Structural Learning Week 7 - Raising Awareness of the View of Disabilities Around the World

Raising Awareness of the View of Disabilities Around the World By Vicky Quaife:

Every week a member of our team has to educate the other members of the team on a developmental issue. It’s now week 7 and we’ve had such a variety of topics and I have learnt so much through them all. This week was my week to do my ‘structural learning’ and my topic of choice is disabilities.

Definition:

When you hear the world ‘disability’ many things may come to mind, but if you are unsure of this word here is a definition to help you out:

‘A disability can be physical (such as paralysis, loss of limb, deafness), mental (such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder) or intellectual (such as a learning disability). Some people are born disabled; others become disabled as a result of an accident or disease. Disabilities range from moderate to significant and can be temporary or permanent. With the help of a supportive community, education and vocational opportunities, disabled persons can make progress.’

Shocking Statistics:

Did you know that 1 BILLION people around the world (that’s roughly 15% of the population) are disabled? (UN)- That’s 1 in every 7 persons, or in some countries it’s as high as 1 in every 5!

And that within those 1 billion people, 80% of them live in developing countries!

20% of the world’s poorest people are disabled, and tend to be regarded in their own communities as the most disadvantaged.

1 in every 10 children has to cope with a disability around the world.

And within those children only 2-3% attends school! Imagine that- 97-98% of disabled children stay at home doing nothing every single day, never having the opportunity to learn, engage with other children, make friends. Not attending school and never learning basic skills is going to seriously impact your life as you grow older, having no education will probably mean that they will never be able to get a job.

Mortality for children with disabilities may be as high as 80 per cent in countries where under-five mortality as a whole has decreased below 20 per cent, says the United Kingdom's Department for International Development.

Also please bear in mind that these statistics are widely underestimated as in many communities people with a disability are shunned, isolated or stigmatized against, so are often left out of census reports, or families hide their children away.

It is also important to remember that these issues are not only occurring in developing countries. In the UK 75% of companies of the FTSE 100 Index on the London Stock Exchange do not meet basic levels of web accessibility, thus missing out on more than $147 million in revenue.

Only 45 countries in the world have some sort of anti-discrimination and other disability-specific-laws.

These two videos sum up a little bit about what persons with a disability rights are and how they can and should be able to exercise them! 

If you would like to see where I found my statistics then please have a look at these two websites.

http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=18

http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/diswpa04.htm

My Passion:

I first started to become passionate about the rights and welfare of people with a disability when I started placements at university. I studied Occupational Therapy and during my placements I would be working with people who had physical disabilities, mental health problems and long term illnesses that resulted in some sort of disablement for that person. During my final placement I was working with adults who had a learning disability; through these placements I was able to see first-hand how important therapies such as occupational therapy, physiotherapy, and speech and language therapy can really dramatically change and enhance people’s lives.

This video is just a little cheesy summary of occupational therapy just so you all know, and it gives a few nice examples of how it can change peoples’ lives. 

Impacts:

For many children, the presence of an impairment leads to rejection or isolation from experiences that are part of normal development. This situation may be exacerbated by faulty family and community attitudes and behaviour during the critical years when children's personalities and self-images are developing.

However existing knowledge and skills could prevent the onset of many impairments and disabilities, could assist affected people in overcoming or minimizing their disabilities, and could enable nations to remove barriers which exclude disabled persons from everyday life. As I believe that actually people who have certain disabilities wouldn’t necessarily have to live a different life if it wasn’t for the environment and society creating barriers for them. If all our roads and streets were perfectly smooth a blind man could easily adapt to his environment and would be able to live a relatively normal and fulfilling life.

The issue is that in many countries, resources are not sufficient to detect and prevent disabilities and cannot meet the need for rehabilitation and supportive services of the disabled population. This is where we come in. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) are a set of 8 goals created by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) which set out to:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

These goals are great and are really inspirational and are planned to be completed by 2015. However what’s missing?

15% of the population is missing. Although disabled people count for around 10-15% of the world’s population the MDGs still do not include persons with a disability.

The “END EXCLUSION – Let’s Enable the Millennium Development Goals” project sets out to change attitudes so that persons with disabilities are not denied their human rights because of discrimination. They especially want to make sure that persons with disabilities are included in programmes designed to reduce poverty, which is often not the case.

This video explains about the ‘Say Yes’ to inclusion campaign, which is backed by the European Union.