In general, the sentence "Please don't touch me" makes people feel awkward enough to keep them from doing it again, in my experience.

I made a post pretty much identical to this one last year when I first started using a white cane. I totally feel you, people think it's okay to touch without permission and it is aggravating and unacceptable behavior. I think what's important to remember is that although it is totally inappropriate and unacceptable people don't always know that, just something to keep in mind, it doesn't excuse the behavior but it might explain it. I have had to take more precautions recently though, so simply getting annoyed and moving on is less and less of an option. I have no tolerance for people grabbing me without asking first anymore, especially in public, it's a safety thing. If you have an O&M that you are in regular contact with you can ask about the "Hind's Break" which is a fairly unaggressive feeling way of getting out of a grip on your arm, I'll use that if I can but I find it difficult because it requires your non grabbed arm and my cane is usually occupying that hand. I've taken to twisting my arm and pulling it forcefully away, I'll usually take a few steps back and cross my cane over my body as well and just tell them firmly that they cannot touch me. This usually gets the message across and it also gets attention from other people. Most of the time I assume it's someone who is well meaning but I've gotten into scary situations three times now because I was complacent. Don't make that mistake, there are lots of good people in the world, and there are also a lot of bad ones and you can't assess that on the scene. I used to be afraid of hurting someones feelings because they were just trying to be nice, but your safety is worth so much more than that, don't risk it.

I'm blind and don't mind it. It did bother me while I was losing my sight, but now it doesn't anymore because I've adopted a posture of dependency. If people want to help I just let them feel good about it even if I don't need any help.

Shrug. I suppose I probably take a slightly different tact than the other responses, but my question is why do these actions matter so much? I am completely blind and find that sometimes things like this are annoying, but only that. I would say it's comparable to them guiding you by letting you grip their arm. Receiving assistance is often going to be a physical interaction, and prescribing limits on when and where seems like something that will be very difficult to enforce.you can keep telling people not to touch you, and it will work each time, but it sort of requires that you say this after the fact, so you're not really solving much. I found it was much easier to just worry less about the personal space issue. We interact through tactile sensations, and it's unlikely that that will change.


On the other hand, I do find that the amount of overprotective assistance is often dictated by the blind person's confidence level. Most of the time I ask for help rather than having to have it offered to me, in which case I generally speaking control the dynamics of that assistance. In those cases you generally initiate the contact. This depends on personality though, I think.

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