Human Rights and Values
Inclusion
Inclusion
Despite improvements in recent years, adults with learning disabilities can find themselves among the most marginalised people in the community. The 2001 white paper, 'Valuing People', focuses on inclusion as one of the key features that will bring positive change to people with learning disabilities. This can be achieved by including people with learning disabilities in day-to-day activities such as education, leisure and where possible, work. There should be a greater access to mainstream activities and less reliance on specialist ones.
Adults with learning disabilities can still often find themselves among the most marginalised people in the community. Despite hospital resettlement programmes and the development of community care, exercising choice remains difficult for many. Similarly, although many individuals would like to work, for the majority a segregated day centre remains their only option. As a result, people with learning difficulties are too often socially and financially impoverished, vulnerable and living in, but rarely a part of, their communities. (Supported living and supported employment: opening up opportunities to people with learning difficulties. Ken Simmonds, Joseph Roundtree Foundation 1998)
The 'Valuing People' (2001) White Paper (and the equivalent publication in Scotland - 'The Same As You') puts inclusion as one of the key features of its vision to bring positive change in the lives of people who have a learning disability. The way to achieve this inclusion, the Government states, is for learning disabled people to be included in an ordinary life. This includes education, leisure and recreation, daytime opportunities and, where possible, work. There should be a greater access to mainstream services and less reliance on specialist ones.
The Government was so concerned about the increasing levels of social exclusion for various groups of people in the 1990s that it set up a special unit to study and report on the subject. The Social Exclusion Unit was created in 1997 with the mandate to look at a better quality of life for all, improve equality and tackle deprivation. The unit described social exclusion as follows: 'it is a shorthand term for what can happen when groups of people (or areas) suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poverty, poor skills, unfair discrimination, poor housing, high experience of crime, bad health and family breakdown'.
Those who are vulnerable can experience multiple disadvantage, particularly those who are disabled or from some ethnic minority groups. The need is for those people with a learning disability not to experience their community care in areas of social deprivation as these areas have fewer social facilities, fewer shops, lower performing schools, poor transport links and fewer doctors. Research has also shown that the take up of services and welfare benefits by vulnerable groups in deprived areas is particularly poor.
People with learning disabilities need to be supported to access their civil rights as one way to achieve better participation and inclusion in their community. They may not appreciate that alternatives and options should be available to them when services are being offered. They are unlikely to be aware that they have the right to complain just like other members of society, or to have the skills to do so.
In 2004 the Learning Disability Task Force produuced a report called 'Rights, Independence, Choice and Inclusion' which was concerned how people's rights became easily undermined. Experiences described simply as 'bullying' or 'abuse' when encountered by people with learning disabilities would be more appropriately called hate, harassment, assault or rape if experienced by non-disabled people.
Citizen equality, together with equality of opportunity, is required in the pursuance of inclusion. However equality is not just simply equal distribution of resources to those that need them; it is also the provision of the necessary support to meaningfully access such resources. The more individuals with learning disabilities take their place in the community in positively regarded social roles such as friends, good neighbours, home owners, team mates, workers/wage earners, people who vote and volunteers, the more they will help to change the expectations of others. These changed expectations should bring about increased respect and dignity and help disregard stereotypes.
Furthering the pursuance of inclusion or tackling social exclusion not only requires an individual response but also asks wider political questions over which individuals have no control. For example, those who are reliant on the welfare benefits system for their income all their life are pretty powerless to grant themselves a higher income! If few (or accessible) buses run to an individual's estate then it may be difficult for them to go and do their shopping at a cheaper supermarket. Low policing levels might mean they are a repeated victim of crime. However, whatever the major political implications affecting the drive for a policy of inclusion, a lot can still be done to get people creatively involved in what does exist in mainstream facilities in their community.
Tackling exclusion is also linked to empowering the individual. This means giving people with learning disabilities a voice, allowing them to make choices for themselves about the direction of their own life borne out of their wishes and aspirations. In fact, to borrow a quote, this means to be 'The Same As You' and to be included.
