Social workers are supposed to be there to practice an antioppressive framework, but most of the time social workers use a medical model and view an impairment as a serve limitation that impacts a person’s life dramatically. They are taught through many different theories on how to engage with clients who are every day people, social workers are the one who are alleged to provide services and assistants to individuals in need or struggle with a crisis situations.
Unfortunately, that is not the case with persons who have a disability. Instead of viewing disability as an undistinguishable connection to both societal and governmental problems, the medical model approach says that a disabled person is the problem and they need repairing (Hiranandani, 2005). That indicated, if disability education was taught more within a social work context, and not seen as the problem there would be less stigmatization, and more resources that could provided.
As social workers, we are always told that before we can help others we need to recognize our social location, as this might make things harder when we go into new situations as that may hinder our ability to help individuals who are oppressed and marginalized. In addition, we need to address our own privilege and understand that we cannot go into a situation where we want to power over an individual who is oppressed.
We cannot dominant anything as we will struggle to help our client; if this does happen it may result in bad rapport and a regretful experience on your client and may make that individual never want to deal with a social worker again (Clare, 2003). As for myself, I am twenty-two-yearold cisgender, heterosexual female in post secondary schooling, who is biracial. I come from a middle class two parent home, also I have prior knowledge about disability issues because of my past studies in Developmental Service Worker.
Also, I do have a learning disability (dyslexia). Therefore, I understand how individuals are stigmatized throughout for society for being considered less than the societal norms. Per Hiranadani (2005) social workers view disability as the problem that needs fixing, and we can do that by using societal and governmental policies that say that these individuals are the problem and we must fix them so they can be accepted into society.
More education and pressures need to be put on social work education as it does not teach anything about the numerous different types of disabilities there is, it does not mention non-visible and visible. As soon as a social worker hears the word “disability” they automatically think of an individual with a physical disability that makes that person different. In social work, we are supposed to have no judgement and believe that we must make sure to humble ourselves and feel sorry for individuals who deviate from the societal norms.
In disability studies, we learn that we are the problem as we are trying to conform people to fit into what the societal norms want and think they need. By not having more education about disabilities in the mandatory curriculum rather than being taught just in electives, students and workers do not learn the basic comprehension about disability or even the history behind why people who are disable have been oppressed for years.
The would never learn about eugenics and how many people were sterilized by the Nazi and it led to having thousands of people in Alberta sterilized without their knowledge just based on their IQ levels, or if they had a disability they would also be sterilized so they could not reproduce and transfer negative eugenics to their children so they did not have to become a burden to society.
In Germany, in the second World War any person who was deemed unfit were placed in institutions and then later killed to lessen what they seemed to consider as the negative characteristics such as alcoholism, epilepsy, and sexual offenders to name a few (Hubbard, 2013) (Malacrida, 2015). Social workers are supposed to provide services to people who are looking for resources that can be given to them in their time of need. A community education approach could be the step in the right direction for both those in the social service fields and the remainder of society.
Having more education being taught throughout school in both primary, secondary and post secondary, this could help with minimizing the stigma that is surrounded with disability. A person who has a disability should not be the problem and we should not be putting the blame on them, it should be on us. The able-bodied individuals as we are the reason they are oppressed because we deem them as unfit, and make it seem like they are inferior to us. We need to understand that if many people had the knowledge about how ableism impacts someone.
We live in ablest society were all our community, private, education and social services are put in place to only gear for the “normal” individuals of society, which excludes people with disabilities (Stop Ableism, 2017). The solution that should be made into social work would be to have a more inclusive, empowerment, and involvement practice for individuals with disabilities. We can do this by including an antioppressive and anti- prejudiced approaches to contest the structural and systemic barriers that are put in place.
This could be done by incorporating the voices of people who have disabilities or impairments and ask them how we could accommodate their needs (Ward, Raphael, Clark, & Raphael, 2016). We must address this change on all three levels society, macro, mezzo and micro in our practices (Cohen, Yuen, & Tower, 2007). Another solution that could be made to help the way social work conceptualizes disability would be not to judge individuals based on their disabilities, as we need to do so for the assessments they must go through before being approved for services.
Social workers deem their “eligibility and suitability for the limited pool of resources and services that we have for them to access” (Dowse, 2007, p. 71). Having these solutions in place will not only help provide more awareness and resources to individuals who have disabilities and families. Through the lens of a disability issue studies the problem of disability is all about challenging the normative throughout society.
Disability has several stems that could make a person have a bunch of intersectionality, but at the same time “intersectionality is not just talking about the places you’re oppressed but also the places where you have privilege” (Mingus, 2010). Individuals who do have a disability also need to recognize their privilege, as it might be easier for a white heterosexual male to access services easier than a queer identified, coloured female. Disability Studies has been made in place to “dismantle the widespread belief that disability is a natural state of bodily inferiority” (Martino & Collins, 2017).
In disability studies people are taught to focus on the individual and not just their disability or the impairment, this could be done by acknowledge the first person’s language and asking the person how you could address their disability, as to the individual might dislike first person language as they feel it is disrespectful or because they are that person because of their disability (Sinclair, 2013) (Titchkosky, 2001). Comparing Disability Studies and Social Work, there are numerous discrepancies particularly, the way Social Work studies usually focuses on individuals who have a physical disability because it is visible.
They do not take into consideration that there are several non-visible disabilities, and those individuals who have non-visible impairments or disabilities are still oppressed and are always trying to prove to social workers and others in the community service field that they do have this disability. They are required to get a psychoeducational assessment done to establish that they have an intellectual disability to get services that should be offered no matter if you have the evaluation done or not.