Focus: Knowing how to deal with disfigurement: a valuable asset
By Cathy Wheatley (April 2005 Issue)
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Why is knowing about disfigurement important for trainers? With ‘diversity’ being the big buzzword at the moment, a knowledge, understanding and expertise in dealing with disfigurement can be valuable to their continuing professional development. Not only that, it can offer huge potential for personal development. As a professional trainer and equal opportunities adviser for Changing Faces, the national organisation that supports and represents people with disfigurements, my argument is that those who can tackle disfigurement are ahead of the game in tackling many other equality, diversity and inclusion issues.
Disfigurement doesn’t usually bring with it functional limitations and therefore it is not always seen as a disability in the way that someone in a wheelchair would be seen as being disabled. So it isn’t often even considered as part of the disability equality trainer’s portfolio. In many people’s minds disability equals physical impairment, statistics from the Labour Force Survey show the UK has a population of approximately 9.8 million disabled people, yet less than 5 per cent of this population uses a wheelchair.
My organisation lobbied hard to get disfigurement included in the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) 1995 so that there would be legal protection for those affected. The barriers that people with disfigurements face on a daily basis are that of attitude and fear – fear of what to say, where to look and how to interact with that person. This can be common in all forms of disability but is even more relevant to people with disfigurements of the face, because it is literally (if you will excuse the pun) ‘in your face’. ...
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