Personal Relationships, the Handicapped and the Community
- Author:
Derek Lancaster-Gaye
Routledge and Kegan Paul, ?1.80
The integration of the handicapped into full community life poses difficult problems which have so far been largely glossed over in simplistic debates. It is the quality of life which ultimately needs examining, and for the handicapped this cannot be divorced from close comparisons with the experiences of normal people.
The full acceptance of the handicapped by their normal peers is probably an unattainable ideal. This little book examines two important aspects of the attempt to integrate the physically handicapped of normal intelligence in four European countries, to see how nearly this ideal is currently being approached. Adequate assistance in maintaining relative independence in community settings is an essential first step, which is examined in Part One, and separate contributions outline the different approaches to residential provision. The Spastics Society seems to have suffered from an historical reaction to the material poverty of Britain’s subnormality hospitals. Its preoccupation, therefore, has been with the need to rapidly expand residential establishments giving adequate material comforts. Unfortunately this zeal has apparently caused them to overlook, till recently, important sociological considerations, some of which were already clearly evident as problems or solutions in the subnormality hospitals. Thus rural isolation, grouping of residents by age, severity, type of handicap, and intellectual level, are all seen how to have serious disadvantages.
The Swedes and the Danes have experimented with integrated flats in urban communities, provided through housing societies. Severely disabled tenants have private flats in a collective house, with access to communal dining and leisure facilities as and when desired. The flats are well equipped with technical aids, and personal assistance is available day and night. The proportion of handicapped to normal tenants is kept at about 1 to 3, and a transport system is provided to aid access to city facilities.
A Dutch example of a sheltered village is also described, with participation by the villagers in the management of community activities, which does not, however, go as far as complete self-government.
The second part of the book tackles frankly and rationally the sexual problems of the physically handicapped. Much progress can be expected in this field as a result of pioneering Swedish research, and the efforts of the Danes and the Dutch with them, investigating the needs of the handicapped and the help they require.
The personal story of A. H. Sutton who, with his wife, appears in a current Spastics Society film* on the subject, gives a graphic description from the inside of the pain of striving for full acceptance by ‘normals’. It poses an important question: can the handicapped themselves accept their handicapped state so that they, like us, can find sexual fulfilment and marriage with a partner having similar attributes, interests and problems, or must they always strive like adolescents for the perfect, idealised mate?
Sutton’s answer indicates the likelihood of a prolonged and painful growing to maturity, and the enormous need for skilful counselling starting with the parents at the earlest stages.
This is a stimulating and valuable book which would have been improved by the addition of refer*Three for Society.
ences. It ends with a crammed chapter on genetic counselling, which might perhaps more appropriately have been replaced by one on the problems of parenthood.
Bavin.
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