adminInternet, is rapidly becoming the new medium of wealth, the media is increasingly playing a more prominent role in our daily communication. The media is especially critical in promoting awareness of important social issues and bringing them into the public arena so that they can be addressed.
Issues that have been comprehensively addressed in the media and which spring readily to mind in this instance, include AIDS prevention, poverty elimination, population control, and agricultural development.
Disability is one such social issue that cries out loud for sustained media attention so that it can be brought into the public attention for its multi-faceted problems to be addressed.
The problems attendant on disability are, indeed, multi-faceted and interconnected. People with disabilities, who constitute 1 200 000 people or 1/10th of the country’s total population, suffer from an
all-encompassing lack of access to the fundamental rights and freedoms that other people in society take for granted.
This lack of access spans the whole spectrum of society, from lack of access to education, health care, employment, transportation, information, sports and recreation, accommodation and lack of access to the built environment.
Negative attitudes by society are mainly responsible for this stigmatisation and the erection of attitudinal barriers that shut out people with disabilities from mainstream processes, resulting in generalised social exclusion.
The majority of buildings in the country’s towns and cities are generally inaccessible to people with disabilities, especially those in wheelchairs, thus further compounding the social exclusion of people with disabilities.
Unfortunately, the generality of society remains blissfully unaware of the multitudes of problems that people with disabilities face on a daily basis, the dehumanising effect of stigmatisation and negative social attitudes, and the role that society can play in countering stigmatisation and discrimination.
Media intervention offers vistas of opportunities for inclusion of people with disabilities in all forms of societal activities. The most obvious effect of media is in its ability to increase cognitive knowledge by supplying people with information on the multi-faceted problems faced by people with disabilities in society, stigmatisation and the role that society can play in reversing the tide of stigma and discrimination.
The media can also educate the public on international instruments, local constitutional and legal frameworks affecting the lives of people with disabilities in order to make the public aware of the framework in which people with disabilities live and the need for disability-friendly legislation.
Through disability-sensitive reporting, the media can promote positive relationships between people with disabilities and the rest of society, particularly in respect to the stigmatisation and social exclusion of PWDs.
The media can lessen tension between people with disabilities and society in a number of ways, including, showing the other in a similar light to self and thus help build a bridge of common empathy, depicting people with the same types of problem, sharing similar interests and positions and condemning discrimination.
Seeing the common ground between one’s own group and another group of people builds empathy. Such thinking leads towards thawing of negative attitudes and normalising relations between groups with seemingly opposing viewpoints, resulting in joint decision-making, sharing of resources, tolerance of difference, and human security.
Through comprehensive and sustained coverage of cross-cutting disability issues, the media can help to set up the public agenda and frame the scope of public discussion so that the public not only takes note of these disability issues, but recognise them as a priority for national action and takes steps to address these issues.
Negative attitudes by society against disability and people with disabilities are responsible for the attitudinal and physical barriers that results in social exclusion of people with disabilities from society’s mainstream processes.
One of the media’s major objectives will therefore be to engender attitude change in society towards disability through disability-sensitive reporting. Disability-sensitive media reporting can invoke three types of changes: cognitive changes, the ways people think about disability and people with disabilities; attitudinal changes, the attitudes people hold towards people with disabilities; and behavioural changes, the ways people with disabilities and the mainstream society interact with each other.
The media may help to promote and mobilise public support for disability events such as the International Day for Persons with Disabilities, White Cane Day, Deaf Awareness Week, Epilepsy Awareness Week and the signing and ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
It also has influence on policymakers, particularly as they think about how to prevent and respond to disability issues, thus paving the way for the making of disability-friendly policies and decisions.
The Sunday Mail has to be singled out for special mention in this regard. In partnership with a number of companies, and top medical experts, the paper took practical steps to ensure disability inclusion and travelled to Copota School for the Blind in Masvingo in the first week of November to provide various forms of relief to the institution.
The bringing together of inter-sectoral allies to empower the marginalised is the essence of mainstreaming. The donation of tractors by President Mugabe and chicks and chicken feed by TN Holdings and Seed co, to the institution, which relies heavily on income generating projects for its sustenance, is a veritable form of empowerment that will see the school boosting its agricultural and
horticultural output, enrolling more children with disabilities, and ultimately achieving the vision of becoming a regional special needs learning centre.
The provision of restoration of sight for students at the centre during the eye clinics and the provision of care and treatment for children with albinism, in addition to improving access to health care for children with disabilities is also aimed at improving access to educational and other life opportunities.
- Lovemore Rambiyawo is the Information and Communications Officer for the National Association of Societies for the Care of the Handicapped (NASCOH). The author can be contacted on [email protected].
Online Reporter