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From the Attitude Foundation. Image: Dr George Taleporos and Dani Di Toro from the Wheelchair Users episode of You Can’t Ask That(ABC TV).
The best way to shatter a disability stereotype is to let the people with disabilities do it for you. The ABC television series You Can’t Ask That provides a forum for doing just that.
The format of the program is very simple. It is people fronting the camera with no backdrop, studio sets or other scenery to distract you. They read out questions sent in anonymously by the general public and provide their answers, in their own words.
Six things that we love about the show:
1.It’s not just about disability, although people with disabilities are well represented. That shows that stereotypes and lack of understanding extends to a range of people.
2.The questions are honest, not politically correct and get an honest answer, sometimes showing that there is often no straight-forward answer about some issues – like should short statured people use their small height as a means to earn money?
3. The program is long enough to allow a range of range of questions and answers to give a full picture of a person’s life experience. That takes it beyond mere curiosity to seeing a well-rounded person with the same aspirations, frustrations and needs as everybody else.
4. By focussing on a different area of disability in each episode (e.g. blindness, wheelchair users, short statured people, facial difference, Down syndrome) it shows the massive range of disability within a “category” and how different the experience of each person is. This helps to show that people with disabilities are not just a “condition”.
5. The people with disabilities are identified at the end, along with which state or territory they live in. This reinforces that they are real people, living real lives.
6. It helps to educate the general public about what is okay to ask and acceptable ways to deal with different types of disability. Always it’s about treating the person as a person, not a disability – just like how you want to be treated.
You Can’t Ask That screens on ABC1 on Wednesdays at 9pm.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
