No one wants to be seen as a charity case
Intellectually disabled people want the right to make at least some choices for themselves, says Brendan O'Connor
I heard a bunch of adults with intellectual disabilities talk recently. At times it felt like being at a militant Red Wedge meeting during Thatcher's Britain.
These people were articulate and angry. And they didn't want your charity. Their hands were not out; their fists were raised. They wanted their rights. They wanted the right to do what they wanted to do, not what their families or the staff at their services wanted them to do.
They wanted the right to have relationships, to have sex in these relationships, and indeed they wanted the right to have sex outside of relationships if they so desired. They wanted the same thing as all of us. The right to make some of the tens of thousands of little choices that we all take for granted every day.
But we don't give them those rights. Instead, overwhelmingly, we give these adults charity, in a God-help-us kind of way. We give them sympathy and good intentions. We give them a bit of what we have left over, out of the goodness of our hearts. Anything they get is at our pleasure. We give money to large institutions and bureaucracies to look after some of them. Many of these institutions then tell those people how to live, where to live, who to live with, what time they eat their dinner, what leisure activities they will enjoy and when. It is unimaginable that we would treat any other citizen of this country like this.
And we mostly aren't even aware that we are doing these people an injustice. We think we are great altogether for looking after them and for giving our few bob to the charities. We are so prejudiced against them we think they should be grateful that we give them anything. It never strikes us that they might want what you and I want, the illusion of freedom, the right to be a person, to think for themselves and decide what they want to do and how they want to live, within reason.
I think a healthy start in breaking down prejudices against people with intellectual disabilities would be to eliminate the word 'charity' from the lexicon. It's a horrible word to enforce on anyone. Who wants charity? Who wants to be a charity case? Who wants to live only at the whim of other people?
Most so-called charities are in fact organisations that are engaged in giving people -- whether they be poor, sick, or disabled -- the basic human rights that the rest of us take for granted, but that we don't think people with intellectual disabilities require -- as if they are somehow less than people.
If someone loses their job, we give them the dole. They have a right to it. They are not reliant on charity or the good deeds of others. They feel beholden to no one and they don't feel like a charity case.
As I listened to those adults that day, talk about the things they aren't allowed to do, it struck me that if you substituted the word 'woman' for 'disabled' and if it was 50 or 100 years ago we would have been appalled at a society that would deny rights to people in this way.
No doubt people will look back on 2013 in 50 and 100 years' time and they will be appalled at our Victorian attitudes to people with intellectual disabilities.
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