Avoiding Issue-overload: Core Principles and Diverse Discrimination

In these times of issue-overload (gender, disability, HIV, poverty, ethnicity, age), experts in each ‘issue’ abound, each with their extensive reading material and advice on how to raise awareness on that particular issue. This can be both conceptually and practically overwhelming; despite the best intentions, it becomes a practical impossibility to attend 6 different awareness-raising courses, and plough through 6 different sets of reading material and guidelines, let alone to accommodate 6 different specialist advisor visits from Save the Children Fund (SCF) HQ…… Yet it is immediately obvious to anyone who becomes ‘aware’ on two or more issues, that there are a significant number of common key principles which once understood and internalised, make becoming ‘aware’ on other issues a much easier task. It would seem that at the current time, whilst these common elements are increasingly acknowledged, very little work has actually been done on producing materials and training packages which define these common principles and issues, and clarify the specific differences.

In the disability field, this is probably due in part to the fact that the disability movement is relatively young, and disabled people have needed to spend time defining themselves and their issues before being ready and able to ‘merge’ with other marginalised groups to fight common oppression; a strong identity is needed before integration, rather than assimilation can occur. However, the increasing categorisation of yet more and more types of ‘difference and oppression’ has resulted in an increasing realisation of potentially ludicrous consequences; competition between oppressed groups, labels taking precedence over acknowledging individual difference and common humanity, fear of speaking/acting due to pressure to be ‘politically correct’.

In theory, guiding principles which refer to all children should be relevant to all these diverse groups. In reality, division, discrimination, ‘blind spots’, ‘mental blocks’, fear and ignorance exist, and although there are an infinite number of types of vulnerability and marginalisation, it is still useful to highlight a finite number of key issues which if people are made aware of, then this can help to improve practice.

Experience shows that a person who is gender-aware, child-aware and race-aware, can still be completely disability-unaware, and ignore or discriminate against disabled children and families with disabled members. The process of awareness-raising on these diverse issues is not one of adding layer after layer of information, it is more like training the muscles of perception (seeing, hearing) to be able to focus on marginalised groups and individual difference, and to recognise how one’s own limitations influences perception. Once our ‘muscles’ become used to perceiving flexibly, it hopefully becomes easier with time to acknowledge and respond to a range of differences.

Principles/issues common to all types of discrimination and difference:

• The need to be aware of and acknowledge our own bias, attitudes and emotions in relation to the issue (e.g. what words/images/feelings spring to mind on hearing the word ‘disability’.
• Awareness of the impact of our behaviour/attitudes/style of communication on different groups (e.g. issues around communicating with children, interviewing women, cultural body language - realising that we can be part of the oppression).
• Importance of identifying both common and specific needs and access.
• Finding out about actual lifestyles/perceptions/priorities rather than transferring knowledge about one person or group to another.
• Importance of promoting positive identity (self-help groups, role models).
• Consulting with and involving different groups separately (e.g. meeting with women alone, or disabled women alone, or children alone).
• Focus on removing barriers (attitudinal, physical, institutional) to participation, rather than trying to change the individual.
• Importance of valuing mistakes and imperfection as a contribution to learning.
• The value of identifying with a marginalised group/person (women talking to women, disabled people working with disabled people), but also acknowledgement that anyone can increase understanding by listening and learning (e.g. it is not necessary to be disabled in order to understand anything about disability, but it is necessary to listen to and learn from disabled people).
• Need to challenge discrimination through policy and practice.

Specific issues - some examples relating to disability:

• Disabled people are very different from each other (whether they have the same or very different impairments).
• Disabled people are dispersed throughout all societies (often very isolated from each other).
• There is no clear, objective dividing line between disabled people and non-disabled people - disability relates to perception.
• Anyone can become disabled at any time.

SCF’s experience of integrated education work has highlighted how a focus on a ‘single issue’ such as disability can become a gateway to promoting an inclusive anti-bias approach. In Lesotho, teachers in primary schools received a three week training on ‘special needs’ in order to help them implement the government programme of integrating disabled children. Initially many felt resistant and also afraid of disabled children. However, because the training was about developing good teaching methods to enable teachers to respond to pupil diversity, many teachers found that they gained more than they thought they would;

‘there are many very useful techniques from special education. We are catering for individual difference… the programme has improved the school drop-out rate and repeaters… it helps non-disabled children because they develop a sense of social responsibility, they learn to feel more responsible for their own learning when the teacher is busy with a disabled child… we now work harder and longer hours, but teaching is more interesting and rewarding! There is no going back - it would be like asking a repentant sinner to return to their sins!’ (interviews with teachers).

Although many more girls than boys attend school in Lesotho for a variety of reasons, the awareness-raising and training for the teachers is perceived as a sort of conversion process, whereby they come to ‘see the light’, they are now really convinced that all children can learn, that they as teachers are responsible for children’s learning, and that children are individuals. They respond more appropriately to children who are quiet or a bit slow, and are more aware of the influence of family background and problems on learning.

I would like to suggest that SCF does not begin to produce a parallel literature/process in relation to gender, but rather pioneers a collaborative approach which will define and refine common principles/issues, and then spell out specific issues according to key areas of discrimination, resulting in a single package of guiding principles. What do you think? (Sue Stubbs).www.eenet.org