The real disability challenge

This flurry of activity has been pre-empted by the Minister and Education and the Teachers Union, both signalling their intention to work on the need to obtain facilities and teacher training for special schools.

The focus is special education.

This at a time when all over the world the emphasis is on integrated education, that is, ensuring that people with disabilities and in particular children with disabilities are placed in mainstream education and provided with the necessary supports.

The problem surfaces in the report of the joint select committee on human rights, equality and diversity on significant issues facing people with disabilities in the year 2016. Whether this committee realises it or not, the main challenge faced by people with disabilities in terms of access to services and employment is lack of awareness and sensitisation of the general public. Yet this is 2016.

How can any State expect its citizens to appreciate and accept those who are different if those who fall outside the norm are segregated literally from childhood? Of course another reason for the flurry of interest in disability matters is Trinidad and Tobago’s fast approaching deadline for submitting its first report on progress made since signing the UN convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Reporting to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is mandatory for the State. But NGOs are strongly encouraged to submit shadow reports. And this shadow reporting is meant to fill in the gaps or indeed correct State reporting.

Since that momentous occasion when Trinidad and Tobago signed the convention in 2015, there has been a great deal of dialogue, which is of course a vital part of the process.

There have been several information sessions, including workshops by the Equal Opportunity Commission.

Thus far though there has been very little action. How is this possible after so much talk and so much discussion and information and communication by State and NGOs? This past week the US ambassador to TT met with disability advocates.

Ambassador John L Estrada, together with UN Resident Coordinator Richard Blewitt, hosted a roundtable session to discuss issues surrounding legislative reform and inter-organisation cooperation.

This week the Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC), in collaboration with the National Insurance Board, hosts a seminar on equitable allocation of resources to vulnerable groups. Soon the various activist groups under the umbrella of the Consortium of Disability Organisations will begin serious analysis as they prepare a shadow report to the UN. But what exactly have we achieved in the past 15 months since this convention was signed? There is an upcoming conference at UWI hosted by the School of Education on “Differentiated Education”, and even a forthcoming journal looking specifically at the needs of people with disabilities.

How is it then that our citizens still have such limited awareness of both the rights and the potential of people with disabilities? Why is it that as a society we still see people with disabilities as charity cases and do not understand that people with disabilities may be different, but they need to be part of our society in real and meaningful ways.

The fact is that there are still individuals in our nation who feel ashamed and embarrassed by people with intellectual disabilities and by disability in general. But that is what the whole question of sensitisation entails: that we actually see people with disabilities as normal and as ordinary people with the needs and desires that we attribute to ourselves and with equal rights as citizens.

But our focus on academic achievement leaves little room for this. In fact very little has changed in the attitude of most of our citizens.

Over the coming months there will be many gestures made to special education. Many will jump on the bandwagon of a now topical issue, disability. But policy changes to bring about the rights of people with disabilities to enter into full-time mainstream education will not be forthcoming.

The EOC will talk about changing the Equal Opportunity Act, but vested interests bogged down by images of what they perceive a person with disability to be and the many stereotypes associated with disability, will prevent any real access to meaningful, as opposed to mindless, employment. If I appear negative it is because I cannot see any real change in people. This is at times apparent even at gatherings of good-minded individuals who still turn to the carer or the companion to ask a question, rather than ask the person with a disability.

She remains invisible and silent.

And it is likely that I will not see any change until we actually make our children part of our society from primary school through secondary school, and thus start the process of integration. This will not happen until people with disabilities and carers take hold of their power to enact change and begin demanding their rights, as has happened in the UK, in Ireland and in the US. It is up to activists and people with disabilities to give voice to their concerns and to insist that c h a n g e m u s t c o m e and that when it does, it is meaningful.