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Violence and sexual violence against persons with disabilities at community level are serious issues. Though CBR programmes and DPOs are expected to prevent violence and offer support to the victims, there is very little informationabout their role in this regard.

Purpose: This research aimed to assess the level of violence and sexual violence experienced by DPO members, and the role played by CBR programmes in preventing it.

Method: The study involved a non-random consecutive sample of 146 persons with disabilities from 3 sub-districts of Bidar district in Karnataka, India. Using a structured questionnaire, interviews were conducted by a group of trained DPO members and CBR workers, many of whom had personal experience of violence. The data was entered using Epi-Info and then converted into spreadsheet Tables for analysis.

Results: 58% of the sample reported having experienced violence and 14% reported experiences of sexual violence during the previous 12 months. Girls and women reported higher levels of violence at different age groups. Male children and young adults reported having experienced more violence, including sexual violence, than older men. The research did not provide conclusive evidence that participation in the CBR and DPO activities played a protective role.

Conclusions: Violence and sexual violence against persons with disabilities are serious problems. More research on the subject, in terms of roles of CBR programmes and DPOs, is needed.

Purpose: This paper seeks to contribute to discussion on the understanding and measurement of empowerment of people with disabilities in developing countries. A novel, text analysis approach was used to depict the way in which empowerment is characterised in conventional measures in Western settings. This was then compared with depictions and analyses of the way in which empowerment is characterised in documents that have more relevance to developing countries.

Method: First, computer-based content and concept analysis was applied to three key empowerment measures. This was compared with analysis of responses to a recent online survey of empowerment conducted by the United NationsDepartment of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA). Visual representations in the form of “word clouds” were generated to depict key concepts within each data source. Second, to provide specific detail regarding how empowerment has been described in documents which relate to developing countries, more detailed computer-assisted lexical analysis was performed on the text of responses to the UN-DESA survey, and on the text of the Empowerment component of the CBR Guidelines.

Results: Initial “word clouds” illustrated considerable discrepancy between concepts inherent in the three most relevant empowerment measures when compared with responses to the UN-DESA survey relating to empowerment in a development context. Subsequent lexical analysis depicted greater specificity and ranked the concepts associated with empowerment in key disability and development-related documents.

Conclusions: Conventional Western measures of individual empowerment may not adequately encompass the broader social, economic and community orientation of empowerment as described in documents from disability and development circles. Further research is required to substantiate these novel and speculative indications.

In Disability Studies the evolution of conceptual models is often portrayed as linear, with a nineteenth-century charity model shifting to the medical model that dominated disability discourse in the twentieth century. This is then assumed to be largely unchallenged until the 1970s, when an emergent Disability Rights Movement re-framed issues into the social model, from which evolved a rights-based model. This paper documents two early efforts to address disability issues submitted to the League of Nations: the Crippled Child’s Bill of Rights in 1931 and a ‘Memorial’ requesting the establishment of an International Bureau of Information on Crippled Children in 1929. Neither submission achieved its stated goals, yet both reflect early attempts to place disability within wider social contexts.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine pre-service special education (PSpE) teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education (IE) for students with special educational needs (SEN) in Bangladesh.

Method: 100 PSpE teachers from a leading teacher education institute in Bangladesh were purposively sampled. A 20-item based survey questionnaire was used to measure participants’ attitudes. Items of the survey were developed from a literature review in which Attitudes Towards Inclusive Education Scale (ATIES) by Wilczenski (1992), Concern about Inclusive Education Scale (CIES) by Sharma and Desai (2002), and Interaction with Persons with a Disability (IPD) Scaled by Gething (1994) were considered as the key specialist resources. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were utilised in the analysis.

Results: The results revealed that while the PSpE teachers hold favourable attitudes towards students with SEN, they are concerned about some basic issues of inclusion. Practicum and close contact with children with SEN were found to be important variables which shaped the attitudes of the PSpE teachers. Implications of the findings are discussed and further suggestions are made as to how teacher education institutes may engage PSpE teachers more effectively with their programmes to promote better inclusive practices.

Conclusion: The study suggests that there is a need for providing PSpE teachers with experiential learning prior to school practicum.

During the “African Decade of Persons with Disabilities (2000-2009)”, East African countries witnessed significant achievements, especially in the development of law, collection of statistics and in funding. However, many persons with disability are still marginalised from opportunities in education, healthcare and employment.

Purpose: With the pre-supposition that the lack of institutional capacities for implementing disability policies is the one major stumbling-block which hinders widespread delivery of social services to persons with disabilities in low-income countries, this study makes a comparative analysis of institutional capacities in the disability sectors of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Method: The research methods adopted were a literature survey and a field survey. The framework for analysis consists of: 1) capacities and functions of disability units in central governments, 2) relationships between central and local governments in the disability sector, and 3) relationships between governments and organisations of persons with disability (DPOs). Special attention is paid to the status, roles and functions of national councils for disability (NCDs), the independent statutory bodies recently established in each of the three countries, with clear authority and duties for the implementation of disability policies. The NCDs enable multi-sectoral stakeholders to be involved in the implementation of disability policies; therefore, positive relationships between the governments and DPOs are essential for the smooth functioning of the NCDs.

Results: While the result of the field survey in Tanzania reveals several effective approaches for the smooth operation of the NCD, further study is needed to verify whether these approaches would be applicable to other East African countries such as Kenya and Uganda.