Presentation on Dlitt. Thesis
Preface
I have been in the field of disability sector for more than 32 years, while interacting with people connected with disability programme it has been found that some people are very enthusiastic & some are not. The people who have shown positive inkling are favorable to any proposition being brought to their notice & they will try their best to facilitate in its execution. However, in some instances where people have shown interest at the face value it has been found to be on superficial level. In other instances it has also seen that at times people say something at your face to show their positive face of the condition and then talk totally differently. On the other side of the coin there are people not connected with persons with disability, take the issue of disability either indifferently or have some negative opinion about them. I have also found people showing sympathy towards disability issue but in such cases they are either in knowledge of disability field due to some body in their immediate family or in close relation. I was wondering why in spite of such a large population of persons with disability the attitude of people towards them is not so positive. Is their thinking process has something to do with their deep buried notion about the persons with disability or it is a lack of awareness of the potential of such persons?
Generally, in lay terms people talk about the disability that they are poor people who are not capable of doing any thing, accordingly give them something in charity, this is the effect of religion in Hinduism as I understand from my experience of visiting holy places.
The sector of disability to work has been very challenging, from the day of my joining this field in the year 1975 as an apprentice engineer to design products for the persons with loco-motor disability without having much experience in the field. The only thing available was to see around people on wheelchair, persons wearing artificial limbs and persons not having both hand dissected in front and people with blindness. The attitude of people was sympathetic because most of them were from army. However behind the scene some negative reaction does take place. Outside the factory the locals had different title for persons working in this factory. Overall there were mixed reactions. However after declaration by the United Nation, 1981 the Year for Persons with Disability as a slogan did change the scenario, Government started working in this direction. National defencve fund was released by the then prime minister late Smt. Indira Gandhi. Luckily I had a chance to meet her in the first exhibition-cum-workshop organized by the then Ministry of Social Welfare at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, and fitting artificial hand to individuals in the exhibition and showing to then prime minister who has gone out of way by allocating such huge funds for this social cause,. Now I can understand that it was not a show of feeling but something from the heart. The following quote says all about her view towards persons with disability.
“Disability causes anguish to those affected and to their families. With assistance and training, the disabled can become useful citizens and lead fulfilling lives.” Indira Gandhi
Changing the perception towards the persons with disability has been a challenging assignment throughout my service.
These issues of feeling towards disability sector were pinching me and one day while discussing with late Mr. Lal Advani, who has been acclaimed as Bhisham Pitamah of Disability Sector, instrumental in initiating a cell in Ministry of Education & subsequently a department in Ministry of Welfare, encouraged me to take up this topic as a thesis. Therefore I thought why not study this phenomenon of consciousness among different segments of the society, encompassing religion, culture, occupation and education to find out the reactions, may be positive or negative which will subsequently help in making a movement of sort.
The rationale of this thesis “Human consciousness & stereo-typed reaction to disability” is based on my experience in the field of disability sector for 35 years. The people have been found to have negative attitude towards persons with disability in spite of their good quality.
It is common experience to find that in various countries cultures and civilizations attitude towards disability are inclined to be negative. In developed societies compassion for disability has been organised in the shape of social security systems. Social security fulfills physical needs of people with disability but not satisfy their aspiration professionally or psychologically. This phenomenon does not appear to have been studied. Some influence of development of science and technology as well as religion, which encourages compassion, appears to be visible in ostensible behaviour. However, the depth of the phenomenon is so great that it needs to be studied in detail in order to ascertain why disability arouses in every human being negative feelings. The problem is of utmost importance and demands immediate attention.
Why is this so? The factors need to be studied. The apparent reasons seem to be that human consciousness is constantly seeking security. Any deviation may be perceived as a threat. Disability is the marked negative deviation, which seeks certain essential security of the perceiver. Therefore, all cultures and civilizations have at one time or another rejected people with disabilities.
Negative feelings towards disability influence the people’s potential for growth and development. This causes a significant loss in national and international productivity and utilization of latent talent of people with disability.
People with disability have shown that they can contribute significantly to economic, cultural and scientific development. From Homer to Helen Keller and beyond, people with different disabilities convincingly demonstrated their social, cultural, political and scientific prowess. History abounds in examples of people with disability becoming great politicians, historians, scientists, engineers, agriculturists and the like.
Therefore, in order to ensure that the latent potential in people with disability throughout the world is drawn out, it is necessary to study the reasons for such wide spread negative feelings against disability. It seems that transformation in attitudes brings about changes in services provided to the people with disability and peoples attitude and behaviour towards them.
Objectives
To study why negative feeling towards disability prevails in all cultures, religions and civilization.
To study why more or less same stereo type attitudes prevail across the cultures and civilizations.
To study as to what extent conditioned consciousness is responsible for consistency in negative attitude.
To study whether effectiveness of implementation programmes for the rehabilitation of people with disability improves the changes in attitude.
To devise appropriate strategies for development, enhancement and empowerment of people with disability in India.
Consciousness is composed of two major factors. The interval between two thoughts is state of awareness, which many philosophers have described as immortal. This is believed to be the energy, which created and manages the universe. This has described as “Brahman”. In the Vedic period the infinite supposed to reside in the common man. This concept has been adopted by the researcher in this present study.
This part of consciousness cannot be conditioned. It has no attitude nor is it involved in behaviour. Attitude and behaviour are determined by the conditioned part of the consciousness. How does human conditioning take place? Every experience Bentham, a British Philosopher wrote about 250 years ago that man lives under an empire of pleasure and pain. This is because every experience is recorded in our memory which threw up negative or opposite feeling recorded on an earlier action. This experience is not only individual but collective. Disability may be seen as threat because since the earlier years of our history, people with disability were regarded as of little value to society and described as ‘unspeakable pests.
The deepest roots of attitudes and behaviour lie in the distant past. The reasons for negative attitude towards disability have, therefore, to be sought in our remote past and understood through understanding how man has continually sought security and how disability may have actually been perceived as threat.
Methodology
An important element in consciousness is memory--- both retention and recall. Memory can be species specific, national, local, familial or individual. Memory is a store house of conditioning. This is clear from Pavlov’s experiment on classical conditioning. This study will be confined to the study of how conditioning is transmitted from generation to generation and how it permeates human attitude towards disability.
The investigator proposed to study the reasons why human consciousness reacts negatively to some disability, why they believe that people with disabilities have no significance in spite of the fact that many great persons have been people with disabilities.
Variable under study
General
Consistency of negative attitude towards disability across cultures, religions and civilizations.
The extent to which progress in science and technology and social development influence attitudes and behaviour towards people with disability.
Specific
To study consciousness about disabled child.
To study consciousness about parent perception.
To study consciousness about caring in action.
To study Human Consciousness and Stereo typed reaction to Disability in general.
On the basis of the results obtained after administering rating scale questionnaire it is expected and hoped that
Significant differences will be found in attitudes towards disability in various culture and civilizations, religious groups, disability administrators and planners, heads of NGOs running disability institutions and other experts.
No significant difference shall be found in countries where science and technology has been developed in full and those where it has not been developed by scanning related literature on the subject.
Expected Outcome
This study is likely to yield information on the deepest causes and the process of formation of negative attitudes towards disability across various cultures and civilizations. This information will help in developing mechanism for eliminating at least some of the more disturbing attitudes towards disability. The study will have potential for developing ways of countering negative attitudes and providing relief to some part of the population of 600 million people in the world, which has significant disability.
CHAPTER-I
Consciousness and Disability
(From Darkness unto Light)
The disability existed on the earth ever since the appearance of the living beings on this planet. People have viewed disability differently in different places and at different times. Their views/attitudes towards disability have been the result of their understanding of the strengths and limitations of various disabilities. for example, in the era of Greek and Roman civilizations the main occupation of the people was fighting. Those who were considered unfit to become soldiers were regarded as useless and hence were killed. An attempt in this chapter is made to understand the role of consciousness in shaping the attitudes towards the disabilities.
Disability is by no means synonymous of personal misery. The disabled can be, and very frequently are, just as happy and productive as their non-disabled counterparts
With respect to attitudes toward disability in general and blindness in particular, and the impact of the handicap on the behavior of the individual, those who work with them are at times inclined to take strong opposing views. Often, such positions are more a matter of tendentious rhetoric or philosophical speculation than of sound scientific hypothesis or empirical fact. The use of Freudian and Jungian concepts are relevant and important in studying the relationship between the disability and the consciousness insofar as symbolic factors play a critical role in the formation of attitudes
Disability as a problem is presented to people through interaction, with the social and physical environment, and through the social production of knowledge.
Disabled people typically treated as expressions of the problem of involuntary deviance, subject to processes of stigmatization who employ a variety of techniques and technologies in order to manage, cope with, or hide the problems that impaired senses, minds and/or bodies are assumed to generate (Davis, 1961).
Diane E Taub et all (2004), describes Women with Disability either down play or claim their disability status depending on the situation as historically, depictions of persons with physical disabilities frequently reflect helplessness, isolation, neediness, and childlike qualities (Albrecht 1992; Asch and Fine 1988; Li and Moore, 1998). Further, reactions from able-bodied persons toward individuals with physical disabilities reveal feelings of resentment and pity (Berry and Jones, 1991; Fichten et al., 1989). As a stigmatized group, individuals with physical disabilities are frequently restricted from opportunities and resources within the dominant culture. Hindering the integration of students with disability, although both men and women with physical disabilities experience prejudice and discrimination, women with physical disabilities encounter more interpersonal barriers than do their male counterparts (Holcomb, 1990;Wendell, 1997).
.Although both men and women with physical disabilities experience prejudice and discrimination, women with physical disabilities encounter more interpersonal barriers than do their male counterparts (Holcomb, 1990; Wendell, 1997).
In a society, it does not matter how one defines disability because the qualities ascribed to the status will always appear negative in comparison with those associated with 'able-bodied being'. Normal/abnormal or valid/invalid! It does not matter which particular binary one invokes, the latter term will be the negative to its partner's positive. No matter how much we go on about a common humanity, in everyday life the negative ontology of disability and the particularities of prejudice and oppression tend to reassert themselves. The body is both limit and potential (Turner, 1992). The disabled body has been regarded as 'limit without possibility' (Titchkosky, 2005) and the non-disabled body, at least in its masculine, normative form, tends to be represented as invulnerable (Shildrick, 2002).
Disability studies are a field of study whose time has come. People with disabilities have been isolated, incarcerated, observed, written about, operated on, instructed, implanted, regulated, treated, institutionalized, and controlled to a degree probably unequal to that experienced by any other minority group. As the population of the disabled is growing day by day due to many factors and also fifteen percent of the population of people with disabilities make up the large physical minority within the United States –One would never know this to be the case by looking at the literature on minorities and discrimination.
The United Nations (1996) says that “More than half a billion persons are disabled as a result of mental, physical or sensory impairment and no matter, which part of the world they are in, their lives are often limited by physical or social barriers”. The United Nation (1996) calls the state and fate of disabled persons world wide a “silent crisis.” These numerical depictions of disability are startling, just as startling is the obvious absence of disability as a major social issue within the discipline of sociology.
In India the Census 2001 and NSSO 2002 figures for persons with disabilities are 2.13 and 1.8%, respectively but these figures could be an underestimation. According to the United Nations, the proportion of disabled people among the total population in the Asia-Pacific region varies from 0.7% (Cook Islands) to 20% (Australia and New Zealand). In our immediate neighborhoods, Bangladesh reports 5.6%; China 6.3%, whereas Sri Lanka reports 7%. In India, the definition of disability used in the Census is very different from that in the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995. The Planning Commission in ther XIth Plan document has indicated about this group which has suffered social and economic handicaps and steps are needed to prevent social discrimination against them. Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees that no person will be denied equality before the law. The State is directed to provide relief and help to the disabled and the unemployable, vide Entry 9 in List II of the Seventh Schedule.
Although from the Ninth Plan there was a slight shift from a welfare-based approach for the disabled to a rights-based approach the pace of implementation was very slow which has been highlighted even in the Tenth Plan document which took serious note of the slow pace of implementation of the enabling legislations and advocated a multi-sectoral and multi-collaborative approach to make the provisions of the Persons with Disabilities Act more effective. Missing of the positive action shows the approach towards this sector, it may be lack of attitude/feeling towards disability by the people involved in implementation of various legislative measures. In the light of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD) which was ratified by India in October 2007. In the Eleventh Plan, a firm four-pronged approach has been made the focus point as to: (i) delineate clear-cut responsibilities between the concerned ministries/departments; (ii) concerned ministries/departments to formulate detailed rules and guidelines within six months of approval of the Eleventh Plan; (iii) ensure that each concerned ministry/department shall reserve not less than 3% of their annual outlay for the benefit of disabled persons as enjoined in the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995; (iv) set up monitoring mechanisms at various levels and develop a review system so that its progress can be monitored on a regular and continuing basis.