Two
days ago, on the 26th of July 2016, a man in Japan – I refuse to
acknowledge his name – killed 19 people and left 26 others injured in a
deliberate knife attack (McCurry 2016). It rated little mention in the media, no great outrage on social media. There was no
mention of the word “terrorist” or “hate crime”. There was, in fact, hardly any
outrage. Because the people he so brutally attacked were not people at a
concert or fireworks. They were not shoppers in a local mall. They were not
people in a restaurant or movie theatre. They were residents of an institution
for people with disability. And that, you see, makes all the difference.
This
man in Japan had made it very clear he intended to do this. He wrote a letter
to his government outlining his plan. He was interned into a mental health
facility for 12 days and released. And then carried out his plan.
His
plan, he wrote in his letter to the government was to create ‘a world where a
person with multiple disabilities can be euthanized, with an agreement from the
guardians because ‘the disabled should all disappear”.
Why
does society hate and despise disabled people so much?! How can it be that
people with disability (PwD) are so easily discriminated against, forgotten,
deliberately ignored, made fun of, stereotyped, dismissed?
In
order to understand, I think we need to look at two concepts: deviance, and
ableism.
Deviance
is any rule or norm breaking behaviour subject to negative social sanctions;
and thus deviants are non-conformists who transgress a community’s normative
standards.
Deviance
of course, only exists in opposition to “normal.” The difficulty with the term
“normal” is illustrated by its very definition – it refers to both that what is
the majority, the average or standard, and that what is as it ought to be. the
first meaning is rational and scientific, what is “normal” and natural (such as
the movement of the planets) is what conforms to the laws of nature. The second
meaning of “normal” implies an evaluation and judgement (the normative).
So
what is “normal”? Normal is a concept developed as part of industrialisation in
the 19th Century. This economic and political revolution shifted
authority - including legal authority - from local rulers to the authority of
the nation state and the power of the capitalist class. Modernisation ordered social
life around the idea of the “normal”, a concept visualised in the Bell Curve. The
French statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1847) was vital in the construction
of the notion of l’homme moyen (the
average, or normal man). A hierarchy was established based on the median as an ideal,
which soon became the measure of progress (Davis 199167). This was applied to
both the body, creating the able body and the disabled body. The Intelligence
Quotient (IQ) emerged as a handy measure to show intellectual superiority on
the one hand and “backwardness” on the other (Davis 1997:17).
In the
1870s, Darwin’s biological concepts of “natural selection” and “survival of the
fittest” were applied to the social world. Eugenics extended this idea further
to selectively improve the quality of the human race based on the physical and
social traits preferred by society at the time. Eugenics was conceptualized by English naturalist and
mathematician Francis Galton (1822-1911) and described as “the science of
improvement of the human race by better breeding” (quoted in Friedlander
1995:4).
Social
Darwinism and eugenics not only reinforced existing stereotypes of the disabled
but also provided a scientific and normative framework for these prejudices.
Since the “normal” implies the “abnormal” disability became inherently
connected, if not simply equated, with deviance. PwD were viewed at best with
morbid fascination and disdain - hence their display at freak shows (see Bogdan
1988) – and at worst with deviant and criminal behaviour. Their digression from
the median made it easy for all “undesirables” such as criminals, alcoholics,
the poor and PwD to be grouped together in an underclass of “paupers”.
In 17th
and 18th Century Europe and America ‘there was little attempt to
distinguish between a “criminal” and a “lunatic” population’ (Garton 1982:89).
Criminality was linked to moral deprivation and seen as a contagious disease to
be regulated by the State. Deemed inefficient and unproductive in
industrialised society, the poor and uneducated were lumped together with those
with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, physical impairments and
alcoholics as “feebleminded” (Winzer 1997; Garton 1982). The aim was to contain
them in institutions and subject them to controls on their procreation, mainly
via forced sterilization (Davis 1997; Garton 1982). Only in the 19th
Century was a distinction made between criminals and PwD, and separate
institutions were established in the form of penal institutions and “lunatic
asylums”.
In the
United States so called “Ugly Laws” were enacted that made it illegal for
people with “unsightly” or “disfiguring” disabilities to appear in public
(Schweik 2010). Chicago’s Municipal Code Section #36034 (1881), which was not
repealed until 1974, stated:
“No person who is diseased, maimed,
mutilated or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly, disgusting or
improper is to be allowed in or on the public ways or other public places in
this city, or shall therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under
penalty of not less than one dollar nor more than fifty dollars for each
offense.”
The
perception of the disabled as deviant was taken to its extreme by the Nazi
regime in Germany and its systematic eradication of PwD though the Aktion T4 euthanasia program, where the
Nazis honed their procedures later used in the concentration camp regime. PwD
were deemed “degenerates” who were “lebensunwert”
(considered unworthy of life). Their very existence was deemed a threat to a
healthy, normal society, and PwD thus needed to be eliminated for the health
and survival of the volk (Friedlander
1995; Evans 2004). This thinking is so internalized as a social norm that it
permeates into popular culture – think about how many literary works portray
villains as one legged, one-eyed or hunchbacks. A currently popular Hollywood
movie features a man with a spinal injury who wants to commit assisted suicide
because his life in a wheelchair is a life not worth living.
While
impairments have always existed, a rational, scientific approach allowed
deviance to be pathologised and emerging classification of “normal” and
“not-normal”, “abnormal”, and, “deviants”, “idiots”, “degenerates” etc. Of
course, all binary oppositions are inherently interdependent since each side of
the dichotomy derives its meaning from the contrasting relationship with the
other.
Thus,
society needs PwD’s “abnormality” to be the mirror for their “normality” in a
never-ending dance between pity and contempt as the distinguishing factor.
And
this brings us to the concept of ableism.
Ableism
is ‘an attitude that devalues or differentiates disability though the valuation
of able-bodiedness equalled to normalcy’ (Campbell 2009:5). Ableism is a
‘network of beliefs, processes and practices that is projected as the perfect
species –typical and therefore essentially and fully human. Disability then, is
cast as a diminished state of being human (Campbell 2001:44). Thus, ableism
contains the ‘belief that impairment or disability is inherently negative and,
where possible, should be ameliorated, cured, or eliminated” (Campbell 2009:5).
Today,
despite an increased acceptance of greater human diversity thanks to social
movements centred around civil and human rights, PwD are still struggling with
perceptions of abnormality and deviance. When a serious crime is committed,
popular media immediately defines the perpetrator as “mental” or “psycho”.
Tabloid media endlessly regurgitates the image of the disabled dole bludger
scrounging off the Aussie battler’s hard word- thus not only “othering” but
also denigrating PwD.
Eugenics
has made somewhat of a comeback, again coated in a mantle of scientific validation
around genetic discoveries. Many medical institutes are actively searching for
foetal genetic tests to eradicate disability - and therefore people with
disability. Pre-birth tests aim to screen for known disabilities so they can be
“terminated” before birth. Disabled women and girls, especially those with
intellectual disability, are still subjected to sterilisations without their
consent. There is still debate around the growth attenuation (stunting growth)
of children with disability, to keep them small and easier to care for, even
though it raises serious ethical and human rights questions. While debate rages
on, one thing is for certain – it wouldn’t even be contemplated for
non-disabled children. As Findlay points out it “perpetuates the
infantilisation and low expectation of people with disabilities” and
“reinforces the idea that people with severe disabilities shouldn’t be afforded
the growth and development opportunities, and the choice and dignity that
non-disabled people are privileged to have.”
References
Bogdan Robert, 1988, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for
Amusement and Profit, Chicago University Press.
Campbell, Fiona Kumary, 2001,
Inciting legal fictions: Disability’s date with onthology and the ableist body
of the law, Griffith Law Review 10:
42-62.
Campbell, Fiona Kumary, 2009, Contours of Ableism – The Production of
Disability and Ableism, Palgrave Macmillan.
Cunneen Chris, Fraser, David, and
Tomsen, Stephen (eds.), 1997, Faces of
Hate: Hate Crime in Australia, Hawkins Press.
Davis, Lennard, 1997, Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the
Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century in Davies,
Lennard (ed.) The Disability Studies
Reader, Routledge_ 9-28.
Evans, Susan, 2004, Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People
with Disabilities, Ivan Dee.
Findlay, Carly, 2016, Comment:
Growth attenutuation infantilises people with disability,
<htpp://sbs.com.au/topics/life/health/article/2016/06/24/comment-growth-attentuation-infantilises-people-disability>.
Friedlander Henry 1995, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from
Euthanasia to the Final Solution, Chapel Hill.
Garton, Stephen, 1982, ‘Bad or Mad?
Developments in incarceration in NSW 1880-1920’. pp. 89-110 in Sydney Labour
History Group, What Rough Beast? The
State and Social Order in Australian History. Sydney: The Australian
Society for the Study of Labour History and George Allen & Unwin.
McCurry, Justin, 2016, ‘Japan knife
attack: stabbing at care centre leaves 19 dead’ The Guardian, Tuesday 26July 2016, < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/25/tokyo-knife-attack-stabbing-sagamihara>.
Schweik, Susan, 2010, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, NYU
Press.
Winzer, Margaret, 1997, Disability and Society before the Eighteenth
the Century – Dread and Despair, in Davies, Lennard, (ed.) The Disability Studies Reader, Routledge:
75-109.
