If you were taunted with that as a child then my guess is
you would feel intimidated. If you were
a child with a disability then you would feel no less intimidated, but
depending upon the range of your disabilities you may not be able to just walk
away or even be able to think of some remark to throw back.
If you overheard one child say that to another in the street
I doubt you would stop and interfere, after all kids say things all the time,
it’s a natural part of growing up, toughens them up for later life.
If you overheard a child say that to a child with a
disability then even if you did not interfere I am sure you would feel a
different reaction for eg. how awful, that child needs to be taught a lesson, I
blame it on the parents, society etc.
Yet every single day we use terms to describe people with
disabilities like ‘they have special needs’, ‘they go to a special school’, ‘we
don’t use the term disabled we prefer to say special’ etc. etc. Let me try and explain where I am coming
from:
Jack and Jill had grown up together, Jack had brown eyes and
Jill like most of her friends had blue, it did not seem to make a great deal of
difference when they were younger. Jill
started to notice that Jack always seemed to get a lot of fuss made over him
because he had brown eyes, he was often referred to as that ‘special little boy
with the brown eyes’, people would smile sympathetically at Jack’s parents and
say words like ‘It takes special parents to raise a special child’. Jack was
sent to a ‘special’ school. Jill
started to resent Jack, she wanted to be thought of as special too. One day they went up to the top of a hill,
everyone thought Jack had fallen, but Jill knew different….
Ok so I am having a bit of fun there, but there is a serious
side to this.
You see, I really don’t believe that children are born with
discrimination in their genes. Put a
two year old with disabilities with an able bodied two year old and they will
play quite happily, make the age gap bigger and they will still play, so what
causes this to sometimes change.
Outside influences play a big part and of course the discriminative
child grows up to be a discriminate adult and thus the cycle is set.
Are we unwittingly sending out subliminal messages to
society by using these sort of descriptive terms?
Now I am not saying that young Jack in my story was not
special, but what I am saying is that Jill was too. Jack was a child just as special as Jill but a child who had
DIFFERENT NEEDS. Perhaps if that had
been explained to Jill the outcome would have been very different.
I have two beautiful Grandchildren, one has different needs
to the other but they are both very very special.
