Recognizing the broader issues constraining the disabled community’s exercise of their full rights (and the concomitant negative effects on the general population) Irene seeks to spark a paradigm shift in favor of the disabled population’s worth, humanity, and rights to personal expression. First, Irene is normalizing the issue of human sexuality as a topic in broader professional therapy. She is leading the creation and implementation of academic and professional specializations in the field, and the provision of integral care to the disabled and those around them. To date, Irene has worked with two national institutions to create a certification degree and a master’s degree in collaboration with the Mexican Institute of Sexology (IMESEX) on disability and sexuality.

In addition to training the next generation of professionals working with the disabled, Irene is seeking to influence public policy and the existing institutional awareness and prioritization of sexuality issues in the education, care, and services offered to the disabled. She is working both nationally and internationally. Irene is a frequent collaborator with public bodies such as the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination, the National Human Rights Commission, and the National Institute for Social Development, engaging these institutions to address the discrimination and the violation of human rights for the disabled. These relationships allow Irene to influence public policy and create a legal framework that ensures that the information, work, and defense of the legal and reproductive rights of the disabled can be sustained over time and spread throughout society.

In theory, children and youth in Mexico without a disability can learn about healthy sexual behavior from sexual education programs at school or from their parents. Disabled children and youth, though, do not receive these educational tools from educational programs or from parents due to cultural taboos that the disabled cannot or should not lead an active sexual life. Parents, teachers, and healthcare providers are not prepared to talk about sexuality with this population, causing frustration and leading to further psychological issues. National statistics suggest that 5.5 percent of Mexico’s population has some type of disability. Citizen organizations (COs) working in this field estimate that it is closer to 13 percent. Regardless of the precise figure, this is a sizable segment of the population suffering from inadequate education.

Improved education, as well as integration of sexuality in the health care for people with disabilities is particularly important as people with disabilities are, by some estimates, victims of sexual abuse at alarmingly high rates, as well as disease, and emotional and psychological challenges. While there is yet no official data on the prevalence of sexual abuse among people with disabilities, it is estimated that 40 percent of the disabled population has suffered from sexual abuse at some point in their lives by family members and others. Studies also indicate that people with disabilities suffer from a high rate of sexually transmitted diseases. One survey reported that an infection rate of HIV among deaf individuals is twice the infection rate of individuals without hearing impairments. These subgroups of individuals are not cared for by public institutions, like the National Center for the Prevention and Control of HIV/AIDS (SENSIDA), the national center for the control of HIV/AIDS, because they are considered projects with low social impact. The lack of education and informed healthcare options for disabled individuals has other negative results, such as the development of abnormal behaviors, which exacerbate their social exclusion and create challenges for the families and communities around them.

Professionals, therapists, government institutions, and society at-large have long been unprepared to face these integrated challenges. The absence of research and academic study on sexuality and the disabled has also inhibited the development of professional training in these areas within the health and special education fields. The lack of information, discrimination, social exclusion, and widespread parental neglect of their children’s particular needs, added to the physical challenges posed by disability, causes widespread negative impacts on the daily life of people with disabilities.

Until recently with the advent of Irene and Geishad’s work, this general ignorance and disregard for the subject of sexuality for the disabled means that the topic has been almost nonexistent at a public policy level, and as a result, policies impacting the sexual and reproductive rights among the disabled have been often contradictory. Despite being recognized in several laws and international agreements, the Mexican government has done little to guarantee the compliance, regulation, and financing of these laws which cover a broad area relating to discrimination around topics such as sexual relations, marriage, and procreation. There is also widespread lack of information for both the disabled and other members of society, as neither clearly recognizes the sexual and reproductive rights of the disabled. Altogether this renders a debilitating and painful environment that does not promote healthy sexual expression and relationships among the disabled.

Irene works comprehensively for social change through direct care to the disabled, education of professionals, and activism in public policy. Her approach is comprehensive, seeking ultimately a more harmonious and balanced development of various social roles in individuals, a core tenet from the field of sexology—a legitimate and rigorous discipline of scientific and academic inquiry. With this theory at its foundation, Irene and Geishad have an ambitious public outreach strategy. For nine years, Geishad has organized an annual event serving children, youth and parents, reaching over 3,500 individuals. Additionally they organize numerous events to spread their message, hosting multiple free workshops and other conferences. These activities support the rehabilitation of disabled victims of sexual abuse and serve to help families and professionals start a conversation about disability and sexuality.

In working with people with disabilities and their families, Geishad attends to populations in difficult economic circumstances by carrying out a socioeconomic assessment of each patient. Then, it assigns them fees depending on the economic resources of each patient. This fee structure permits Geishad to be economically sustainable but at the same time provide care for all patients that need it. In addition to Irene’s specialized attention through sexual therapy, she also has a program focused on the development of social abilities that seeks to reintegrate patients in society by allowing them to become more self-sufficient. This program can be incorporated into work and school environments through workshops, instruction of officials or pedagogical support to finish primary education.

In the next component of her strategy, Irene starts to awaken awareness of this pressing issue through education and training initiatives and her efforts to change public policy. She has developed workshops, courses, diplomas, and postgraduate degrees with official accreditation to contribute to the development of professionals who work in sexuality and disability. The master’s degree is administered through IMESEX, while the diploma is taken at the Autonomous University of Yucatan. This year, thirty-three specialists are currently enrolled in these programs. Twenty-eight have already graduated. Classes focus on teaching the methods for teaching sexuality to students of all disabilities—from the deaf and blind to autistic and physically disabled individuals. In addition, Irene has created a number of workshops assessing the issue of sexuality and disability. Some include, “Human Rights and Sexual Rights,” “Sexual Valorization,” and “Assertive Communication.” The creation of these academic tools attends to the demands for information from diverse sectors of the population including students, professors of diverse educational institutions, the general population, mass media, and the disabled.

While Geishad’s clinic provides direct services to people with disabilities, attending to more than 900 patients in Mexico City and in other Mexican states, it is also embraces an educational mission. Geishad has organized more than 1,650 workshops, attended by more than 14,500 students. Over 16,500 hours of classes, workshops, and conferences have been offered by a staff of more than thirty teachers. This professional development, along with the certification and master’s degrees mentioned above, are key to the diffusion of the program.

Geishad has been able to spread awareness through media. Irene has appeared on a number of television and radio shows in Mexico as a specialist on sexuality for the disabled in addition to various interviews. Her organization has also had an important connection with Teletón, a TV and radio program broadcast yearly to raise funds to the disabled. Irene has also authored a number of books. For instance, Irene authored, Sex out of a Can: Sexual Education to Children and Youth with Disabilities and Violence Against Women with Disabilities, are each directed to a specific focus group. Irene continues to publish academic articles. Geishad also maintains an electronic Network of Sexuality and Disability, where the organization is able to spread articles and updates of issues related to the topic. Additionally, Geishad maintains a phone line to help with sexuality issues.

In politics, Geishad assists the integration and visibility of sexual rights for the disabled in the public agenda by pushing for the creation and modification of policies and institutional programs. Geishad has thus far achieved the incorporation of sexuality for the disabled into the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED), the Mexican government’s program for the prevention and care to the disabled. Also, Geishad provides advising and consulting on matters of sexual health and the rights of disabled individuals to different public and private organizations including: the National System for Integral Development, the Office of the Mexican Attorney General, the Teletón Foundation, the National Institute of Women, and COs like Reintegra Foundations. Geishad has an agreement with the Office of the Mexican Attorney-General to care for disabled victims of sexual abuse and violence in which Geishad provides legal services and clinical care for victims and their family members. Irene has successfully rehabilitated 100 percent of the patients in her program. She has achieved this high success rate through consistent follow-up with each patient as well as regular communication with the family.

Irene plans to make her methodology replicable throughout the country by training professionals. Her goal is to create a certification diploma that prepares eighty professionals in education and health yearly. These professionals will be able to implement her treatment methodology in existing public and private treatment facilities for the disabled. This will allow Irene to achieve her long-term vision that all individuals with a disability receive integral sexual education and treatment with family support that allows them to exercise their sexual and reproductive rights in a healthy way.

Irene has dedicated more than half of her life to the disabled and the inclusion of the sexuality in integral rehabilitation. At a young age, Irene became aware of the implications of social exclusion, discrimination and the lack of sexual education for the disabled. Irene has two disabled younger siblings, one with Down syndrome and the other with schizophrenia. Irene has learned to understand life in another way by living and constantly interacting with disabled individuals. This understanding was the starting point of a lifelong struggle to fight to change the situation that the disabled live today.

Irene studied occupational therapy in college and clinical sexology for her master’s degree. She was surprised by the lack of information, research, and training in the discipline. After graduation, Irene worked as an occupational therapist, master’s-level sexology professor and co-owner of the Mexican Institute for Sexology. In this role she realized that the area of sexuality for the disabled has not been a priority for the organizations that formed the Mexican Institute of Sexology, the National System for Integral Development or any of the institutions in which she had worked. Irene decided to launch Geishad because she had specialized in the areas of sexology education, clinical sexology, occupational therapy, management of groups of educational sexologists, and had strengthened the development of sexuality of the disabled in Mexico.

In 2004 Irene founded Geishad, and later struggled to gain traction with this difficult subject to changing dynamics in the field, and only a recent awakening of consciousness. With her eyes set on national expansion now, her project is in a key moment for her to achieve the scale and social impact she envisions.