Disability is defined by culture. The tendency to categorise all people with different impairments as ‘disabled’ is a fairly recent phenomenon emanating from Western societies. Many traditional societies do not have an exact equivalent in their own language for the word ‘disabled’, and they can seldom match the three-tier concepts in English of ‘impairment’, ‘handicap’ and ‘disability’ espoused by WHO and disability theorists; they usually do however have words for specific impairments such as ‘deaf’, ‘blind’, ‘lame’, and so on. Furthermore what is counted as a ‘disability’ (ie. that which prevents someone from fulfilling the roles normally expected of them, especially as regards marriage), differs from one culture to another. Among the Tuareg in Mali, for example, freckles and small buttocks are counted as a serious impediment to marriage and could therefore be considered a disability. In other words, the way societies think about disabled people is determined by a variety of cultural variables, including the nature of the impairment. It is therefore essential for planners of community disability programmes to know and understand how different impairments are viewed in the target community in order to plan effective interventions, especially since many disability programmes place changing attitudes among their main objectives.
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The individual medical model of disability says that the disabled person must try to overcome their disability by some means or other in order to join in with the mainstream. This implies that the disabled person is intrinsically of less value because of their disability. This has devastating implications for the disabled person’s ability to grow and develop. It is very insidious, and is present in just about every encounter between a disabled person and other people, especially professionals. In the former communist countries, as an extreme but at least frank example, anybody working with disabled persons is called a ‘defectologist’. Disabled people are regarded as defective in the medical model.
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In ‘Disability and Society: Emerging Issues and Insights’ Len Barton writes: ‘Being disabled involves experiencing discrimination, vulnerability and abusive assaults upon your self-identity and self-esteem.’ Is this always the case? Does the definition of disability hinge on the fact that it provokes negative reactions from others? Is it possible to have disability without social discrimination, or does it then cease to be disability? Can we honestly say that a soldier who has lost a leg in war, who is regarded as a hero and who suffers no social discrimination, is not disabled, while a Tuareg man prevented from marrying by the fact that he has freckles or small buttocks is disabled? It is precisely this problem of definition that creates the apparently insuperable difficulty of assessing the number of disabled people in the world.
(από το Disability and Culture)
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The individual medical model of disability says that the disabled person must try to overcome their disability by some means or other in order to join in with the mainstream. This implies that the disabled person is intrinsically of less value because of their disability. This has devastating implications for the disabled person’s ability to grow and develop. It is very insidious, and is present in just about every encounter between a disabled person and other people, especially professionals. In the former communist countries, as an extreme but at least frank example, anybody working with disabled persons is called a ‘defectologist’. Disabled people are regarded as defective in the medical model.
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In ‘Disability and Society: Emerging Issues and Insights’ Len Barton writes: ‘Being disabled involves experiencing discrimination, vulnerability and abusive assaults upon your self-identity and self-esteem.’ Is this always the case? Does the definition of disability hinge on the fact that it provokes negative reactions from others? Is it possible to have disability without social discrimination, or does it then cease to be disability? Can we honestly say that a soldier who has lost a leg in war, who is regarded as a hero and who suffers no social discrimination, is not disabled, while a Tuareg man prevented from marrying by the fact that he has freckles or small buttocks is disabled? It is precisely this problem of definition that creates the apparently insuperable difficulty of assessing the number of disabled people in the world.
(από το Disability and Culture)
