SubscribeRichard Rieser, Director, Disability Equality in Education (DEE) has written the article at Inclusion Week entitled The Social Model of Disability. I think some of the ideas contained in it will gain some new press coverage as one of his travel companions textmailed me a moment ago with Twitter-like reflexes:
" Scott - Watch out for a press release. A member of Equality 2025 was taken off a plane and refused a flight by air france from london to belfast..."
Reiser begins his article with a review of the damage caused by the medical model and the absolution it promises to those who then fail to perceive any social responsibility to adopt Universal Design:
The 'medical model' of disability sees the disabled person as the problem.
We are to be adapted to fit into the world as it is. If this is not possible, then we are shut away in some specialised institution or isolated at home, where only our most basic needs are met. The emphasis is on dependence, backed up by the stereotypes of disability that call forth pity, fear and patronising attitudes.
Usually the focus is on the impairment rather than the needs of the person. The power to change us seems to lie within the medical and associated professions, with their talk of cures, normalisation and science. Often our lives are handed over to them.
Other people's assessments of us, usually non-disabled professionals, are used to determine where we go to school, what support we get and what type of education; where we live; whether or not we can work and what type of work we can do and indeed whether or not we are born at all, or are even allowed to procreate. Similar control is exercised over us by the design of the built environment presenting us with many barriers, thereby making it difficult or impossible for our needs to be met and curtailing our life chances. Whether in work, school, leisure and entertainment facilities, transport, training and higher education, housing or in personal, family and social life, it is practices and attitudes that disable us.
Read on at:
http://inclusion.uwe.ac.uk/inclusionweek/articles/socmod.htm
And watch for the press release. The Office of Her Majesty's Government Office for Disability Issues describes Equality 2025 as:
Equality 2025 is a big step forward towards the government meeting its commitment to implement the recommendations in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit report ‘Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People’.Equality 2025 will carry out the promise to disabled people that they will have a direct voice into government to help us design polices and services that they really want.
Air France, are you creating the sort of "voice in government" that serves investors? Perhaps this pattern of treatment is part of a neatly conceived plan to "adjust shareholder value downward" on the order of the incident with passenger Adele Price:
Adele Price, 42, a British citizen, sued the airline in Manhattan federal court seeking unspecified damages.Price, who was born without limbs because her mother took the drug thalidomide during pregnancy, said in the suit she is able to manipulate a wheelchair and has traveled by air many times.
The suit states that she had bought a ticket in 2000 for travel between Manchester, England and New York. After Price had checked her luggage, she alleged that she was stopped by an Air France agent who told her that "a head, one bottom and a torso cannot possibly fly on its own."
http://www.rollingrains.com/archives/000156.html
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