The alternative ruptures the disability industry – deconstructing ableist views embedded in psycho-emotional disability towards a critical understanding that ensures accurate representations of policy and disability

Social workers aim to integrate anti-oppressive strategies into their front-line practice. Students are taught to be critical of how systems and institutions control the lives of marginalized people and how to be aware of their own biases and power. Having a critical or structural understanding of social problems is essential if social workers wish to have a positive effect on people’s lives and make lasting social change. Mullaly (1997) describes what oppression looks like and how social workers are to respond. 125 Everyone suffers frustrations, restrictions, and hurt. What determines oppression is when these happen to a person not because of individual talent, merit or failure, but because of his or her membership in a particular group or category of people… Oppression protects a kind of citizenship that is superior to that of the oppressed. It protects the oppressor’s access to a range of better paying and higher status work. It protects the oppressors’ preferential access to and preferential treatment from our social institutions. (Mullaly, 1997, pp. 138-139) Mullay (1997) explains that “structural” social workers must critically examine their own actions and determine if they are contributing to oppression (pp. 202). Carniol (2000) directs social workers to challenge the current treatment of people who are oppressed by supporting individual empowerment and social change. The social model of disability is an essential theory in anti-oppressive practice. It was developed by Oliver as a way to help his social work students understand the hegemonic oppression of disabled people within society. As a professor of social work and a disabled person, Oliver (1990b) understood that social workers have power in their relationships to clients and that they needed to rethink disability in a critical way. I originally conceptualised models of disability as the binary distinction between what I chose to call the individual and social models of disability (Oliver. 1983). This was no amazing new insight on my part dreamed up in some ivory tower but was really an attempt to enable me to make sense of the world for my social work students and other professionals whom I taught [emphasis added]….I wanted to put this distinction into a framework that could be understood by professionals with a limited though expanding knowledge of disability issues. (p. 2) 126 Unfortunately, Oliver expressed that in twenty years social work had failed to embrace the social model, failed to meet disabled people’s needs and was dead in the lives of disabled people (Morgan & Roulstone, 2012; Oliver, 2004). He explains: “There is little doubt that the hegemony of the individual model still endures within social work, as in other professions” (Oliver, 2004, p. 11). Still, Oliver continued to work towards the goal of using the social model to inform anti-oppressive social work practice. In Social Work with Disabled People, Oliver and Sapey (2006) critique the “disability industry” and that social workers have been complicit in ignoring disability issues (p. ix). Social workers have relied on individual pathology assumptions in their practice, and ignored the social context that people face when they acquire a disability. They quote Paul Wilding (1982) in his comment that the emphasis on “…a medical, psychotherapeutic and individualized model of work” was for social workers a way to gain professional status (Oliver & Sapey, 2006, p. 22). They argue, however, that social work is the occupational group which is in the best position to challenge the injustices and barriers that people with disabilities face and change their practice to support and reflect the social model of disability. Morgan (2012), Oliver and Sapey (2006) and Reeve (2012) describe how the social model should inform social work practice, both in the critical analysis of social policies (macro level) and the one-on-one, front-line relationship with disabled people (micro level). Morgan (2012) frames the social model of disability as a paradigm shift or “threshold concept,” and explains that this is why it is so difficult for social work students to integrate (p. 215). Most students enter social work programmes with the professed aim of ‘helping’ and so to be confronted by an approach (the social model of disability) and a body 127 of research and theorising (disability studies) that challenges their taken-forgranted assumption that social work practice is ‘helpful’ is unsettling and can lead to resistance. (p. 215) The result is that students mimic what they believe the social model to mean, a problem that Morgan calls “ritualized performance” (p. 220). A threshold concept has five main characteristics, it is transformative; irreversible; integrative; bounded; and troublesome (Morgan, 2012). Morgan explains that the social model is often personally transformative, challenging personal beliefs and once explained often denotes irreversible knowledge. It is integrative and bounded in that it exposes underlying ideas and it creates conflict between disciplines, in this case between disability studies and social work. Lastly, it can be troubling for the learner: [A threshold concept can be] “alien”, counterintuitive or even intellectually absurd at face value’ (2003, p. 2). Clearly a social model perspective can be all three to some learners. Many students are distant from the lived experience of disability and take their cues from wider social and cultural depictions of and scripts for understanding disability. The idea of disability as an individual’s personal tragedy is so hegemonic that it is extremely difficult for some students to grasp an alternative despite the modelling of similar approaches to issues like gender and ethnicity and the pervasiveness of claims to non-judgementality and antidiscriminatory practice within social work. Threshold concepts like the social model can be ‘subversive’ and undermine deeply-held beliefs and attitudes and, in the context of social work, they trigger fundamental questions about the nature, practice and future existence of social work itself. (Morgan, 2012, p. 221) 128 As a social work student doing a practicum at a disability organization, I was tasked with representing the philosophy and values of the organization in writing a handbook on education. The enormity of the task meant that I had to understand the radical, anti-oppressive side of the movement. When confronted with disability pride, or parents who were angry at selective abortion or segregated services, I was shocked. At first I had trouble getting past the ingrained tragedy perspective and found the alternative viewpoint upsetting and completely absurd. I experienced this new knowledge as a radical, threshold concept in my own social work practice and began rethinking how I viewed people with disabilities and how they were treated by society. I started from an individual pathology framework, but I rapidly understood that this belief system was oppressive. I had also assumed that people with disabilities had access to the supports they needed, which was challenged by the reality of residual, micro-managed services that limit personal choice. The most difficult problem to be confronted with was how interpersonal exclusion and the devaluing of their lives affected the quality of life of many disabled people. They live a life that most people do not inherently see as valuable and are systematically excluded from typical work, recreation, education, living and social situations. This is the real tragedy, not their impairment. Forming relationships and being valued in any social role is difficult unless they fit into a stereotype or learn to manage and thrive within ‘normal,’ ableist society. For me, incorporating the social model affected both my microlevel practice, but also my macro-level analysis of the problem. In front-line practice, there are practical ways that social workers can implement the social model at the micro-level. Reeve (2012) uses Honneth’s work on social justice, suggesting that for justice to be realized, people need to experience recognition in three 129 areas: love; rights; and solidarity. A lack of recognition leads to exclusion, shame and degradation (Reeve, 2012). She points out how holding individual pathology model beliefs about disabled people has a cumulative emotional, personal effect in their lives. [It] is particularly important that professionals such as social workers understand how their behaviour and attitudes might (inadvertently or not) disable the person they are working with. Significantly, psycho-emotional disablism is cumulative like any form of emotional abuse (see Reeve, 2006). Consequently past experiences of being ridiculed or patronised may play out in current relationships with professionals. (Reeve, 2012, pp. 229-230) This presents a challenge to social workers, showing how a progressive, social model perspective changes their practice with disabled people: Put simply, a student on placement may not be able to do anything concrete about a voluntary sector service which is housed in an inaccessible building (structural disablism); however, the student does have control over the manner in which they interact and support a disabled person, the attitudes and assumptions that they make (psycho-emotional disablism), which in turn influence the services provided…..[In] contrast the elimination of psycho-emotional disablism relies on the social work student to be reflexive and self-aware of their own prejudices about disabled people so that these are not acted out and so is commensurate with the politics of recognition advocated by Honneth. (Reeve, 2012, pp. 230-231) Oliver and Sapey (2006) suggest that social workers evaluate the usefulness of their interventions in removing disabling barriers, and implement a position of “determined advocacy,” allowing disabled people the right to define their own needs (p. 186). 130 At a macro level, social workers need to embrace the social model in order to be relevant in the lives of people with disabilities, as social work from and individual pathology perspective is no longer viable (Oliver & Sapey, 2006; Morgan, 2012). There are fundamental questions about the future role of social work in the lives of disabled people in the personalisation era and about whether statutory social work can meet the wider needs and entitlements of disabled people….social work and social work education need to provide an articulate and convincing argument about what social work can offer disabled people in the twenty-first century. (Morgan, 2012, p. 224) In 1983, the original challenge that Oliver and Sapey gave social workers was to “...review the individualising and pathologising knowledge and methods that had dominated their practice, and to join disabled people in challenging the political, cultural and professional barriers they faced in their everyday lives” (Oliver & Sapey, 2006, p. ix). In relation to using the social model as a lens to analyze specific welfare policies, Oliver and Sapey (2006) suggest becoming a profession that is allied with the disability community, understanding their needs and goals: What is also required is that social workers have a knowledge of the social model of disability that will inform their actions as practitioners and managers within a welfare system that has itself been seen to be oppressive….If social work is to be an effective ally to the struggle and to use its influence within the welfare state to alter and modify disability policies, it must do so from a position that is informed by its work with collective organisations of disabled people. It may, in Finkelstein’s terms, need to become a profession allied to the community. ( pp. 184-188) 131 6. While this thesis analyzes policy from a theoretical or ideological standpoint, the implications are real for people with disabilities. Many people with disabilities experience life-long poverty with no opportunity to escape. The charity mindset that pervades income replacement programs, the low benefits and the policing of personal details does not create a feeling of equity and accommodation, but further segregates and disables people. People with disabilities should not be celebrating a benefit increase on AISH that keeps them well below the poverty line, but that is the reality. They are the “deserving poor,” but not deserving of equity and accommodation as a result of that label.