DISABILITY MATTERS:
Helping a new day dawn
CBC News Viewpoint | May 10, 2006 | More
from Disability Matters
This column will feature three writers, each with a
different disability. They all have something to say
about living with a disability and how they view
awareness and attitudes toward disabilities in Canada.
The column will deal with the rights of people with
disabilities, eliminating inequality and discrimination,
and issues of self-help and consumer advocacy. Our plan
is to rotate among our columnists to have a new column
each month.
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 Anna Quon is a
freelance writer and mental health consumer living in
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. A former assistant to the editor of
the now defunct Ability Network magazine and a frequent
contributor to Abilities magazine, she has a strong interest
in the stories that matter to people with disabilities.
Montrealer
Marie Barile is a woman with a disability, a researcher with a
Master's degree in social work, and a feminist. She was
walking with a cane and not yet using a wheelchair when she
applied for a social work position. "They said, how will you
do home visits, and how will you handle the phones?" Barile
remembers. She explained that she could use a wheelchair in
the office to save her energy and use her cane when she had to
visit clients in their homes, and that she could bring her own
adjustable phone from home. But she didn't get the job. "They
looked at environmental reasons [not to hire me], which had
nothing to do with my skills," Barile says.
That was
four years ago and Barile says that women with disabilities
are still coming up against the same kinds of barriers to
employment. More women with disabilities may be earning
university degrees than ever before but their employment
levels and income lag behind those of men with disabilities
and non-disabled women. Economic issues, along with access to
information and to services such as transportation and health
care, are still on the agenda. So is violence and abuse
against women with disabilities, who, according to one
researcher are 1.5 to 10 times more likely to be abused than
non-disabled women, depending on the severity of the
disability, the number of caregivers involved and whether they
live in an institution or in the community.
Twenty
years ago Canadian women with disabilities were just beginning
to stand up for their rights. In 1986, Barile was one of the
organizers of a conference in Ottawa that resulted in the
founding of the feminist organization Disabled Women's Network
(DAWN) Canada. DAWN aimed to be a voice for women with
disabilities on many issues including those outlined above, as
well as the protection of the right to motherhood and
reproductive rights, while also fighting forced sterilization.
Barile left DAWN in the early 1990s to concentrate on human
rights issues at the local level in Montreal such as the
discrimination mothers with disabilities faced when trying to
find accessible, affordable apartments for themselves and
their children.
DAWN had an international reputation
as a catalyst for research into women with disabilities but
Barile says a lack of funding and conflicts with related
organizations have weakened DAWN in the last several years.
However, this year DAWN celebrates its 20th anniversary, and
Barile, who rejoined the group in 2003, is hoping for its
rebirth. Later this month, DAWN will hold a national meeting
in Richmond, B.C., with the aim of restructuring the
organization, and hearing from women with disabilities across
the country about the issues they're facing. "I would like to
say 10 years later I came back and got the organization to a
certain level," says Barile, "But most of all, I got the women
to talk to each other."
You wouldn't think that would
be so hard. Women, after all, have a reputation for talking to
their girlfriends about all manner of things. I am a woman
with a disability and my friends and I talk about the kinds of
things Barile wants to hear - the stresses of being poor and
of making a living as self-employed people (partly from choice
and partly because we haven't managed to find employment that
reflects our interests, education, skill-sets and accommodates
our disabilities) and about the limitations that our
disabilities bring to our energy levels.
Marie Barile
hopes DAWN Canada will help women to make those kinds of
connections on a macro level. Technologies that exist today
make it easier to get women across the country talking,
including those who face barriers to communication, such as
deaf women and non-verbal women - and DAWN Canada can be a
forum for that conversation. A place where women with
disabilities can pinpoint and discuss the questions that need
to be asked about their lives, their needs and their rights.
Barile is hoping for a strong DAWN Canada that can
give feminist researchers with disabilities the support they
need to ask the questions that need to be asked about women
with disabilities. For example, what happens in the lives of
women with disabilities between earning university degrees and
ending up unemployed or underemployed? Why don't women with
disabilities use technology as much as other groups, including
men with disabilities?
It's hard, Barile says, to be a
feminist with a disability in Canada because a support network
of other like-minded and disabled women is not there. Also,
she says, compared to 20 years ago, "There's more of a fear of
feminism, there's more of a right-wing perception in the
country." And significantly, she says, now when she goes to a
disability-related conference, there are more people attending
who aren't disabled. "Twenty years ago there was an
understanding that the people who lived in a certain situation
are the best to regulate the solution," she says. The
perception today, she thinks, is that "we need to be cared for
rather than that we need to be in charge of our own affairs.
It's like back to the 1960s." And that's something she hopes a
reinvigorated DAWN can help change.
Barile has high
hopes for DAWN but she knows the limits of her own stamina, a
reality for many women with disabilities. "I'm not Judy
Rebick," she says, comparing herself to the Canadian feminist,
journalist and political activist. "I don't have the energy."
^TOP
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