Disability images and human reality
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Chris
Sidoti
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The electronic mass media are among the most powerful influences on people's lives today. You who work in the media shape our view of the world and of each other. Through media exposure we get access to a vast range of life situations that go far beyond what any one of us could personally experience.
It's both a blessing and a curse. We have more knowledge but a lot of it is superficial.
This has important consequences for the way we view people. In a world now crowded with information we are influenced by portrayal as much as by personal contact. And the way people with disabilities are portrayed has an enormous effect on their place in society.
I emphasise immediately that people with disabilities have the same human rights and community responsibilities as all other citizens. This ought not to require emphasis but it does. When it comes to enjoying their rights and exercising their responsibilities people with disabilities are often pushed to the margins of society. The way they are represented in the media can promote or reduce this marginalisation.
This is where you can make a difference. Here are three questions to ask yourself about portraying people with disabilities. They are all about stereotypes.
- Does the portrayal patronise? No one is incapable of being a person, whatever aspect of his or her life is affected by disability. People with disability live full, active, normal lives. They are not objects deserving pity or sports stars heroically conquering adversity. At least most of them aren't. Yet almost all media portrayals fall into one or other of these two categories. Both are patronising.
- Does the portrayal victimise? Throughout history people with disabilities have been presented as victims of fate. They are still presented that way. These representations reinforce their dependent status. They are victimising.
- Does the portrayal demonise? Everyone is familiar with the villain who has a limp or a scar or is in some way not "normal". Describing people we identify as "other", as not just different from us but actually bad, is perhaps the most common way of putting people outside the community and keeping them there.
Here is a fourth question that can set the record straight.
- Does the portrayal normalise? Community life is the accepted goal of and for people with disabilities, not isolation, dependence and rejection and not pity or hero status. The representation of people with disabilities as normal people in normal situations is all they ask for. The media have an important responsibility to portray the reality of people's lives, not some imagined reality. In this way they can reflect the changes that have occurred and continue to occur in our society. And they can encourage further change.
When you are preparing a news story or a program that involves people with disabilities, think about that. Present them as individuals, not as people characterised by their disabilities. Show all aspects of their lives, not only those that concern their disability. After all, no one is defined by ability or disability. The great majority of people have aspirations and life activities in common but different ways of doing things.
Yes, people with disabilities have to overcome barriers to do many things others take for granted. For that they rightly receive admiration. They also have to grapple with barriers that need not exist, discriminatory barriers and stereotypes that are legacies of history, that were constructed by prejudice and that must now be removed.
The most important thing to do is to talk with people with disabilities. It's very important not to rely simply on advice about people with disabilities from government, academics and carers. Many people have expertise in this area but the real experts are people with disabilities themselves. And they don't have only one view. They are as diverse in their opinions as the rest of the community.
This isn't a plea for good-news stories to become the dominant way people with disabilities are represented to the world. It's a request for a better reflection of the reality, diversity and dignity of human lives, for us to see a person in a wheelchair at the cinema or a deaf person in a TV game show or hear a person with intellectual disability on the radio. People with disabilities can be portrayed as saints or sinners. From time to time they will be one or the other. People are complicated, sometimes they will be good and bad at the same time or perhaps just plain ordinary. That's what people with disabilities are. People.
