Rolling Through

The language we use frames or shapes our thoughts and is shaped by them.    Using different words to describe the same thing can urge us to consider it very differently.

Consider the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. 

If you are considering geographical features, you think of them as “mountains”. You might consider the rocks that they are made of and how the mountains impact the water system around them.  You don’t think of them as positive or negative.  They just are.

If you were a colonist in the early years of Australia’s colonisation, these mountains weren’t just mountains.  You thought of them as a barrier and a threat to your survival because they limited access to land to grow food on.  The early colony was at risk of starvation because they couldn’t find their way over those mountains and they didn’t have the skills to survive in their new environment. The mountains were a negative.

If you were an Aboriginal person in colonial times, you might have considered the mountains a shield or a safety barrier, keeping the colonist invaders out of your territory.  You perceived and talked about the mountains as a positive.  

The mountains are the same mountains.  The ways different people talk about them and think about them is different.  Psychologists and linguists refer to this difference as Framing.  Whether we frame something as positive, negative or neutral makes a big difference to how we respond to it.

The way we talk about people makes a difference too.

Over the past few years, it has become common for politicians, public figures and people in the social services sector to talk about “vulnerable people”.

Vulnerable means “at risk” and “in danger”.  It’s about lacking safety and security and being unable to protect or defend yourself.  It conveys utter hopelessness.  It’s a word that evokes an image of hands thrown up in despair.  It often evokes feelings of pity.   It urges no action and offers no hint that things might be different.

“Vulnerable” is a dangerous word when it is used, to create a category of people.

As a wheelchair user, I’m often included in the people referred to as a “vulnerable people” and it makes me angry. 

All human beings live with a certain amount of vulnerability.  It’s easy to trip down the stairs and break an ankle, slip on a wet floor or fall off a ladder.  There’s the vulnerability of pain and ill fortune that can come through a broken relationship or sudden unemployment.  Life is not entirely predictable for any of us. Human beings are vulnerable by nature.

Within society we have various ways of reducing human vulnerability.  We might install a railing on the stairs and put up a safety sign on the wet floor until it dries.  We provide workers up ladders with safety harnesses.  Socially, we look for ways to stand by one another and help each other out when times get tough.  Friends gather round in support when relationships fail.  Unions, employment laws and social security offer some protection from employment crises.   We know that life isn’t always smooth sailing.  It has its ups and downs. Vulnerability is a normal human characteristic that we all experience from time to time. 

If all people are vulnerable, why should a certain subset of us be labelled, “vulnerable people”?

To me, it’s a phrase that smacks of victim blaming.

When we talk about “vulnerable people”, we are not recognising our common vulnerability as humans. 

We are characterising some people as vulnerable – making them as one dimensional and beyond help as one of Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Men and Little Miss storybook characters.  Using the phrase “vulnerable people” makes vulnerability sound like an identity, an unchangeable characteristic.  It’s the same language pattern we use when we talk of “short people”, “tall people”, “black people”, “queer people” “white people”.  Those are unchangeable characteristics.  Vulnerability is not.

Using a language pattern that suggests a fixed characteristic neatly sidesteps questions of why vulnerability arises and how it can be dealt with. It evokes pity while utterly failing to demand or even suggest action for positive change.

I find it incredibly disturbing that the use of this phrase has been taken up so uncritically within our community – including among people who work in the disability and social services sectors.

Talk of “Vulnerable people” undermines the Social Model of Disability.

Mike Oliver, a UK sociologist, who lived with disability himself, was one of the people who developed the Social Model of Disability, starting in 1976.  At the time, it was a new way of understanding disability.  it Invited people to move beyond individual thinking about what is “wrong with” an individual who is disabled and look at the bigger picture.  It invited people to recognise, that disability results from the interplay between Impairment, available resources and the choices society makes. 

Human beings all live with varying levels of ability and impairment.  Some are shorter, some are taller, some are stronger, some are smarter.  Whether a limitation is thought of as an impairment tends to depend on how much one person’s situation differs from most of the people around them.  I find walking quite difficult whereas most people find it easy – so I’m considered to have a mobility impairment.   Whether an impairment is considered a disability depends on the impact it has on the person as they go about living their life. 

Consider a person who has less than perfect vision.  It’s a common enough problem.  For a lot of people In our own time, it can be addressed simply by wearing glasses.  In the 21^st century it would be unlikely for someone to describe themselves as disabled simply because they needed a pair of glasses to read.

If, however, the same person lived in the tenth century, before the invention of spectacles, they might experience their sight impairment as a disability.  They wouldn’t, for instance, be able to complete fine needlework.  They would need to find a role in life that did not require keen sight.  They might need friends or family members to assist them with particular tasks.  Without the assistive technology we now know as spectacles, they would be somewhat limited by their disability.

The Social Model of Disability recognises that impairment contributes to a person’s experience of disability, but it’s not the whole story. 

My ability to walk is limited, so I use a power wheelchair.  I regularly do my shopping at the local supermarket. 

My wheelchair means I can travel faster to and from the shop than my husband walks and I can comfortably carry more.  In that respect,my chair can offer an advantage.  It turns to a disadvantage if the aisles are narrow or the shop has a step at the entrance.  Then I can’t shop there. 

In both situations, I am a person in a wheelchair.  I haven’t changed.  The architecture and layout of one shop en-ables me to shop in one place and dis-ables me from shopping in the other.

Or to put it another way, in a shop with flat access, I’m capable of doing my shopping myself.  If the shop is not accessible, I am at risk of hunger.  I can’t do the shopping myself.   Unless I find an accessible shop or some assistance, I’ll go hungry

The Social Model of Disability recognises that circumstances, resources and human choices (like whether to have a ramp) can all contribute to whether a person’s impairment results in disability.  It encourages society to look at how we could do things differently to minimise people’s experience of disability.

People are frequently put at risk because they are subject to discrimination and poor choices on the part of decision makers. 

Disabled people commonly experience discrimination when looking for work.  I’ve gained interviews based on a resume that offered experience the employer valued (but didn’t mention my disability) only to find that once they saw crutches or a wheelchair, the interview was basically over before it began because they couldn’t imagine someone with a disability in the role.  That fact that I could, when I read their job ad, counts for nought.  The employer is the decision maker.

I’ve had other employers who would have considered employing me but couldn’t because their premises were not accessible enough.  I can either work from home or in accessible premises.  Every time a job I could otherwise do is available in inaccessible premises, I am prevented from doing it. 

Low expectations like, “someone with a disability couldn’t do this job” often come from the fact that many Australians have few, if any disabled friends or acquaintances, despite the fact that about 20% of the Australian community lives with disability.   Many Australians have no experience that shows them the strategies disabled people use to get things done.

It’s not surprising.

Australia has a long history of separating disabled people from the broader community –  and even though things have improved somewhat in my lifetime, it’s still common.  I know disabled people my own age whose parents were urged to put them in an institution, forget about them, and “have another family”.  Today, people with high support needs continue to be offered residency in very small institutions, euphemistically called “Group Homes”.

Since 2005, schools have had a responsibility to offer inclusive education where children are not segregated on the basis of disability but 20 years later, many parents still experience pushback when they try to enrol their disabled child in the local school and ensure they have the supports they need to thrive there.

Separate schools specifically for disabled kids continue and many mainstream schools still have separate classes where disabled kids are segregated from the rest of the school and don’t have the same educational or social opportunities. 

Disabled adults judged “too disabled” for ordinary work can find themselves placed in “day programmes” or special, usually seriously underpaid, employment in sheltered workshops (now known as Australian Disability Enterprises – ADE). 

This is where many employers and other community members expect me to be too.

When employers don’t respond positively to disabled employees, they are behaving the way they’ve been conditioned to behave but their discriminatory attitude makes disabled job seekers much more at risk of unemployment.  The problem rests with discrimination, not impairment.

Government can reduce these risks to disabled people by doing more to resource inclusive education and ensuring accessible pathways to employment.  School principals, teachers, parents and other kids have contributions to make too.  If we focus on what can be done and do it, the things that can’t be done, often become less significant.

Inaccessible buildings can also increase the risk of unemployment for disabled people.  You definitely can’t work in a building that you’re unable to enter. 

You might also be more likely to lose your job if it takes you much longer than it takes your colleagues when you need to use the toilet.  I’ve worked in buildings where the accessible bathroom is located on a different floor.  You don’t want to be in a hurry because you have to travel in the lift to access it.  There’s only one on the floor you’ve gone to and if, when you arrive, you find it occupied, you have to wait.  That could add up to a lot of unproductive time over the course of a week.  It’s literally “built in” discrimination when my colleagues only need to go down the hall and back to use the toilet while I have to make the trek out of the office and down to another floor. 

Of course, the boss won’t say, “I’m firing you because you take too long for a toilet break” but they might, after a while, decide that you are less productive than they require, without even recognising the impact of the complicated access to toilet facilities. 

Remember the movie Hidden Figures, set in America,1961, where NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson had to run for miles, straight past the “whites-only” toilet, to get to the one she was allowed to use as a black woman, every time she needed to go? 

Her boss was oblivious to the time that cost her every day. When he finally realised what was going on, he changed the signs on the door and insisted that all toilets were available to workers of every skin colour.  Unfortunately, you have to do more than change the signs to make a toilet wheelchair accessible. 

Decisions on toilets are made when you design the building.  Building design is the result of planning decisions by government and property developers.  Poor decisions set disabled people up for increased risk of unemployment.  They don’t have to.  Our community could choose to make all spaces accessible to all people.

Having limited work options leaves disabled people at greater risk of poverty and the social security we can then be forced to rely on is below the poverty line, while rent and the cost of living is high. 

These are factors beyond our control that have nothing to do with our impairments.  Many non-disabled Australians are also currently experiencing poverty due to high living costs.

If government decided to ensure that all Australians had access to a liveable income, no one would experience poverty.  If we treated housing as a means of providing shelter rather than increasing wealth, it would be more affordable.  If people were able to grow their own vegetables and share with their neighbours, food costs would go down while nutrition and quality of life went up. 

There are choices our community can make that reduce the risks we face.

We don’t have to leave people to suffer their fate. We can gather round, pool our resources and work together for change.  We don’t have to accept the status quo.  Together, we can develop and implement strategies to reduce risk- but we have to start by asking where the risk comes from and assuming we can deal with it. 

Humans will always experience vulnerability but together, we can be resilient people. 

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