07786258404 erica@livebe.net

Come on, admit it – have you ever thought that you didn’t get that job, promotion, prize, or bonus because you were not part of the in-crowd?  It’s the very definition of discrimination: to define a group by some trait, and therefore to define all others without that trait as ‘other’.  Some groups are more benign than others, but at heart, any form of pigeon-holing of people or talents has a flip side for the excluded.

Why devalue ability, talent, skill set, knowledge, and personality?

Confident professional woman in a wheelchair

Let’s face it, anti-discrimination legislation is stomach-churningly compartmentalising and exclusive: To paraphrase, ‘Read the list below of special criteria that elicit special protections in law… ‘And guess what, you get compliance on sufferance, but few hearts and minds are convinced.  On the contrary, it is highly likely to be counter-productive and a breeding ground for resentment.

So let’s start again.

What is the common good?  How about, making the most of the full talent pool by helping everyone to live the best lives they can?  There is no exclusivity in such aspirations, and it doesn’t fall into the trap of pre-defining the worthy and unworthy.

Imagine a world where the authorities, government, and employers offer routes to channel our abilities.  Every option is open to everyone.  When someone presents with a disability, then the common mindset is already primed to think laterally about enabling solutions.  To take a leaf out of second language learning, better to hear, read, speak, and write, and to mix it up, rather than to concentrate on one method to the exclusion of others.

Why introduce a chapter on efforts at vocational rehabilitation in the UK in such a manner? Why:  Because any policy position must sit within the wider policy priorities of civil society that in turn seek to address the wider challenges faced by a society.  For the UK challenges include pressures on public finances and access to the National Health Service.  Specifically, mental health is being increasingly discussed in Parliament and within the press as under-resourced, with some linking poor mental health provision and an increasing prison population with an increasing proportion of prisoners with mental health problems.  Mental health is one of the last taboos, indeed how easy it is to talk of others suffering from mental health issues, whilst ‘we’, if we are depressed, are depressed by definition by some external force.

When it comes to disability rehabilitation policy in the UK, mental health is the new frontier, and by implication rehabilitation strategies for offenders and veterans should be part of the policy mix.

Where do we start disability rehabilitation?

Well, one place might be to investigate what sets up the cycle of marginalisation for people with disabilities in the first place.  Once into the criminal justice system, and once imprisoned re-offending rates rise like a positive feedback loop.  Now here are two points to consider:

  • Liberal societies are becoming increasingly intolerant of what once upon a time might be termed bad or ignorant behaviour. Yes, it can be hurtful, offensive, bigoted, and mildly threatening.  But so much is being done now to criminalise such bad behaviour.  A right to free speech is being replaced by a right not to be offended.
  • Rare but appalling cases of commission or neglect lead to so-calling safeguarding interventions attempting to eliminate the most heinous of crimes. Yet in practice such measures bread a widespread culture of suspicion where trust in ordinary people displaying ordinary behaviour has to be proved.

And that’s where the problem lies: Any weakness, any non-conformity, any … lack of education, is reason for someone, anyone, to take an interest in your affairs.  It’s a very intolerant form of liberalism that selects worthy causes piecemeal and then reverses the burden of proof for anyone who doesn’t conform to some kind of group norm.  And ultimately, guess who suffers: the very vulnerable groups we considered needing the policy interventions in the first place.  The spiral of marginalisation starts from the spiral of increasing micro-managed control and authoritarianism and who can argue against such an approach without being painted as a defender of criminals?

This era is like any other era.  Some may claim now is special, now is the time of globalisation, and that resistance to the onward march of progress is futile.  However, liberal democracies do have choices in the way they can set up their policy regimes.  They can approach matters from the bottom up, detail by detail, point by point, or from the top down, from general rules of jurisprudence and ethics: a values-based approach.  These values can be held to be universal, and they can be couched in positive or negative terms: thou shalt not torture, or you should offer equality of opportunity.  To take a leaf out of evolutionary biology, you cannot stop natural selection of the fittest and with it the possibility that some species will go extinct, but if you really want to give most species the best opportunity then you need working ecosystems with functional niches.  Analogies can be taken too far, but the concept of managing the policy environment holistically is the point I wish to get across.

To conclude, policy initiatives in the UK are bringing mental health issues into sharper relief.  People understand that the causes must be treated, not just the symptoms.  If better mental health provision could provide more effective ex-ante disability rehabilitation, whether through talking therapies or otherwise, then the cycle of isolation, depression, poverty, imprisonment, and ex-post rehabilitation could be avoided.  However, more fundamental changes might be made were there to be more reflection in the policy-making and legislative processes and a more holistic approach taken to be more positive about inclusivity.

Final thoughts

One final point worth considering: Are we right to see the role of government to be laissez-faire, but to intervene as a last resort to protect the most vulnerable?  It seems totally logical.  Indeed, if we return to the evolutionary biology analogy, you might ask yourself, why wouldn’t you want to invest the most in protecting the most vulnerable?  Why wouldn’t you start with saving the giant pander as the first step in avoiding a forthcoming anthropogenic-driven biodiversity mass extinction?  The answer, as it turns out, is that many ‘less vulnerable’ or perhaps if the truth be said, less charismatic species, might go extinct, but could be saved, were the contribution to maintaining the ecosystems, set as the criterion for returning value.  Put bluntly in disability terms, this means valuing people for their abilities and seeing the potential in them.  And is that such a bad thing?

Our approach to disability discrimination policy needs a fundamental overhaul, as do our values.  Kind intents and muddled thinking have led to regulations that are nothing short of counter-productive.  And where once Darwinism was cast as the villain in any civilised debate about interventions, a rational case can be made for whole system approaches, whole system value sets that manage for positive results across the board in an inclusive rather than exclusive fashion, in a way that enables all individuals, rather than protects the entitled.