HISTORY & IMAGES

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ATTITUDES TO DISABLED PEOPLE

A recent UK Government Survey (Winter, 1995) showed that only 40% of disabled adults of working age 16-65 years old) were working or unemployed. The rest - 60% - or 2.2 million disabled people were on benefit and not looking for work. It also showed that of the 3.7 million disabled adults of working age 41 % had no educational qualifications. This compared to the whole working population very poorly where only 18% had no educational qualifications. This situation reflects generations of prejudice, fear and discrimination towards disabled people in education and work. The main reasons are negative attitudes and stereotypes, which are based on untrue ideas that have been around for thousands of years. We can all, at any time, become disabled, develop a physical or mental impairment. Perhaps the need to distance ourselves from reality makes it convenient to rely on negative attitudes and stereotypes of disability. They are less troubling than accepting the individuality, the joy, the pain, the appearance and behavior and the rights of disabled people.

As disabled people, we often feel that the culture we are in characterises us in a number of false ways that makes us seem different to everyone else. These are what we call stereotypes, which are bunches of attitudes that structure the way that people think about us. You've got the 'super-crip' or 'triumph over tragedy'. Have you ever noticed how often perfectly ordinary things that disabled people do become newsworthy? The blind mountain climber, the boy with cerebral palsy who walked one mile, or the deaf man who was a chess champion. These things are only seen as newsworthy because journalists have a view that disabled people usually can't or shouldn't be doing ordinary things. The 1996 London Marathon was advertised by NIKE showing us a guy with no legs or arms saying, "Peter is not like ordinary people, he's done the Marathon." This plays on two ideas. Firstly that we are not able to do things; and secondly, on people's curiosity of us as 'freaks' to grab their attention. We are often seen as 'cripples'. A term which comes from an old German word 'Kripple', meaning to be without power. By the way we don't like being called this.

With the development of the printing press in 1480, at a time when most people could not read in Europe, cartoons became a popular way of making political and moral comments to the mass audience over the next 500 years. The old ideas of the Greeks became recycled. Man was created by gods who were perfect in their own image, and so the less physically perfect one was the less good. Evil, moral weakness and powerlessness were shown as caricatured disabled people. When the Tudors wanted to discredit Richard III having usurped the throne from him and fearing a popular uprising to restore his heirs.

Tudor historians created elaborate propaganda of Richard as disabled and a vengeful mass murderer. Even his portrait, which hangs in the National Portrait gallery, has been X-rayed and Richard's hump was found to have been added 60 years after his death. Modern filmmakers often make their villains disabled. Not much changes. President F D Roosevelt, the only man to be four-times elected President of the USA was previously disabled, having had polio in both legs and was unable to walk unaided. Yet he perfected ways of disguising it, never being photographed in his wheelchair, as he believed (and maybe he was right): "The American public would never vote for a president who was a cripple."

In the last part of 19th century a growing number of scientists, writers and politicians began to wrongly interpret Darwin's theories of evolution and natural selection into seeing people with impairments, particularly those born with one - congenital - as a threat. It was no accident that these theories became important as industrialised countries like Germany, France, Britain and USA were competing with each other to make the rest of the world their empires. They had to have a view of themselves as superior to other races and having 'inferior' disabled people around was a threat. They were locked away in single sex institutions for life or sterilised. This led to segregation and special schools for disabled people. In 37 states in the USA, born-deaf women and anyone with an IQ (Intelligence Quotient measured on a biases test) under 70 were sterilised in the 1920s and 1930s. Sign Language was banned as it was thought deaf people would overpower hearing people.

We are often a burden and, at times of economic stress, that becomes more so. In Germany in the Third Reich there were whole films made by propagandists there to show how we were a burden on the state, the 'useless eaters', and we should be got rid of. In the end we were. 140,000 physically and mentally disabled people were murdered in 1939/40 at the hands of the Doctors of the Third Reich in six so-called clinics which were staffed by people who went on to run the concentration camps in Poland where six million Jews were exterminated. That argument is coming forward again in this country at the moment with cutbacks in the welfare state. There was a poll on television the other morning about how many people thought the doctor was right to kill off two disabled kids. 85% of people in Britain thought it was fine. Well, that is part of the history, part of the conditioning that we are up against. Now let's go right back to the beginning of 'western civilisation'. The Greek and Roman attitude was the body beautiful, which is personified by the sculptures of the time like the discus-thrower. The cult of the body beautiful was put into practice, particularly amongst the patrician classes, the ruling classes in Greek and Rome. Aristotle wrote 'that you should take your child off if they are imperfect and get rid of them'. And you didn't become a child until 7 days after you were born, so this allowed time for this to happen. It didn't always happen as parents do love their children and so quite a few disabled people got through, but in the representations on vases and tablets, sculptures and so on, you will find very, very few disabled people. In Rome, the games at the Coliseum put on to entertain and pacify the 'mob' included disabled children being thrown under horses' hooves, blind gladiators fighting each other and 'dwarves' fighting women.

The next period, which sees the body beautiful as very important, is the Renaissance. Take the Duke of Urban, there are several well-known paintings of him. He is always shown in profile. Why? Because he had a facial disfigurement on the other side and so you will never see him full frontal, he's always on the side. Renaissance painters idealised the human form even though it was a time when many people had impairments and most would have been scarred by smallpox.

There are many negative Biblical references to disabled people. The Book of Leviticus says that if you are a disabled person you can't be a priest. But charity was also seen as important particularly from the Judaic tradition - it was seen as a mean of achieving God's grace to help those less fortunate than oneself, and this idea was spread by Christianity. There are many pictures and stories from medieval times of penitent sinners. Groups of penitent 'cripples' are depicted trying to get alms and, if they wandered around long enough, feeling humble enough, then maybe they will make it in the next life. So it's a very strong message that is coming across. Disabled people were often scapegoats for the ills of society as in Breugel's painting "the cripples" where the fox tales denote wrongdoing. If you look at any medieval church, on the outside are the deformed ones, the gargoyles, and on the inside are the perfectly formed pictures around the crypt.

Plague - there were thousands and thousands of people wandering around Europe beating themselves, the flagellants, to try and make themselves more holy so they didn't get the Plague. That was the thinking that people had, so if you were different you were somehow marked. This comes right through to the present day. Many charity adverts are designed to create fear such as the 'the shadow of diabetes'. The girl living under the shadow of diabetes probably didn't even know she was in a shadow until she found herself up on the billboards of England for three years. She probably thought she was just injecting with insulin everyday and that was all right, but now she is suddenly living in this shadow. Most charity advertisements still use either fear, or make us look pitiful in black and white imagery.

Witchcraft got linked in with disabled people in 'The Great Witch Hunts' of 1480 to 1680. The 'Malleus Malleficarum', 'the Hammer of Witches' - was a bestseller in Europe from 1480 to 1680 and went to 70 editions in 14 languages and has whole sections in it on how you can identify a witch by their impairments or by them creating impairments in others or giving birth to a disabled child. Between 8 and 20 million people, mainly women, were put to death across Europe and a good proportion were disabled. Take the three witches hung after an Oxford trial in 1513; one of them was put on trial because she was a disabled person using crutches. This comes through in the folklore of Britain and Europe. The Brothers Grimm collected the oral stories of northern Europe and made them into their Fairy Tales. The witch in Hansel and Gretel is deformed, blind, ugly and disabled with a stick. If you go into any newsagent you will probably find this book for children, aged two or three. Or, how about the stories of evil imps changing healthy babies for disabled ones? Luther, the founder of German Protestantism, said, take the changeling child to the river and drown them.

And what about pirates? From Lego to Stevenson's Long John Silver or Blind Pew, or Barrie's Captain Hook in Peter Pan, they nearly all have eye-patches, hooks and wooden legs. All these disabled pirates that we have don't really fit with history because pirates had a system of simple social security long before anyone else. They had common shares in the common purse so, if you got injured during the course of your endeavors, you would retire to a tropical island with as much money, drink and, presumably women, as you wanted and you were unlikely to go on trying it as an impaired pirate. Yet what we find is that in the 19th century, a number of writers became obsessed with pirates being disabled and evil. In previous centuries, pirates had been socially acceptable as they plundered and built up empire. For example, Daniel Defoe wrote a bestseller on a certain Captain Singleton, pirate, and on his return thrice Lord Mayor of London who was a popular hero. But pirates outlived their usefulness and so were shown as evil and, you guessed it, disabled. We have also been figures of fun. Henry the VIII had his jester, William Somner, a disabled person or, as they were called then, a hunchback, of course a figure of fun. There are many other examples, and don't forget the obligatory dwarves in the court pictures - all to make people laugh. Today we are still doing it, people are laughing at 'Mr. Magoo' cartoons. Or did you see the film 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil' which makes fun of a blind and a deaf man? Think of the circus and the freak show where people paid money to laugh at people who were different to them. The last freak show in the USA only closed in 1995! How many other films can you think of where disabled people are shown as funny, evil or pathetic?

What doesn't come across is the fact that over the years, disabled people have been struggling their whole lives for our rights, for human dignity and to be just included. In the 1920s, when unions of disabled veterans were formed all over this country, they held sit-ins, occupations, in order to get the legislation that the Government took away in December 1996, the so-called 3% quota system and the registration of disabled employees. In the 1920s and 30s there were literally hundreds of thousands of First World War veterans with no rights at all in this country. So the first disability movement in this country was there and we owe them a great debt. Disabled people are still struggling for the right to use public transport, get into buildings, and go to school or college with their friends or to get a job.

EUGENICIST THINKING

Mary Dendy, an active eugenicist campaigner in the 1890's, in 'Feeble Mindedness of Children of School Age', asserted that children classified as mentally handicapped should be "detained for the whole of their lives" as the only way to "stem the great evil of feeble-mindedness in our country." "Feeble minded women are almost invariably immoral, and if at large usually become carriers of venereal disease or give birth to children twice as defective as themselves. A feeble-minded woman who marries is twice as prolific as a normal woman... Every feeble-minded person, especially the high-grade imbecile, is a potential criminal needing only the proper environment and opportunity for the development and expression of his criminal tendencies. The unrecognised imbecile is the most dangerous element in society." (Fenald, 1912)

"There was much debate about the loss of liberty for those with mental handicap in Parliament during the passage of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, but the liberty from which they required most protection was, in the view of society, the liberty to 'repeat their type' and thus increase the numbers of the degenerate and wasteral classes, with disastrous consequences for the entire community." (Wormald and Wormald, 1914, 'A Guide to the Mental Deficiency Act 1913')

"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feebleminded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a race danger. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed." Winston Churchill MP, Home Secretary at the time the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 became law.