98 Benefits Number 43 • Volume 13 • Issue 2 Disability: rights, work and security Marilyn Howard Disability is a complex and contested issue, often with tensions between policy approaches of ‘benefits’ and ‘rights’, that is, benefits as compensation for exclusion rather than civil rights to enable inclusion (Daniel, 1998). These intersect with different models of disability (medical, social and transactional: Howard, 2003). Traditionally, the medical model has been the ‘moral basis’ for benefits (SSAC, 1997), although increasingly the social model is accepted
ELEVEN Disability: prospects for social inclusion Carol Thomas Introduction Disability was a topic of interest to Peter Townsend from the earliest days in his academic and policy-oriented career. From the 1960s onwards he recognised that disability was always present somewhere in the mix that sculpted poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage in communities – especially among old people and in families with disabled children. His long-standing interest in social conditions, social relationships and the unequal distribution of resources meant that social
245 SEVENTEEN Distress and disability: not you, not me, but us? Peter Beresford Introduction The relationship between distress and disability has continued to be a vexed and controversial one at all levels. This was helpfully illustrated by the Lancaster University seminar and the follow-up report, which led to this publication.1 These tensions are also embodied in their different conceptualisations, internal and external definitions, cultures and movements. For some time it has even seemed that there might be an impasse in relationships between distress
103 The life course FIVE The life course: dimensions of change in parenting and disability Introduction This chapter examines the importance of change in the experiences of disabled parents and their families. This involves focusing on hopes and experiences of becoming and being parents, within a life-course perspective. By this we mean exploring choices and expectations around parenting, from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. Parenting is often perceived as a ‘normal’ feature of independent adult life. And yet attitudes towards disabled
55 THREE living conditions among people with disabilities in developing countries Arne H. Eide, Mitch E. Loeb, Sekai Nhiwatiwa, Alister Munthali, Thabale J. Ngulube and Gert van Rooy introduction Living conditions and poverty are two common quantifiers or parameters of socioeconomic status and both have evolved from rather narrow economic and material concepts to encompass broader and more complex understandings. According to Heiberg and Øvensen (1993), studies on living conditions have evolved to include individuals’ capabilities and how they utilise their
13 ONE Unreasonable adjustments? Applying disability policy to madness and distress Helen Spandler and Jill Anderson The rights of disabled people are now enshrined in law and reflected in policy at national and international levels. As a result, in many countries disabled people can access financial and social care support, through mechanisms like independent living payments. They are also entitled to reasonable adjustments or accommodations, to facilitate their access to education, employment and goods and services. Although the disabled people
75 FIVE Legislating for equality: evaluating the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 Nigel Meager and Jennifer Hurstfield Introduction This chapter presents selected findings from some recent studies of the workings of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (see Hurstfield et al, 2004). In particular, it focuses on the third of a series of studies, which looked at the Act’s implementation through in-depth case studies of participants in cases and potential cases1, although we also incorporate some findings from the first two studies (Leverton, 2002; Meager et al
315 TWENTY TWO ‘Work’ is a four-letter word: disability, work and welfare Colin Barnes and Alan Roulstone Introduction This chapter suggests that to overcome the problem of disabled people’s ongoing disadvantage in mainstream employment and, therefore, society, a radical alternative strategy is required that poses a direct challenge to orthodox thinking on work, and associated policies that centre almost exclusively on disabled workers. Building on longstanding analyses from within the disability studies literature, it is argued that an holistic approach is
57 FOUR Unsettling impairment: mental health and the social model of disability William J Penson Introduction This chapter advances an account of the social model of disability (SMD) that questions impairment and the application of the model in the areas of mental health and distress. It does so by critically examining the relationship between impairment and the social, which, in a simplistic application of the social model, is often taken as unproblematic. The concerns voiced here cannot be resolved within the chapter, nor without the involvement of a
Much of the conceptual architecture of the chapter on physical disability ( Chapter 6 ) is relevant to this chapter on intellectual disabilities: intersectional subjectivities; the impairment/disability dichotomy; the social construction of disability; the heteronormative and genito-centric conception of sexual intimacy; the radicalism of crip/queer theorising; and the necessity of critical deconstructions of normative and normalising discourses that produce desexualising impacts upon disabled people. Similarly, there are important issues to explore at policy
