Hearing Impairment and Hearing Disability

Towards a Paradigm Change in Hearing Services

Anthony Hogan,Rebecca Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317123095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The purpose of this book is to challenge people (service providers, people with a hearing disability and those who advocate for them) to reconsider the way western society thinks about hearing disability and the way it seeks to 'include them'. It highlights the concern that the design of hearing services is so historically marinated in ableist culture that service users often do not realise they may be participating in their own oppression within a phono-centric society. With stigma and marginalisation being the two most critical issues impacting on people with hearing disability, Hogan and Phillips document both the collective and personal impacts of such marginality. In so doing, the book brings forward an argument for a paradigm shift in hearing services. Drawing upon the latest research and policy work, the book opens up a conceptual framework for a new approach to hearing services and looks at the kinds of personal and systemic changes a paradigm shift would entail.

Chapter 1
Hearing as a Social Issue

Anthony Hogan and Rebecca Phillips

In the Introduction we presented the idea that the social landscape, in which people with hearing disability live, requires attention. This chapter delves into the depths of this issue in two ways, first by arguing that disability in general and deafness in particular, has been the focus of a negative form of governance for over 150 years and second by examining the extent to which (if at all) this form of governance has served to the detriment of people with hearing disability. To this end we recount, through the lens of historical sociology, the social construction of notions of disability, deafness and impairment. This work builds upon Hogan (1997) while also noting that quite recently more and more researchers (e.g. de Feu and Chovaz 2014) are recognising the antecedents of the values of disability that still problematise life for people today. In turn we provide a social profile of people with hearing disability to illustrate who these people are that we keep referring to and why their social position might be an issue. We draw primarily on Australian data and provide an overview of research literature on a range of issues including wellbeing. The aim of this chapter is to document as much as we know about the social position of this cohort in the one place.

The Governance of Deafness

Prior to the industrial revolution, most people with disabilities in western societies were left to live freely (or at least as freely as anyone else) (Finkelstein 1980). But then something changed in the manner in which people with disabilities were treated. Attitudes as to how the person with a disability was expected to manage themselves also changed. In understanding the social standing of people with hearing disability today it is important to know what has changed, and why, because we consider that the essence of the values of yesterday still linger deeply within the design of hearing services today (we return to this issue in later chapters). We situate these changes within the context of broader 19th century-social movements which resulted in the:

• further social marginalisation of notions of disability

• devaluation of the notion of interdependency and the emergence of a discourse of self-sufficiency

• construction of the person with a disability as a moral menace, and

• the birth of phono-centrism in the governance of deafness and hearing impairment.

Social relationships have historical origins. An appreciation of the historical origins of a particular set of social arrangements must be gleaned from understanding how specific groups, interests and discursive practices came to be aligned at a particular moment in history (see Foucault 1991). For philosophers such as Foucault (1988), there is not simply ‘one set’ of social relations that require documentation – there are layers of relations made up of ideas, social forces, institutions and competing interests that interact with one another at any one time. Depending upon how these combine, and based on who comes to work with whom at a given time, an overall governmental process made up of ideas, beliefs technologies and behaviours (individual, social or instructional) result. These will not be the only ideas, beliefs and practices of the day, but will probably be the dominant ones at a given point in history.

Depictions of Disability

It is fair to say from the outset, that the historical depiction of people with disability, including people who are deaf or hearing impaired, has not been a positive one. It is important to recognise these depictions and constructions but in doing so, the reader may wish to steel themselves for the experience. Moreover the social construction of notions of disability developed over time, particularly in regard to their place (or the lack of it) within rights to citizenship. The literature shows that throughout medieval times, communities did not differentiate between people who had various disabilities that impacted upon their spoken communication skills -they were essentially treated as fools (Kanner 1964; Neugebauer 1978). Overtime, deaf and more seriously hearing impaired people were caught up in the differing labels and groupings that emerged. These new groupings included notions of cretins (Kanner 1964), the feebleminded, idiots (Kanner 1964, p. 39 and 42), mental defectives (Trent 1994) and the mentally deranged (Rosen 1968). People with disabilities were also likened to Darwinist notions of urbanised savages. Lane (1993) cites one example of these attitudes from the French school, led by otologist Itard: ‘(Deafness) condemns the victim to moral isolation, impaired speech, and incomplete intellectual development. The deaf-mute appears like a civilised man, but inwardly there is a barbarity and ignorance of a savage’ (cited in Lane 1993, p. 73).

Lane (1976) points out that at times children with disability were also associated with reports of ‘wild’ or abandoned children. The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Lane 1976) is a latter day example of many so-called feral children who survived by living off the land. This was not the only contribution Darwinists made. The society of the day was concerned about issues of difference such as those between humans and animals, and the so- called ‘savage’ and the ‘civilised’ person (Young 1985). Durant (1985, p. 288) observes that ‘[R]eason, will, consciousness, [and] morality … were regarded as the distinguishing marks of man’ from apes. The ability to use spoken language, to express verbally and understand logical thought, was seen as the factor which differentiated humans from animals. Sign language, presented as a collection of animal-like noises, gestures and primitive pantomime, could clearly be seen to be more ape-like than human. For Darwin, humans had passion that had ‘clearly discernible roots in the animal world’ (Durant 1985, p. 289). Apes, savages and man were but a series of changes over time, but they remained connected nonetheless (Durant 1985).

Changing Perspectives on Interdependency and Citizenship – the Birth of Phono-centricism

The various texts cited above evidence the fact that attempts to govern deaf people are not new. These writers (and others noted below) have pointed out that deaf people were treated differently in various societies. Such interventions have included the killing of deaf children, the denial of property rights, the denial of citizenship and a denial of access to rites of social passage (for example, not being allowed to participate in church rituals). Such communities privileged a culture concerned with able-bodiment centred upon spoken communication (Edwards 1994). As such hearing and speech were constructed as being central to citizenship and as such phono-centricism was formalised into social policy.

In medieval times, if people with disabilities survived, they did so either by working on the family farm or in village shops as dependents or they lived as beggars, paupers and social outcasts (Lane 1984). Under Elizabethan laws, families were responsible for the maintenance of the ‘poor, lame, blind, and impotent’ family members, and ‘those without labour’ (Corrigan and Corrigan cited in Dean 1991 p. 31). The Reformation saw the break-down of the parish welfare system and in consequence new ways were needed to address the needs of those deserving poor who were thought worthy of social support. However, unlike ‘traditional almsgiving the new system categorically excluded the vagrant, and especially the able-bodied, beggar’ (Von Greyerz 1994, p. 39).

From the late 16th century, access to ‘selectively’ provided social support would depend on the applicant’s ability to comply with socially prescribed conditions of eligibility, based upon a judgement as to the extent to which a physical impairment prevented a person from undertaking work. In the coming centuries, extensive efforts were concentrated on the differentiation of people with disabilities into various administrative categories, each of which were concerned with the remaking of people with disabilities so that their behaviour might conform with that of the rest of the community (Kanner 1964; Rosen, Clark and Kivitz 1976). All these people, including the latter-day advocates of the various deafness movements, formed part of a general social movement of the 19th century that was concerned with the categorisation and administration of people with disabilities. The goal of such administration was to provide a form of governance which supported the moral and material economies of the day. More importantly still, these value systems laid down the terms under which the emancipation of people with disabilities could emerge for the first time in many centuries.

Before examining this key issue in greater detail, it is important to discuss the socio-historical contest (that is, consider the archaeology of the governmental arrangements) which emerged through concurrent social movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. These movements provided the overarching moral framework in which the administration of disability came to be situated. During these times key principles of social policy emerged. These included the value that:

• the care of people with disability was a public responsibility (Kanner 1964, p. 39)

• that this responsibility included the requirement to house and educate people with disability(Howe cited in Kanner 1964, p. 42)

• such education and training would enable people with disability to become productive members of society (Trent 1994, p. 35) and,

• the utilisation of people with disability in society would serve to prevent crime, poverty and dependency on the state (Trent 1994, p. 84).

These principles manifested themselves in the development of a wide variety of institutions in America, Europe and the United Kingdom. However, their development was greatly aided by the social construction of disability as being part of the broader moral menace that was taking shape across the world.

Constructing Disability as a Moral Menace

Never let a serious crisis go to waste (Mirowski 2013).

The 19th century commenced in the shadow of the guillotine, symbolic of the overthrow of the French aristocracy. Weeks (1986) observed that a moral panic drove the 19th century:

[T]he moral panic crystallises widespread fears and anxieties, and often deals with them not by seeking the real causes of the problems and conditions which they demonstrate but by displacing them on to ‘Folk Devils’ in an identified social group (often the ‘immoral’ or ‘degenerate’) (Weeks 1986, p. 14).

The values underpinning this panic were displaced and confused with other movements such as Social Darwinism (discussed below). Weeks suggests that the essence of the moral panic in Britain of the 1840s and onwards was based on the fear that the French Revolution resulted from a moral decline in the community of the day and that a similar fate awaited Britain unless this decline was halted. It is recalled that at this time Britain was the dominant world economy and as such (and in keeping with Marx), its social concerns were the concerns of many countries. Fears arising from the moral panic were expressed in a political movement to control sexual behaviour that attempted to shape people individually for the sake of the general well-being and prosperity of the whole population: ‘[T]he two are intimately connected because at the heart of both is the body and its potentialities’ (Weeks 1989, p. 34).

Social control then focused on the morality of the family. However, unlike aspects of the deafness debate that likened control of communication systems to repression, Weeks (1989) argues that [T]he thrust of these discursive creations is control: control not through denial or prohibition, but through ‘production’, through imposing a grid of definition on the possibilities of the body (Weeks 1989, p. 7).

Weeks concluded that a centralised morality resulted; that is, there was one form of acceptable moral behaviour, based as it was on the social values of the phono-centric upper classes. The use of the body subsequently became a moral concern not because of sex but also disability. Notably the presence of deafness in a family was also held to reflect upon the morality of the family:

[T]he moral to be drawn from the existence of the individual idiot is this – he, or his parents have so far violated the natural laws, so far marred the beautiful organism of the body, that it is an unfit instrument for the manifestations of the powers of the soul (Howe 1848 cited in Rosen, Clark and Kivitz 1976, p. 34).

Thus the negative social consequences of modernity were generalised into a folk devil – a moral menace that was constituted by people who were sick, poor, criminal or had a disability. The categorisation of specific marginal stereotypes and behaviours followed. Deaf people were the target of many of these stereotypes:

• ‘the deaf-mute is by nature fickle and improvident, subject to idleness, drunkenness, and debauchery, easily duped and readily corrupted’ (Itard cited in Lane 1993, p. 118).

•‘deaf and hearing impaired people are by many accounts like children. They have want of foresight and are ignorant. They easily allow themselves to be carried away. They need to be supported, retrained, directed; they need more than a benefactor, they need an instructor’ (Gerando cited in Lane 1984, p. 145).

• deaf people were constructed as an evil or pagan identity or as in some way mentally incompetent (Bender 1970; De Saint-Loup 1993; Edwards 1994; Kanner 1964; Lane 1984) and as such in need of help.

• the belief that people with disabilities that affected their social interaction could be left to their own devices unless they were ‘too dangerous to keep at home, or had no one to care for them, or who were socially disturbing’ (Rosen 1968, p. 139), and

• the deaf person depicted as urban savage (discussed above).

Taken together, a social construction emerged around people with disability which associated them with vagabonds, dependents, beggars and homeless people and as such they constituted urban savages who served as a threat to the viability of the emerging post-revolution...