Students with Hearing Loss Are Less Vulnerable to Internet Predators?

Did you ever think someone could come up with a hearing loss angle related to the predators that lurk on the Internet? I didn’t think there was an angle like this until my heart sank and the thoughts racing through my mind kept coming back to why my daughter Nicole’s listening needs were being left out once again. This latest occasion of her listening isolation was a much touted and highly recommended Internet Safety Night for parents and students at her school.

Although she is physiologically deaf, Nicole depends fully on her listening abilities through her cochlear implants. Her cochlear implants, along with early detection of her hearing loss plus auditory training at a very early age, make her one of new generation of children who are deaf but use listening and speaking as their primary mode of communication. She just doesn’t hear as well as most of us, and her cochlear implants are supplemented at school by an FM amplification system which helps to provide a clear, strong signal to overcome distance and noise.

Out of the many hundreds of people in attendance that night, Nicole was the only student who was not allowed to hear the entire audio portion of a very powerful and deeply moving video of a mother who had lost her daughter. The audio feed was never hooked up to Nicole’s FM system, in spite of the plans we had worked with school staff to develop at the start of the school year.

Nicole did have the opportunity to hear all of the words of the primary speaker, because he alone used the microphone that was connected to her FM. But the when the other speakers talked, they did not use that microphone. Again only our daughter was not allowed to hear words of those others who spoke that night.

When I first realized that Nicole wasn’t getting everything, I started to raise my arm to try to catch the attention of the school principal who was standing up in front. But Nicole didn’t want to be the cause of an interruption and to risk embarrassment in front of all the students in her school. She calmly told me that it was okay and that she was still getting maybe 80% of what was being said. This was just another of many incidents, and she has learned well how to try to get by.

I could only keep thinking about the 20% that even she knew she wasn’t hearing and sarcastically wondering if our school had now come to the novel conclusion that she just doesn’t need to have full access to all the Internet Safety information. Obviously her school must believe that Nicole is less vulnerable to predators on the Internet simply because of her hearing loss.

Subsequent to that night, the school principal shared with me that he recognized at the time of the presentation that Nicole wasn’t getting everything through her FM. I believe he is a good principal and good person, but why he unfortunately chose that night to not interrupt the presentation to fix that situation for Nicole is something that I simply cannot easily explain. Perhaps it is partly the cause of the trickle down effect from our school district leadership that we believe is callous to the listening needs of our students with hearing loss.

Hearing loss is the invisible disability that our school district and so many of us in our society do not yet appreciate. From the very first day of birth and our arrival into this world, most of us with typical hearing have been fully enveloped in the sounds that surround us. We simply have no experience without sound, and we cannot imagine what it must be like to be constantly cut off from the communication through spoken language that is so intrinsically a part of our lives. Our ears have always been there to serve as the natural sponges that absorb our connectedness to humanity. We don’t think about it; it just happens.

Additionally a low incidence mentality often permeates our thinking. There are so many other students with needs, and it just costs too much to deal with the listening needs of the very few students with hearing loss. We tell ourselves that we simply can’t afford the financial resources and people efforts to ensure that a student with hearing loss receives equal access to all the communication in the school. As long as they are getting an education and their grades are okay, we say we have fulfilled our responsibility.

Similar thinking used to permeate our society with respect to people with physical mobility challenges. Today we recognize our moral and legal responsibilities to the students who cannot walk into a school building like most of our students. We would never tolerate a student in a wheelchair being left at the door, isolated from the communications of the rest of the students or staff. The Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws now protect against such discrimination. Barrier-free access has become part of the policy language of our school district and many others.

Yet barrier-free access in our schools does not include access to the sound waves of spoken language. Missed opportunities for communication and language pervade our schools during the most critical times in the development of our students’ young minds. The window of opportunity closes with each and every precious day that passes by. Let us not delay a moment further.

Today the time has come for us to tear down these barriers. We must now make it a priority to ensure the appropriate deployment of amplification systems for the listening needs of students with hearing loss and other student populations who are at risk. We must now make it a priority to incorporate well-known standards for listening conditionings (acoustics) into the regulations and building codes of our schools. Finally we must join together in our shared bonds of love for all children who are deaf or hard of hearing, regardless of different choices of communications modalities. The fundamental right to equally participate in communication and language belongs to all.

“School is perhaps, more than anything else, a language laboratory. It is where linguistic skills mature and a child’s sense of self and knowledge grow. Emotional, intellectual, and educational growth is unthinkable without the ability to communicate, to exchange ideas and information. Language is the linchpin of everything we learn.”

The Human Right to Language: Communication Access for Deaf Children
Lawrence M. Seigel
Gallaudet University Press (2008)