Nipping Away at Devaluation

Devaluation can occur in subtle ways, and sometimes unknowingly. We usually mean well, and work at ways intending to be valuing and uplifting. However, when our “SRV lenses are on”, we realise that sometimes those measures in themselves can be harmful in how they cause people with disabilities to be perceived.

Dr Fahmida Islam of Chittagong, Bangladesh, a physician, activist, and mom of a son with autism, left a four day course on Social Role Valorization with a sense of urgency to do something to ease the wounding she saw impacting people around her. It seemed overwhelming – she realised this as soon as she returned from her SRV training and tried to make a plan for how to begin. As Founder and Director of Foundation for Autism Research and Education (FARE), she felt an obligation to act, and recalled the words of the SRV experts – “Don’t let what you CAN’T do get in the way of what you CAN do”.

One piece of powerful learning for Dr Fahmida was how the labels that are placed on a person with disability can come to take over the identity of the person. Those labels can be helpful in terms of helping people access certain services that can help. However, in the minds of many people, a child with autism may become actually seen as autism itself (the condition) rather than a full human being, a student, a son, a valued contributor to society, a citizen.

This bothered Dr Fahmida, and she and her team wondered how they might lessen the impact of this constant labelling and categorizing of the students they serve at FARE as “autistic”. They noticed that the van in which the children rode into school every day was emblazoned with the name of the school on the side - pretty typical across Bangladesh. However, the name of the school is Spectra School of Autism. With her new lenses, she realized that it was not necessary or even helpful that this label followed the students everyday as they travelled to school, reinforcing the notion in thousands of passer-by’s minds that the most important thing about the people on that van is autism.

Dr Fahmida and her leadership team realized that this was one small way to nip at the heels of overly labelling their students. They have renamed the school “Spectra School”, leaving out the unnecessary label – this means there is a little bit more space for people to see these young people in more valued ways. They are not trying to deny the disability, just put it in perspective as one characteristic about a person, not the defining characteristic. Slowly, taking small steps to keep chipping away at devaluation is imperative, as is not getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the journey that lies before us in combatting devaluation. For that we need to have eyes that are SRV savvy and take small steps in translating SRV thinking to SRV doing. Dr Fahmida and the small but strong team of SRV practitioners in Bangladesh have them, and that does make a difference.