Hello!
I'm back I promise. It's a new semester with many new goals. One of the most important is to be as active on this website and show my learning process as much as I can. I spend a lot of time on emc, but it consists of random epiphanies throughout the day or thought-provoking conversations at 8AM in the library or a few sentences of a research paper whenever and wherever I can squeeze it into the day. However, I shouldn't make excuses for my lack of posts, so from now on I'm going to keep myself accountable.
I started reading a new research paper today (as seen above).
It's called "Attitudes Towards Disability and People with Disabilities". While it doesn't focus on children, what I've learned from the first page is amazing. Although, from own experiences and prior research, I already know most of the information on the first page, but the paper has definitely solidified many of the overarching themes I've been researching over the past few months while providing adequate details to back up it's research conclusions.
So, here are a few things I've learned/found fascinating/questions from the first page:
1) There is substantial social marginalization of persons with disabilities in India. Moreover, negative values about disabled people in the broader community are likely to be internalize by people with disabilities and their family members.
2) Much of the literature about disabilities as pointed to the importance of karma in shaping the attitudes towards disabilities. To many, disabilities are perceived as punishment/karma for misdeeds of persons with disabilities or their parents in another life. One author wrote, "disability represents divine justice". In mundane terms, people with disabilities are seen as unpromising and unnecessary. Most research has acknowledged that the social status of persons with disabilities' family has an impact on their potential acceptance into larger society. In an experiment conducted in rural and urban Andhra Pradesh, 40% of respondents believed that disability was a punishment or a curse of God. The share of people holding such views increases with age, higher among women, higher with low socioeconomic classes and higher for those who are illiterate.
3) For both households with and without people with disabilities around half believed that disabilities was almost always a curse of God. Moreover, household with a family member with disability had 15% higher share with the belief than households without a person with a disability.
If a family has a PWD why are they less empathetic towards their own situation than families that don't have a PWD?
4) Two forms of mythology greatly impact social perception on disability: traditional mythology and Bollywood ideals. In mythology, portrayal of persons with disabilities is negative with more importance toward men than women. In Bollywood, although there is a drastic difference between the portrayals between men and women, recently films have played important role in highlighting aspects of lives of people with disabilities that aren't clearly understood and dispelling myths and biases prevalent in society.
It's crazy that I've realized this much in only one page! I'm excited to keep reading and learning from this paper, and I will most definitely post with new findings and questions :)