Review for Sociology written on the 1st February 1995

of

Michael Hirst and Sally Baldwin, Unequal Opportunities: Growing Up Disabled, London, HMSO, 1994, £13, ix + 139 pp.

Based on a follow up study to the 1985 OPCS Surveys of Disability, this study tries to reveal the extent to which the transition to adulthood is experienced differently by young people with disabilities in comparison to their able-bodied peers. Under various chapter and sub-headings ("Living and Working Independently", "Financial Independence" and "Self Esteem and Personal Control" for example) Baldwin and Hirst conclusively show to their own satisfaction that growing up disabled is pretty unpleasant; and to top it all, it is probably the parents' fault. As with the original OPCS surveys, this study is firmly rooted in the medical model of disability (disability as impairment and largely pathological), whilst ignoring every advance made in the study of disability as a social construct (disability as social, environmental, institutional and attitudinal barriers created by society). Though Michael Oliver's The Politics of Disablement (1990) text is acknowledged in the bibliography its significance and sociological analysis - which make it the key text in relation to disability of the twentieth century - is ignored. An omission which makes Unequal Opportunities seem flawed and shallow, if not atavistic.

Unequal Opportunities does make passing references to the disability movement and the social model of disability, but only to ignore its principles in favour of advocating increased social and medical surveillance of people with disabilities; even when the survey itself has revealed (p. 110) that "loss of hospital services was not seen as a problem by the disabled young people themselves". And although Baldwin and Hirst are very good at highlighting certain inequities that young disabled people endure (reduced income, twice as likely to be unemployed, un-partnered and living at home with their parents for much longer, and having almost no sense of their own worth) they never seem to be able to see its cause as anything other than a pathological or psychological weakness (i.e. parental protectiveness).

Social criticism is, in this book, completely avoided by maintaining a narrow impairment based view of what disability is, and as such, it lacks any degree of balance or value. Though the authors state in the book that interpretation is not in the remit of the study they constantly (on every page) interpret the data to advocate generalised (impairment based) management of all people with disabilities; any study that wishes to get to grips with how disability is experienced differently to normality must accept that many of the conventional relationships between the disabled and non-disabled are the very factors which create and enhance the sense of alienation, despair and isolation that many disabled people feel.

One of the most disappointing factors about the book is that so many potentially exciting 'facts' about growing up disabled are mentioned and then ignored: disabled people are in predominantly lower social status families, women are more often the head of the household and the father is more likely to be unemployed as well. Exciting stuff, but ignored in favour of claiming that paternal protectiveness is the key to understanding the disabled experience! Unequal Opportunities would be essential reading on any course to do with disability, but only as an example of the discourses that construct disability as something that it is not: pathologically abject. From the point of view of the books perspective one can only assume that it is aimed at the very professions which are the most explicit in the negation of disability (the medical and social services). What is most amiss about this book is its simplified attitudes to disability, despite its apparent claims to see it as complex (most significantly it ignores major class issues), which finally undermine its undoubted value for the few disabled/professional relationships that it could have contributed towards improving.

University of Warwick Paul Anthony Darke

615 words