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Include disability dimension in national developmental plans
National Association of Societies for the Care of the Handicapped (NASCOH)
Extracted from NASCOH Disability Update, Aug 17-24, 2006
August 24, 2006

As the world celebrated International Youth Day on 12 August, the spotlight once again fell on the recurrent themes of poverty, education, employment and mortality. Predictably, there was deafening silence on the plight of the most vulnerable group of youths, and who should form the focus of poverty alleviation, educational and employment creation efforts – children with disabilities.

The marginalization and social exclusion of children with disabilities continues unabated in the face of unsettling statistics that mortality for children with disabilities may be as high as 80% in countries where under-5 mortality as a whole has decreased to below 20%; that only 1-2% of children with disabilities in developing countries receive an education; that only 1% of girls with disabilities are literate; and that about 80% of people with disabilities are unemployed. The staggering unemployment rate is largely attributed to employer prejudice and lack of awareness of the abilities of people with disabilities as well as limited access to education and vocational training.

Children with disabilities are also highly vulnerable to HIV and AIDS because of a number of factors. These include low literacy rates; vulnerability to sexual abuse because of need for attendant care and at times drugging; belief in the myth that having sex with people with disabilities cures AIDS; the assumption that it is easier to get way with abuse perpetrated against people with disabilities; higher incidences of substance abuse among adolescents especially; inability to comprehend AIDS messages; and lack of access to information on AIDS.

Children with disabilities are undeniably the most vulnerable of all children. They grow up in the most hostile, unaccommodating and forbidding environment. Their life is a vicious cycle of rejection – rejection by the family, by the community, by peers and by the society at large. Right from the onset, children with disabilities are rejected emotionally in families and abused because of their perceived low status; parents routinely beat up children who exhibit signs of mental illness, interpreting their behaviour as disobedience and willfulness; some parents even go to the extent of hiding children with disabilities away in back rooms, treating them like animals, sometimes locking them in cages, particularly in the rural areas. In Zimbabwean society, and indeed in most societies, a disabled child is viewed as other, lesser, a burden, a punishment or a curse. Worse still, their very existence is often denied. In the majority of cases, their births are not registered, they are not recorded in census data, and some families go to the extent of abandoning them in institutions.

Children with disabilities face exclusion from education, cultural activities, festivals, sports and social events and are especially vulnerable to poverty, physical and sexual violence, lack of access to health care, emotional abuse and neglect. Their isolation can defy description, with poverty, ignorance, superstition, culture and prejudice combining to strip away the remaining shreds of their humanity and dignity. The onus is on society as a whole to rally around the disability issue and implement comprehensive programmes of action to ensure the inclusion and integration of children with disabilities in the wider society.

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