Research consultancy
COMMUNITY BASED REHABILITATION
DISABILITY
In ancient Rome, children with disabilities were treated as objects of scorn. Children who were blind, deaf, or mentally retarded were publicly persecuted and reported to have been thrown in the Tiber river by their parents. Some children born with disabilities were mutilated to increase their value as beggars. Other children born with disabilities were left in the woods to die, their feet bound together to discourage anyone passing by from adopting them. In the military city of Sparta, the abandonment of “deformed and sickly” infants was a legal requirement. In addition to that one of the great philosophers in the ancient Rome “Aristotle” further recommended that, there should be a law that no deformed child lives (Stiker, 2019).
In England there was exclusion of disabled children from ordinary schools, which occurred routinely in England until the late twentieth century was not recognized as something of concern to the society and it was not until the 1918 Education Act, which made schooling for all disabled children compulsory. This was one of the first steps towards educating children with disability globally and By 1921, there were more than 300 institutions for blind, deaf, ‘crippled’, tubercular and epileptic children in England (Watson, & Vehmas, 2019).
Although there has been a significant increase in access to basic education for children with disabilities in the last two decades, access to education is still limited to millions of children with disabilities around the world and children with disabilities have lower educational attainment than other children. They are also more likely to enroll in school late and leave earlier with fewer qualifications than other children. Estimates show that of the 67 million children school worldwide, children with disabilities constitute than one-third, and the chances of children with disabilities not attending school are two or three times greater than children without disabilities (Geere, Bartram, Bates, L., Danquah, Evans, Fisher, & Nguyen2018).
According to UN (2019) Disability is defined as a social situation particularly a particularly a form of social oppression imposed on people with impairments which is caused by social and environmental barriers that exclude them from participating in society and which is entirely distinguished from their individual impairment.
Disability
Nature of disability: Deaf (Hearing Impairment).
Hearing impairment (HI) is considered a hidden disability because it is not visible unlike other types of disabilities such as visual impairment or physical impairment which are clearly identifiable. HI or deafness according to (IDEA, 2004) is a condition where an individual is impaired in processing linguistic information through hearing. The severity of a hearing impairment is measured by the amount of sound that can be heard using one’s better ear and this is measured using decibels (dB).
It is categorized into four, that is, mild hearing impairment where the minimum sound that can be heard is between 25 and 40 dB, moderate hearing impairment where the minimum sound that can be heard is between 40 and 70 dB, severe hearing impairment where the minimum sound that can be heard is between 70 and 95 dB and profound hearing impairment where the minimum sound heard is 95 dB and over (WHO, 2012).
Hearing loss can be caused by a number of factors including; heredity (genetics), aging, loud sound exposure, diseases and infections, trauma (accidents), or ototoxic drugs (drugs and chemicals that are poisonous to auditory structures (Van and Dobie, 2004).
Sexual violence on deaf students in Uganda.
Sexual violence and abuse is a dark underbelly that continues to fester across communities in Uganda. But it could be more pronounced among vulnerable communities such as girls and women with hearing and speech disabilities. Usually, investigations require medical examination reports and survivors often find themselves revictimised as they are put to task to prove the allegations. This often elicits trauma and shame among victims.
Analysis of sexual violence among the deaf;
According to the daily monitor (on December 2021) it was reported that there was sexual violence on deaf children. For the survivors of sexual violence among this community, it is a tall order when the offenders are those in positions of influence.
“On a Friday afternoon, the orange glow of the radiant sun warmly embraced us in its rays as we set off to meet a 22-year-old former tailoring student at UNAD in Kiwanga, Mukono District. She completed a two-year course at the donor-funded institution. But she remains locked in depression after being abused. Her dream of becoming a fashion designer is like a mirage. She is now receiving mental and psychosocial support with an NGO after a protracted battle to prosecute the offenders run into hurdles.
Although the goal of inclusive education is to promote the academic and social integration of students, regardless of hearing status, hearing impaired students in public institutions often face social isolation and difficulties in academic participation and there is general lack of respect for the people with hearing impairment as are often raped and find it hard to report the perpetrator, this therefore affects the ability of the deaf school going girls from enjoying their rights of education.
People with hearing impairment are often marginalized and therefore they do not have the ability to exercise their right of justice, this is indicated in this story of the daily monitor which indicated that the girls in the story had been sexually abused and could not get justice.
Prevailing situation on the nature of disability
Hearing impairment is considered a disability, therefore the people who are deaf carry with them the stigma of lacking a typical human characteristic. The concept of stigma can be negative, because it separates the individual from the norm, when people with disabilities identify with other people who have disabilities they do not regard themselves as stigmatized, but as members of a select group, and this has an overall effect on social integration with the hearing persons.
The biggest problem and root cause of the increase in isolation and anxiety is communication difficulties fostered by the mainstreamed setting. A study of mainstreamed students showed that rather than being actively disliked, hearing impaired students were neglected by the hearing students in terms of socialization. The experiences of the hearing impaired graduates of inclusive institutions seem to indicate that during their attendance in these schools they encountered feeling of marginalization and isolation because they could not communicate easily with their classmates.
REFERENCES
Stiker, H. J. (2019). A history of disability. University of Michigan Press.
Watson, N., & Vehmas, S. (2019). Disability Studies: Into the multidisciplinary future. In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies (pp. 3-13). Routledge.
Geere, J. A., Bartram, J., Bates, L., Danquah, L., Evans, B., Fisher, M. B., … & Hunter, P. R. (2018). Carrying water may be a major contributor to disability from musculoskeletal disorders in low income countries: a cross-sectional survey in South Africa, Ghana and Vietnam. Journal of global health, 8(1).
