Past News > Speaking about inclusion with Louise Bailey and Judith Snow

Disability: the next civil rights frontier?

Post date: May 11, 2005

Article reproduced from FSA Magazine Catalyst:Ideas for Change, Spring/Summer 2005 issue

Inclusion—even though it sounds like a dental procedure—is actually a lofty objective that would boost the public, economic and other “goods”. Catalyst sat down with two Family Service Association of Toronto experts, Judith Snow and Louise Bailey, to clue us in about inclusion.

Catalyst: As a society, where are we on the road to inclusion? Have we made significant progress?

Judith: I think we are going backwards. Before there were services in the 1950s, if a person was able to survive physically, they were either completely segregated in their family or included in some way. It was a very black and white situation, but lots of people were included. Now they just get labelled and segregated. Along came special education and people who otherwise got through the system were marginalized. Once you’ve been through the special education system, you’re likely to be segregated for the rest of your life.

C: Do you see the movement toward a more inclusive society as an evolutionary one or a revolutionary one?

J: Economically speaking, I think it’s going to be a fairly aggressive revolution. It really serves the economy to have lots of services—people get jobs in the service system. No matter what jobs and services it provides, people have a right to fully participate in society and particularly in the economy.

But in terms of social change, I think it’s more of an evolution. I think people are just beginning to realize that including people with so-called disabilities changes the relationship structure of our community for the better. The kind of relationships that it takes to support a person who has different abilities are good relationships to develop. It’s good for schools; it tends to increase academic achievement. It’s good in social situations as they tend to increase the level of social support that people give each other. So it is very much an evolution moving from individual to community.

Louise: I think a revolution started to happen with self-advocates and People First—when people stood up and laid claim to their rights. The revolution kind of petered out but you go into different phases of a revolution. It depends on the government of the time. For a while it seemed that we were making a lot of progress then it sort of stalled. We’re looking at how to get second- and third-generation leadership. A lot of people who came up through the movement are getting older and they want to do different things but until enough changes, there is no choice but to come together for a common cause.

C: What do you see as the key levers to achieving true inclusion?

L: I think that a lot of things are already in place. However we don’t have the will to make them happen. School boards are still able to apply regulations and laws as they choose. School is one of the great agents of socialization in our society, and if we are not present from junior kindergarten all the way up, we’re not in the game. We need to enforce the rights we have. And we need to bring creativity in terms of making educational methods more relevant—thinking about curriculum differently.

J: People that I’ve seen who put their energies into building circles of support and ensuring that their child is constantly included in peer activities have benefited the most in the long run. What happens is they end up having people who know that person as a contributor, who take on championing roles to get that person into work or whatever when the parents should no longer be the major advocates.

L: People start to think about independence for people with labels when they get into their 20s and 30s. Yet you start to foster age-appropriate independence for other children when they get off the bottle. There is a dignity of risk for a two year old, five year old, etc. If kids in your neighbourhood are playing out on the street, you need to get your kid playing out on the street. Then, chances are your son or daughter will have the feeling of competence, of belonging in the world. Discrimination and prejudice exist, however we have to think about raising labelled children the same way we do other children. Forget the label. People think “oh my gosh this is so complicated” when actually it is really very simple.

J: People develop the habit of being excluded when they are excluded as children. They then cease to do the things that assist them in being part of society. They learn to be helpless and it is a whole lot more difficult to get somebody outgoing again once that happens.

C: How powerful a role does language play?

J: I think language created disability . Before we had the professional language that turned different ability into a medical thing, you didn’t have a class of people who were labelled disabled. The language that creates disability focuses very much on individuals. But very interesting to me is that our culture is moving further away from individualism and really inquiring into community, relationships and what people in groups can do. The more that takes on, the more disability starts to disappear again. There is no disability in relationship. Relationships create capacity. Inclusion can happen in a flash as soon as people see that. The obstacle is that we really believe in disability right now.

L: Language is a very powerful thing. It has always been used to put people down. I don’t see people with disabilities as being “differently abled”. I think any one of us has a collection of things that we’re good at and a collection that we’re not so good at. Instead of struggling to find the right word to call ‘those people,’ I would rather they put the energy into making a system that is more adaptable. Let’s focus on individualizing and get away from all this categorizing.

C: Does a single disability movement serve the best interest of all who are labelled?

J: There is no genuine disability community. People who have disabilities belong to every culture and we don’t have that much in common with each other. The fact that society pushes us together doesn’t in any way increase our ability to be included. However inclusion comes to be, it’s not going to be through some segregated civil rights movement. That is the antithesis of inclusion.

L: I have a slightly different take on that. In terms of disability rights, people who are labelled don’t see eye-to-eye on what would make a level playing field, but overriding their difference is a common complaint about exclusion, poverty and denial of equal opportunity. There is no disabled community; people belong to their own community first, but even in those communities they encounter exclusion. I think that even though the civil rights movement of the 60s focused on the oppression of Black people, there were more than Black people involved in that movement. If that weren’t so, the civil rights movement would have stalled.

C: So many businesses talk about diversity just in terms of race. How can we turn the lightbulb on?

L: I think that if every kid was in a regular classroom, over time almost every child would know someone and have a friendship with a labelled student. I think being in the same classrooms, teams and dances would build the expectation that those same students would be working beside them. But when you grow up in separate worlds, it’s not so much that companies are determined to keep us out, it’s that we’re not even on their radar or it’s the “good works” radar – co-op and community placements. When you go to them to ask for a job with pay they say “oh no, we don’t hire people but we do co-op placements.” Does a hospital say, ‘We only have medical students, we never hire them as doctors”? I’m a believer in the law, in teeth. I think if companies were fined significantly for not creating job opportunities, hiring people and career pathing people, they would change.

C: What should the Ontario Government’s new plan for people with disabilities look like?

J: It is really important that government move away from single access to situations that are based on actual families and actual individuals. In other words, right now a person is required to use the services as they are designed, whether or not they actually need that service. You have to take it to get anything. We need to move away from that, it’s wasteful and inefficient.

L: I think if they were able to ensure that the Ministry of Education implemented its own policies around integration, then that would go a major distance. Also, income supports that function more as a guaranteed annual income rather than a poverty track. People who are on the Ontario Disability Support Program get trapped in that cycle where they’re dependent on income supports because they are encouraged to go on it at 16.

You start out on the assumption that you’re not going to achieve independence and you’re trapped before you know it. Does the welfare office come to the local high school to make a presentation to typical students so that they don’t feel like going to work or college and can go onto welfare right away out of school?

If you think “how would this look in the ‘real world’?” you will see that a lot of things that are done for people with disabilities look very goofy. I think a person should be encouraged and supported and there should be opportunities demanded so that they can go out and earn as much money as they can possibly earn. Go and achieve as much as you can achieve.

Louise Bailey, M.S.W., is Clinical Manager for FSA Toronto ’s Options program. Her razor-sharp analysis of issues of inclusion has left its mark on exclusionary public policy for over two decades.

Judith Snow, M.A., is a Community Resource Facilitator with Options. Her breakthrough thinking on debunking disability myths and two decades of teaching and activism have fuelled much progress in Ontario.

Patrick Worth, FSA Options Self-Advocates Network Facilitator, dedicated advocate for labelled people and co-founder of People First of Ontario, an advocacy group run by and for people who have been labeled intellectually disabled, passed away in November 2004.

 

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