The answers to those questions mirror the reasons why disabled women so often occupy the lowest social, political, and economic rung of society in general.
Disabled women are in survival mode. Much of the energy of disabled women and their organizations is focused on meeting the most basic needs, such as access to food, shelter, and medical care. What little energy and resources are able to be focused on policy are often devoted to serious, grassroots, local issues such as forced sterilization, the prevention of abuses, and access to educational and employment opportunities. Especially in resource poor environments, International policy, in my opinion rightly, gets deprioritized in favor of a focus on immediate needs.
Disabled women, especially those from developing countries, are for the most part too undereducated to participate in meetings like this. UNESCO estimates that the overall literacy rate for women and girls with disabilities is 1 percent. According to a report published by the UK advocacy group Disability Awareness in Action, fewer than 4% of male disabled children in India go to school at all. One can assume the figure is worse for girls. According to Human Rights Watch, disabled women in my own country are 5 times as likely as non-disabled women to have fewer than 8 years of schooling and US census data for the year 2000 indicates that less than 7% percent of American disabled women hold Bachelor's degrees, compared to over 14% for non-disabled women. And despite all the international health community's rhetoric about embracing traditional and grassroots knowledge, we all know that the opinions of those on the extreme low end of the educational bell curve are simply not sought. This inequity must be dealt with before we can even pay lip service to the idea that disabled women are taking an equal place at the international health policy table. Some cultural customs make it difficult for disabled women to participate in civil society. In many countries, social mores prohibit disabled people and women from speaking in public, or even walking down a public street. Power dynamics also play a role in this scenario. In cultures where women are taught to defer to men, and disabled people are taught to defer to able-bodied people, disabled women, of course, experience the full force of both oppressions at once. Yet precious little work is being done to empower disabled women living in such cultures, despite the fact that similar work has proven hugely beneficial to able-bodied women. In both developing and developed countries, access is a barrier to the participation of disabled people in society, especially in under-resourced environments. In fact, this exclusion is often intentional as those who allocate the resources choose to ignore the needs of disabled people in favor of providing more programming for the majority. For example, many development programs will build schools or hold food distribution programs in places that are not accessible to people in wheelchairs, and have no material in alternate format for people who are deaf or blind. When this discriminatory behavior is pointed out, the directors of said program are likely to claim that 1) it was too expensive and difficult to provide access or 2) that no disabled people come to the program anyway. What the directors fail to realize of course is that disabled people are often the most
in need of services and too, even if they wanted to come to the program, they can't. The process of inclusion is made all the more difficult by the fact that many countries lack civil rights legislation for disabled people. Perhaps most problematically, in my opinion, is the systematic infantilization of disabled people, women, and disabled women in particular. Disabled women are expected to remain in the house as perpetual little girls. Almost no expectations of employment, marriage, childbearing, or any adult responsibility are imposed upon young girls with disabilities; not that I think the imposition of traditional expectations is a good thing for any woman, but it’s far worse, in my opinion, to have no expectations of any kind for a child. All too often developmental assistance directors also harbor these same prejudices, and therefore do not allow disabled women to access programs such as microcredit and leadership training, which have been so successful in increasing women's empowerment globally, because they don't expect disabled women to have the strength of character, or ambition, to complete the program successfully. This is, in my opinion, a drastic error which will keep disabled women dangling from the bottom rung of our social structure. But I don't mean to sound like all is hopeless, because it isn't. Across the globe and boundaries of all kinds, disabled women are organizing themselves, aided by sympathetic rather than pitying development organizations. Mobility International, a U.S. based non-profit organization, has held leadership trainings for disabled women for nearly 25 years, as well as conducting much impressive research on the needs of disabled women. Disabled women are also connecting in the mostly barrier-free world of cyberspace, through organizations such as Disabled Women on the Web, Gimpgirl, and the Women's International Linkage on Disability, or WILD. But women are also meeting in their own church basements, schoolyards, and neighborhood community centers. For example, 75 Liberian women with disabilities just met to discuss the needs of disabled women in Liberia earlier this month. The one-day meeting was funded by the Global Fund for Women. Although disabled women have many barriers to overcome before achieving true equity in society, I think that we, with the aid of the international health and development communities, have discovered the world beyond our families and houses. In fact, I believe we are emerging all too slowly, in my opinion, to take our rightful place in it. While the impetus to take this new position must come from disabled women themselves, allies play an important role. In order to circumvent the sexist and ableist nature of most present societies, disabled women require support from those in power, be they able-bodied women, disabled men, and even, yes, able-bodied men. To ignore the needs of these women as they struggle to improve life quality for themselves and others is to deny the reason that most international health policymakers choose to do this work in the first issues in the first place. Editor's note: Reach Out would
like to thank Martina for that thought provoking article. To learn more about Martina please check out her website.
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