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six Disability Introduction Social citizenship rights have never been fully extended to disabled people and, as a result of this, disabled people are over-represented among the unemployed and experience higher rates of poverty and in general do not enjoy a standard of living that is comparable with current social expectations. Over time there has been an uneasy relationship between healthcare professionals and disabled people. Professional social work has operated from a framework that encourages paternalism and dependency as part of an individualised
119 8Disability Practice scenario kate is a 31-year-old woman with a degenerative condition that necessitates using a wheelchair. She lives in the family home with her mother and brother in a rural area. Her mother works part-time as a cleaner and her brother stacks shelves in the nearby supermarket. Her benefits bring her a greater income than either her mother or brother earn and she feels guilty about this. the family have no transport. She has recently come out to her social worker as lesbian but she does not want her family to know. Her condition
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This book is about being disabled and being poor and the social, cultural and political processes that link these two aspects of living. Environmental barriers, limited access to services and discriminatory attitudes and practice are among key elements that drive disabled people into poverty and keep them there. 'Disability and poverty' explores the lived realities of people with disabilities from across the developing world and examines how the coping strategies of individuals and families emerge in different contexts.
131 SIx Equality, identity and disability introduction Consistent with social work codes of ethics and mainstream social policy objectives, the disability rights movement (DRM) promotes the universal values of equal rights and individual autonomy, drawing heavily on Kantian philosophy. However, I argue here that an anti-universalised Nietzschean perspective is also promoted via specific interpretations of the social model of disability, explored in Chapter Five, that challenge the political orthodoxy of rights-based social movements and the aspirations of
153 EIGHT Disability and barriers in Kenya Lisbet Grut, Joyce Olenja and Benedicte Ingstad People with impairments encounter many barriers in their daily life. In this chapter we describe the variety of barriers and see how the collected sum of many barriers influence access to what is considered essential and indispensable for all humans: healthcare services and education. We illuminate some of the mechanisms that create and maintain a difficult life in a resource-poor context by describing the particular challenges people living in poverty with
107 FIVE Egalitarianism, disability and monistic ideals introduction In this chapter, I argue that the medical and social models of disability, while establishing clearly located poles for understanding competing interpretations of disablement, allow for a range of interpretations between these two extremes. In this light, the chapter outlines these various interpretations, to help clarify the different types of claim made by the disability rights movement (DRM) as related to the equality and diversity debate explored in previous chapters. Briefly put, the
1 INTRODUCTION Disability and poverty: a global challenge Benedicte Ingstad and Arne H. Eide Disability and poverty This book is about being disabled and being poor and the social, cultural and political processes that link these two aspects of living in what has been characterised as a ‘vicious circle’ (Yeo and Moore, 2003). It is also about the strengths that people show when living with disability and being poor: how they try to overcome their problems and make the best out of what little they have. It is a book about those who we will call ‘the heroes
171 NINE Disability and social suffering in Zimbabwe Jennifer Muderedzi and Benedicte Ingstad poverty and politics Zimbabwe is a land-locked country in southern Africa. It shares borders with South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique. It has a population of 13 million people, 348,861 of whom are people with disabilities (CSO, 2004). Half of the people with disabilities are children (Government of Zimbabwe, 2004). Zimbabwe is mostly a rural country and there is a higher poverty incidence in rural areas (63%) than in urban areas (53%). Most rural
117 8 Meta-narratives of disability1 Authored with Mary-Dan Johnston In his book of the same title, Marshall Gregory discusses how we are shaped by stories. For Gregory, what is at stake in the stories that we hear is the way stories construct the world, the way stories invite responses and the way that stories exert shaping pressure, because ‘both the “knowledge” offered by stories and our seldom denied responses constitute kinds of practice, modes of clarification and sets of habits for living that, once configured and repeatedly reinforced, accompany us
121 TEN Beliefs about disability Summary The introduction of new benefits in the 1970s reflected a shift in social attitudes to disabled people and recognition that society had a role in responding to their financial needs. Policy since then has, with rare exceptions, been a response to fears that the changed attitudes and benefit provisions may have created excessive, or indeed illicit, demand for benefits. Survey evidence on the extent of disability has proved influential, increasing the climate for policy reform, although the definition and measurement of
