Gov's disability awareness campaign forgets where negative attitudes are from

26 September 2023 , 16:51

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This morning the Government launched its latest disability awareness campaign to much scorn from disabled campaigners. Ask, Don't Assume is apparently, about changing attitudes toward disabled people and encouraging non-disabled people to ask instead of assuming things about us.

In theory, this sounds great, but under the surface, this is just another fluffy PR exercise from the Minister for Disabled People which aims to distract from the fact that the conservatives are responsible for the way disabled people are viewed.

The campaign claims the aim is "empowering the public to become allies to disabled people" but in my opinion there is no call to action, though the government won't agree, beyond “ask the poor disableds invasive questions”.

There are also no resources that tell people how to be better allies to disabled people. In fact, the resources section points to a campaign championing equal access to public transport and the government Help to Grow hub, which gives information and advice on starting a business.

By sharing personal stories instead of actions, it encourages the public to continue asking disabled people invasive questions, because what I love more than anything is when strangers demand “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU??”

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It also puts the onus on the public when we know where the narrative is coming from. 13 years of hatred of disabled people. Painting us as scroungers and that we're all fraudsters. A reminder 0.07% of all claims are investigated for fraud and 87% of these are overturned.

Leonard Cheshire found that disability hate crime had risen by 25% with violent hate crime rising by 27% Only 1% of these cases were taken up by the Crown Prosecution Service. Meanwhile, charity Scope found that 72% of disabled people had experienced negative attitudes.

And they want to encourage people to be even nosier?

The campaign also assumes all questions are well-intentioned when disabled people know this isn't the case, at the end of the day I don’t owe anyone my deeply personal diagnosis and experiences. As my friend and fellow campaigner Sarah O’Brien said on Twitter “Disabled people want to go about our daily lives, not become continuous learning moments or curiosity fodder”

Over the last 5 years disability campaigner Dr Amy Kavanagh has worked on the Just Ask, Don't Grab campaign, which has opened up conversation around the problematic behaviours experienced by disabled people. Through the hashtag #JustAskDontGrab disabled people have been able to share their stories about the impact of negative assumptions and problematic interactions.

Dr Kavanagh told the Mirror “The Government's campaign is an attempt to divert attention from the real issues and barriers faced by disabled people.”

“By labelling these behaviours as misplaced good intentions the Government fails to acknowledge the real impact of these experiences on disabled people and especially the escalating issue of disability hate crime.”

The funniest part of all of this to me is that the slogan for the campaign is “Together, we can do better” as if the government hasn’t spent over a decade destroying disabled people’s lives.

At the end of the day, the government aren't serious with the Ask, Don't Assume campaign. They just want to some good PR to hide under whilst they take away our rights.

Instead of giving the public tools to assist disabled people and a campaign that encourages them to not be so nosy, the government is giving them license to ask even more intrusive and quite frankly rude questions. It’s almost like they orchestrated it.