Disability Discrimination

5 Key excerpts on "Disability Discrimination"

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  eBook - ePub

  Literature and Disability

  • Alice Hall(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  By the late 1980s and the 1990s, these social and political rights–based campaigns and legislative changes had triggered a greater awareness of disability in academic circles. In disciplinary terms, disability had traditionally been the preserve of medicine, psychology, and social work. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, scholars in sociology, social policy, education, cultural studies and the humanities began to draw on recent campaigns and civil rights paradigms in order to put forward an alternative model of disability. Many explicitly defined themselves in opposition to a medical model in which disability was understood as a deficit residing in the individual; they refused to see disability as a pathology or to treat it as a problem that is necessarily in need of cure, rehabilitation or concealment. Instead, activists and scholars put forward a social model, sometimes called the “social-constructionist” model, of disability. This model emphasised the public, structural aspects of disability and highlighted the status of people with disabilities as a historically oppressed group. The social model makes a key distinction between “impairment” and “disability”, summarised by UPIAS in 1976 as:

  Impairment: Lacking part or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ, or mechanism of the body.

  Disability: The disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.

  (Barnes and Mercer 11)

  Under this model, first proposed by Irving Kenneth Zola, impairment is a functional limitation (Davis “Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies” 506). Disability, by contrast, is created through a social process: through the relationship between an individual with an impairment and the society in which they live. Society “disables” individuals by excluding or discriminating against them and creating affective, sensory, cognitive or architectural barriers. Put in stark terms, a social model view suggests that wheelchair users might have a mobility impairment, but they are disabled by the lack of provision of ramps and appropriate access facilities. Similarly, a person with a hearing impairment only becomes disabled when no-one else in the room can communicate using sign language.

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  Disability and International Development

  A Guide for Students and Practitioners

  • David Cobley(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In our view, it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from participation in society. Disabled people are therefore an oppressed group in society.

  (UPIAS, 1976, pp. 3–4)

  The statement goes on to draw a clear distinction between disability and impairment:

  Social model distinction between impairment and disability

  thus we define impairment as lacking all or part of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body and disability as the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.

  (UPIAS, 1976, p. 14)

  This definition, which was later widened to include sensory and intellectual impairments (Barnes, 1998), implies that society creates disability in two ways. Firstly, the structures of society, including families, communities, physical infrastructure, the economy and the political system, are not designed to fully accommodate people with certain physical and/or mental characteristics.3 Secondly, society ‘excludes’ people with impairments through discriminatory attitudes, systems and practices.4 In the early 1980s, this radical new way of conceptualising disability, encapsulated in the UPIAS document, gave rise to a feeling of optimism among disabled people that was captured by Allan Sutherland (1981, p. 1):

  p.12

  Over the last few years, a new, more uncompromising mood has been springing up among people with disabilities. Increasingly, we are jettisoning passive acceptance of our situations, taking pride in our selves and our bodies, and coming to see ourselves as disabled, if we are disabled at all, not by the idiosyncrasies of our bodies but by a society which is not prepared to cater to our needs.

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  An Introduction to Disability Studies

  • David Johnstone(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The campaigns have all tended to come to successful fruition as a consequence of direct action and political activism. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) (Morrissey 1991) is an example of legislation that has come to be a powerful testimony to the campaigning zeal of disabled people. It is also a symbol of and justification for political activity in the development of civil rights for people with disabilities in other parts of the world. However, in the United Kingdom the evidence that disabled people are still denied their full rights to citizenship is overwhelming. It is also increasingly evident that, despite political rhetoric to the contrary, ‘social disadvantage’ has come to be associated with accusations of new forms of deviancy. Some forms of socially inappropriate behaviour are now akin to some of the former stigma associated with disablement. The socially disadvantaged as the new disabled – cases to be treated rather than individuals with rights – is still rather fanciful but it is interesting to see how the shift in liberal tolerance of the ‘other’ has moved away from fear of the body, to fear of fear itself.

  It is only recently that commentators have begun to question if the very services set up to help establish a better quality of life may not instead be helping to create the problems they were designed to resolve. Bureaucratic assessment procedures and the perpetuation of segregated and residential facilities have in the past denied people the right to live where they choose. The conjunction of disability, community provision for disabled people and the philosophy of inclusive living is crucial here; particularly in terms of the realisation of individual potential and the affirmative model alluded to by Swain and French (2000) and Johnstone (1995).

  Summary

  In this chapter Disability Studies is discussed as a multidisciplinary subject area that sets out to explore both the private and collective experiences of disabled people. The differences between the labels of disability, impairment and handicap are outlined and critically analysed. The strongly medical definitions that are associated with the individual ‘tragedy’ of an impairment – e.g. chronic loss, pain, loss of status – is compared with the more politicised social construction of disability. The contrasts between these two simple models is emphasised. The emergence of a language discourse that empowers and liberates disabled people as a group, in a more inclusive and affirmative paradigm that challenges the negativity associated with marginalisation and oppression is also discussed. Shared oppression is argued as a liberating feature of the disability movement. This brings attention to a fourth explanation of disability, based on the demand for civil rights. This model has grown from the social model as numbers of disabled people have started to act collectively in order to seek access to civic rights and full citizenship. These actions, in turn, create the basis for a critical examination of community care and form the backdrop for the exploration of equal opportunities in Chapter 2

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  Meeting the Needs of Children with Disabilities

  Families and Professionals Facing the Challenge Together

  • Helen K. Warner(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  They imply that it is the individual’s impairment rather than society’s attitude or willingness to accept diversity that inhibits his or her ability to overcome some of the challenges disability presents. These definitions could be said to reflect the medical model of disability. The social model of disability moves away from defining a disabled person by his or her inherent deficiencies, and proposes that it is society that disables people by its lack of provision for their needs, negative assumptions and the erection of ‘disabling barriers’ (Swain et al. 1997). A disabled sociologist has claimed, that ‘disability is socially produced’ (Oliver 1992). This perspective is shared by others and has led to the development of an alternative definition of disability: The disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities. (UPIAS 1976:3–4) This definition, proposed by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, overturns conventional notions by suggesting that no individual is disabled except by the society in which he or she lives. Such an approach is reinforced by the enormously varied interpretations different world cultures place upon disabled members of their communities; in Martha’s Vineyard, for example, the result of a high proportion of children born congenitally deaf was the acquisition by the whole community of sign language in addition to spoken English – not the segregation and disabling of those affected (Groce cited in Barnes et al. 1999:16). It is true that ‘disability is not measles’ (Rioux and Bach 1994), but from a practical standpoint it is necessary to find a word that identifies those people for whom the whole of society – including the healthcare professions – needs to make extraordinary provision in order to support their enablement needs

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  The Ethics of Health Care Rationing

  An Introduction

  • Greg Bognar, Iwao Hirose(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These critics would be just as critical of the quote above as we are, but for a different reason: since they deny that disabilities in themselves are bad for you, they would deny that disabled people would have a lower QALY ranking – that is, that their health-related quality of life is worse. They would agree that people with disabilities do often have worse lives all things considered, but not because of any shortfall in their health-related quality of life. Rather, their worse lives are the result of the prejudice, stigma, and injustice they have to face.

  This idea is an extreme form of the view called the social model of disability. In its less extreme forms, social models of disability emphasize that the disadvantages faced by people with disabilities have two sources: those that are caused by a physical or cognitive impairment (e.g. the inability to walk) and those that are the result of the social environment (e.g. the lack of wheelchair access to buildings and public transportation). These versions of the social model are useful by calling our attention to the fact that the disadvantages associated with disabilities are seldom the result of a medical impairment only, and societies can and should do more to lessen them.

  But the social model does not fit all disabilities equally well. As we have already mentioned, opponents of cost-effectiveness analysis tend to take a broad view of what counts as a disability. It is undeniable that the disadvantages associated with blindness or deafness are in part socially imposed (deafness would hardly be noticed if everyone was fluent in sign language). But it’s far less plausible to hold that the disadvantages associated with asthma or allergies are socially imposed. At the end of the day, it is more useful to think about some disabilities in terms of the social model, but not all of them. In some cases, a medical model is more appropriate.

  But for the extreme view, disabilities are mere differences. A person who is disabled and a person who is not will not differ in terms of health-related quality of life as long as the only difference between these two people is the presence or absence of the disability. Their overall quality of life may be different, but that is due to the social environment.

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