UK study interviews post-WWII disabled people about their life experiences

From The Yorkshire Post in the UK:

Dan was a disabled child who attended mainstream school in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he remembers being treated much the same as other children. His father was in the Navy and his mother died when he was 10, but his was a close and very supportive extended family.

However, because of continuing medical treatment, doctors featured prominently in his life and he regularly spent spells in hospital. He recalls that the decision to send him to a special school at one stage was influenced heavily by the medical profession, "who thought they knew best".

The experience of special school was one which he found lacked intellectual challenge. Luckily, this day school was near home, so Dan kept his old friends, and after he repeatedly complained, he was given a place in a mainstream secondary school.

The place of medical authorities and how the lives of disabled people back then were often ruled by the profession, even in non-medical matters, will be part of the discussion at a conference on whether life has changed for disabled people since the Second World War.

Stories of acceptance of medical authority and institutional separation from families were common in Dan's generation, but in the cases where a disabled child was able to avoid being sent to a special school, a determining factor was someone in the family taking on the authorities or an influential teacher, who argued on their behalf that they would do well in the mainstream.

According to research carried out by Leeds University's Centre for Disability Studies, the picture is more complex than simply being able to say that, because of legislation and enlightened attitudes, everything in the lives of younger interviewees is necessarily better than it was for those born in the 1940s. The body of research that forms the basis of the conference includes valuable biographical evidence of how people of different ages feel about social attitudes, medical treatment, their own education and other aspects of everyday life. Dr Sonali Shah's work involved interviews with 58 disabled people born in three different decades since the Second World War.

She and colleagues have worked on the Nuffield-funded project Times of Our Lives project and and Performance of Disability Histories project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and it paints a fascinating picture of how lives have changed.

In the early post-war period, large numbers of children with physical impairments spent long periods separated from their parents in long-stay hospitals, says Dr Shah – a separation which has had an impact on their life ever since. In the 1940s and '50s, the challenges encountered by families with disabled children were considered largely to be a private trouble rather than a social issue. "People with impairment were seen as a burden and a drain on resources, and putting disabled people into long-stay hospitals or special schools was primarily to get them away from mainstream society," says Dr Shah.

"One interviewee who was born in the 40s said that her parents took her to their GP when she was very young, and the doctor said, 'you might as well stick her in an orphanage because she won't walk, talk and have a normal life.'..We interviewed 12 people born in that decade, and what I found really interesting was more than half of them didn't spend a lot of time in institutions – mainly because someone in the family was assertive."

Interestingly, school segregation for disabled children expanded most rapidly in the 1970s, while at the same time ideas about inclusion were moving up the political agenda.

Successive pieces of legislation have enshrined the equal rights of disabled people in this country and internationally, but Dr Shah thinks there is still a major job to be done in terms of changing attitudes. In her own life, negative attitudes have included teachers at a mainstream school needing to overcome preconceived notions that being disabled meant she must be intellectually "slow".

Even at university level, she says she has come across those who have questioned her ability to tackle academic projects because of her physical impairment.

"If I go into the local shop with my non-disabled husband and I ask for the newspaper, the man there automatically makes his response to my husband, not looking at me... And no, I don't think he realises he does it. You can easily change things like physical access for disabled people, but attitudes are slow to change."