The impact is ontoviolence

(Fiona Kumari - Professor of Disability and Ableism Studies in the School of Education & Social Work @ University of Dundee, “The violence of technicism: Ableism as humiliation and degrading treatment,” Ableism in Academia: Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education, UCLA Press, 2020, Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13xprjr.18)

We do not normally think of inaccessibility as a form of inhumane and degrading treatment. The Price case was a test as to whether inaccessibility came within the remit of Article 3 of the ECHR. Article 3 states that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’. This is an absolute right with no exemptions or limitations. The Court is required to take into account all the circumstances of the victim. In The Greek Case (1969) ‘degrading treatment’ is defined as ‘deliberately causing severe suffering, mental or physical’ and ‘inhuman treatment’ that ‘grossly humiliates the […] individual before others or drives him to act against his conscience’. In Tyrer v. the United Kingdom (1978), the European Court of Human Rights stated that it was enough for the victim to be humiliated in his or her eyes and not necessarily in the eyes of others. Inaccessible environments are not benign: they occur through a lack of insight, conditioned by the practices of ableism, into the situation of difference being modelled on the illusory notion of the normative (benchmark) human being. In Price the court concluded that inaccessibility is ipso facto material and ontological violence – a form of degradation and debasement, even if the parties to the action did not intend to violate the psychic and bodily integrity of Price. This is an extraordinary judgment, a radical decision swept under the carpet, through a process of restricting the decisions to only prisons and psychiatric facilities.2 Universities are, however, on notice, as inaccessible environments constitute humiliation and debasement. The European Court of Human Rights reaffirmed the decision in Tyrer (1979) and found that Price’s Article 3 rights had been violated despite the lack of ‘any positive evidence of an intention to humiliate or debase’. Inaccessible relations hurt and as such constitute an assault on beingness and shape our ontological character. Humiliation caused by inaccessibility can lead to low self-esteem, social phobia, anxiety and depression, pointing to a link between humiliation and ableist practices as a form of harm (Hartling and Luchetta 1999; Torres and Bergner 2010). Torres and Bergner (2010) identify four key elements of humiliation on which there is general consensus in the literature, namely • Calling into question a status claim • There is a public failure of the status claim • The degrader has status to degrade, highlighting asymmetrical power relations • There is a rejection of the status to claim a status, that is, a disabled academic is denied recognition of their claim to discrimination There is no room in the chapter to discuss the phenomenon of microaggressions: demeaning implications and other subtle insults against minorities that may be perpetrated against individuals due to gender, race and religious difference, sexual orientation, and disability status (Solorzano 1998). Suffice to say that there is an interconnectivity between microaggressions and humiliation. Relations that read differences as forms of subordination and signs of deficiency produce suffering that humiliates and debases. I have used the term ontoviolence to capture these effects that literally seep into the interior spaces of a ‘cast-out’ person’s beingness (ontological framing), producing instant, longer-term and accumulated effects of defilements of the body and mind. As Guru (2011) reminds us, humiliation always has a context, as does the Convention’s preamble, which understands the production of disability to occur within the context of interactions. Context and responses of technicism within universities towards the disabled academic often mask humiliating practices. Indeed, acts of humiliation are a direct attack on equality measures and run counter to an ethos of celebrating diversity. This is because humiliation is only possible when an individual already possesses a sense of self-determination: it is an assault on the selfrespect of the victim. As Parekh (2011, 23) puts it, disabled academics ‘have a certain view of themselves and the kind of minimum treatment that is due to them. When this is denied and others’ treatment of them falls below their expectations, their self-respect is violated.’ The very existence of a system of equality law raises reasonable expectations on the part of the disabled academic; however, it is the negation of a disabled academic’s experiences – an act of ontoviolence that results in the caustic harm of humiliation. Ableist practices erode confidence in institutional mechanisms to resolve inequalities and are manifested by accumulated experiences of ableist defilements. Interestingly, there is a school of thought that argues that when self-respect and a sense of entitlement are lacking, individuals do not experience of sense of humiliation (Parekh 2011). I am not convinced; internalised ableism means that in order to survive some disabled staff may accept or tune out ableist interactions. Equally, from the perspective of perpetrators, it is difficult to prove intentionality where the norms around the debasing of disability are so insidious and commonplace that they may not even arise as a conscious form of negative intentionality – that is, how institutions respond to disabled people. We may ask whether intentionality matters in the final instance; should we instead be focused on the effects of the ‘event’? One example given by Inckle (2019), a disabled lecturer at the University of Liverpool, in response to a request for reasonable adjustment, illustrates this point: ‘The university might deem it reasonable for you to go downstairs on your bottom in some situations rather than schedule you into fully wheelchair accessible rooms.’ I cannot even fathom a situation whereby the above-mentioned expectation would be considered reasonable. Again, Parekh (2011, 25–6) concludes that ‘humiliation is most effective when it is so deep and pervasive that it is no longer recognised for what it is, but that does not gainsay its reality’. Humiliation can involve some not-so-self-evident ironies: a sense of technicism’s reductio ad absurdum. At my institution there is online diversity training about disability produced by an equality consultancy business that I believe contains certain offensive assumptions and viewpoints about disability, yet in order to comply with equality training protocols, disabled employees are required to complete these packages, to further submit to humiliating practices as part of their employment contracts. Inckle (2019) points to another one of these ironies: her academic department is the School of Law and Social Justice and the vice-chancellor of the university was awarded a damehood on the basis of services to equality. Bringing about complaints means being ushered into processes within the university that further humiliate and silence, where the onus of proof is on the disabled academic to prove the validity of discrimination. This ontoviolence has the effect of sanitising technicist ableism and redirecting attention away from a university’s equality obligations. Ultimately it diminishes the contributions of disabled academics to the intellectual life of universities. This chapter has threaded together the practices of ableism within universities in spotlighting the forms of technicism engaged and weaponised to harm and humiliate disabled academics as they go about their work. It is clear from European case law that inaccessibility is a form of ontoviolence and that there is a direct relationship between accessibility and discrimination.