A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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If able-bodied children were taken from their local school... (and) forced to
undertake physical exercise for all their waking hours to the neglect of their
academic education and social development, we would regard it as unacceptable and
the children concerned would rapidly come to the attention of the child-protection
mafia. But in the lives of disabled children (and adults too), anything goes as long as
you call it therapeutic (Oliver, 1996:107).
What is sometimes perceived as the immaturity or vulnerability of disabled people is not an
outcome of impairment, but the outcome of being situated within segregated social
environments.
From the other direction
The segregation of disabled people from the social mainstream means that, until relatively
recently, many non-disabled people have had little familiarity with impairment and, when
confronted by it, have found it strange and frightening. Hazel, Rose, Ben, Helen, Ali and
Surinder are people whose impairments only became apparent or received diagnosis in
adolescence or adult life. Growing up they attended mainstream schools and did not consider
disability an issue that affected them. Hazel talks about her first recollection of meeting a
disabled person in Northampton at around the age of fourteen:
a friend of the family had a grand-daughter who used to attend a special hospital
about three miles from where I lived… and my mum and dad said one day would
you like to go and see Spencer‟s grand-daughter… and I said I would, and she had,
erm… multiple disabilities, really, and she was in a room with people with lots of
different disabilities… and that was my first experience of… going into a room and
actually seeing people who had different disabilities… which at the time, I must
admit, I found distressing because I was only a teenager myself… (l.1.18)
While the large institutions where many disabled people were expected to see out their days
have now mostly been closed in Britain, the experience of having grown up in a social world
where few disabled people were seen still shapes the beliefs and expectations held about
impairment by many non-disabled people today. When impairment has been understood as
best hidden away, as it literally has been, and relegated to the margins of society where it is
identified as a medical and „care‟ issue, regarding the possibility of becoming impaired as
anything other than negative is very difficult.