By:

Imran Ahmad Sajid

M.Phil 2nd semester
Institute of Social Development Studies (Social Work)
University of Peshawar
By: Imran Ahmad SAjid 2
 In ancient Greece the philosopher,
Aristotle, advised getting rid of a child if it
was imperfect. Greek law even dictated
that a newborn baby was not really a child
until seven days after birth, so that an
imperfect child could be disposed of with a
clear conscience. 
 Martin Luther, founder of Protestantism,
speaking of congenitally impaired children,
said: "Take the changeling child to the
river and drown it."

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 An impairment is a physiological disorder or injury. Or
 Lacking part or all of a limb, or having defective limb,
organ or mechanism of the body.
 A disability is an inability to execute some class of
movements, or pick up sensory information of some
sort, or perform some cognitive function, that typical
unimpaired humans are able to execute or pick up or
perform.
 A handicap is an inability to accomplish something one
might want to do, that most others around one are able
to accomplish.
 Or the Disadvantaged or restriction of activity caused
by disability.
 Source: [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry//disabilities/batya/node2.html]

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By: Imran Ahmad SAjid 5
 ‘disabled person’ is a person who has a
‘disability’. A person has a ‘disability’ if:
 ‘he or she has a physical or mental impairment
which has a substantial and long-term adverse
effect on her or his ability to carry out normal
day-to-day activities.’ (Source: Section 1(2) of the Disability
Discrimination Act, UK. DDA)
 In
short, this definition says that disability is
activity restricted by impairment.

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Is this glass
of water
half-full or
half empty?

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 Models of disability provide a
framework for understanding the way
in which people with impairments
experience disability. They also provide
a reference for society as laws,
regulations and structures are
developed that impact on the lives of
disabled people. 
 Example: Glass is Half Empty, Glass is
Half Full
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1. Moral/Religious Model
2. Medical/Individual Model
3. Charity/Tragedy Model
4. Economic Model
5. Social/Rights-Based Model
6. Disability Model
7. Other Models
i. Rehabilitation Model
ii. Spectrum Model
iii. Market Model
iv. Empowering Model

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• Punishment from God (ie: due to
displeasure)
• Evil spirits (possessed)
• Witchcraft
• Bad Karma (did something evil in the
past)
• Gift from God
• Character weakness
• Corruptness
• Immoral-ness
• Examples: villains in movies,
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 A ‘sick/disabled’ person has one or more parts of the mind
or body that need to be fixed to be ‘healthy’.
 Focus treatment on the non-functioning component of the
mind/body to restore to ‘normal’
 Practitioners as experts = in charge and directing service
 Clients = expected to seek help, ‘follow orders’ and get
‘well’.
 May involve community or institution based services
 Disability is therefore an individual health issue

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 http://www.ddsg.org.uk/taxi/images/medical-model.g
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 Thisis an offshoot of the medical
model, which regards the disability
as a deficiency that must be fixed by
a rehabilitation professional or other
helping professional.

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• Disability is considered a tragedy
• Society needs to take care and
protect persons with disabilities
• If someone with a disability achieves
something that a “normal” person
does, then the person with a
disability is looked at as inspirational
(super crip)
• This is often mixed with the Moral
and Medical Models
• Examples: inspiration news story,
telethons, charities
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 Often employed by governments
 Equates value to society with productivity. Disability can
strain society due to decreased productivity.
 Interventions minimise the impacts of non-productivity
and the financial support required for people with a
disability and their carers
 Practitioners provide economic, legislative and program
support to maintain people in society whilst clients are
expected to participate in programs and accept financial
support.
 Society pays for the financial support and programs via
taxation and abides by legislation

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 Cont
;

 Developed in the 1970s by activists in the Union of

the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) ,
the social model of disability has been called ‘the big
idea’ of the British disability movement (Hasler,
1993).
 It is society which disables physically impaired people.
 Disable people are a socially oppressed group.
 Disability is a social oppression, and not a form of
impairment. [Tom Shakespeare, ‘Research in Social
Science and Disability’ Volume 2, pp. 9-28 (2002)).]
 Disability results from barriers in society and the
environment
 Physical barriers
 Attitudinal barriers
 Disability as inability of society to accommodate all its
members.

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  ‘disabled by society not by our
bodies’.

http://www.asiadisability

18
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 Cont
;

 Criticism of Social Model

 If the social model argument was pushed to its
logical extreme, we might not see impairment as
something which we should make efforts to avoid.
As a consequence, we might be unconcerned
about road safety, gun control, inoculation
programmes, and mine-clearance.
 having more disabled people is by no means a bad
thing, and that we should not always try to avoid
impairment. [does this make sense?]
 ‘barrier free environment’ is an unsustainable myth
(a fairy tale, such as in Finkelstein, 1981).
Removing environmental obstacles for someone
with one impairment may well generate obstacles
for someone with another impairment.

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 Cont
;

 It is impossible to remove all the obstacles to people

with impairment, because some of them are
inextricable aspects of impairment, not generated by
the environment. If someone has an impairment which
causes constant pain, how can the social environment
be implicated? If someone has a significant intellectual
limitation, how can society be altered to make this
irrelevant to employment opportunities, for example?
Does mainstream sport disable impaired athletes by
imposing oppressive criteria – such as being able to
run to play football?. Some of these examples may
seem ridiculous. But they point to the problem of
pushing the social model to its implications, and
highlight a flaw in the whole conception.

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 Disability is one of many normal aspects
of human life that many of us will
experience over a lifetime.
 Look at the experience of having a
disability as just one facet of adapting to
the human condition
 None of us is perfect, we all have (or will
have some day) diminished capacity of
one sort or another (due to age,
temporary injury, or emerging disability)
and we will all have to make adaptations
to accommodate our disabilities.

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Which one is
more
accurate?
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