This year marks significant anniversaries in disability rights: twenty-five years since Italy's Law 104 on "support services, social inclusion, and the rights of handicapped people," and ten years since the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The path ahead seems clear and well-marked for handicapped people to find genuine inclusion in our society. Yet we still encounter enormous obstacles. Vittorio Scelzo, drawing on his long experience with the Sant'Egidio Community, shares some vital observations to help us think through these questions — a conversation we hope to continue in future issues with voices of those who work and live within the disability world.
What changes do we still need to see? For some parents, the concept of "care" must evolve into something larger: a person cannot truly feel like an active member of society or community if their constitutional role is to be perpetually dependent. Vedere Oltre works in dialogue and education, convinced that we must imagine the entire arc of a disabled person's life. Such people, though they may depend on others, should still be able to realize their full potential within the capacities they have. Parents need support in learning to recognize those possibilities.
Trento's Pedagogical Consultation Service has worked for years to support parents with a disabled child, aiming to make parents active agents in their child's development — not rehabilitationists. They must remain parents. Ideally... not alone.
Many parents tell me the same thing: real inclusion remains far off. School inclusion has certainly borne fruit despite its obstacles, yet it seems to stop at the classroom door. It rarely extends into ordinary community life — whether in work or leisure. How do we foster genuine participation by all members in society and community? How do we nurture a culture of real welcome? Even if we grasp the importance of these values and try to live them, do we pass them on to our children and young people in our parishes? Are we talking about them enough? Too much?
Word also reached us of France's State Council ban on a Coordown advertisement in which people with Down syndrome answered a mother's question: would her expected child with Down syndrome ever be happy? The ban came so as not to disturb those who had chosen abortion. In Ombres et Lumière, director Cyril Douillet wrote months ago of troubling shifts in France, where the country celebrates the Trisome Games — international competitions for athletes with Down syndrome, in which our own Nicole Orlando participated — as proof of social integration and human worth, yet simultaneously the state pursues preventive genetic screening policies chillingly reminiscent of eugenics. Douillet concluded that "in the great game of life, most people with Down syndrome have no chance to win, because they are denied even the right to play."
We need a new awareness in education itself: teaching our children to accept that hardship can touch anyone, exposing them to realities where suffering seems to reign yet joy persists, helping them overcome fear of the different and teaching them to care, learning that pretending suffering doesn't exist only ensures it spreads in other forms. All of this belongs to the educational work we owe our children.
Cristina Tersigni, 2016