People with disabilities are not lessons in compassion

[adrotate banner="16"]

[feather_share show="twitter, google_plus, facebook, reddit, tumblr" hide="pinterest, linkedin, mail"]

By: Sarah Jama

Over the past few weeks a picture has been floating around on my social media feed. From my understanding, it went viral because it captured an act of compassion. It showed one man — known only as Robert — who initiated hand holding with a stranger who allowed and reciprocated it. Godfrey Coutto, the stranger in question, is a McMaster student.

Believe me when I say I understand why this picture went viral. When on the HSR, most of us barely look up from our cell phones, let alone conduct acts of kind-hearted physical contact with people we don’t know. Not only was this moment a rarity, it also reminded a lot of people about how simple and momentous an act of kindness can be.

But something was off. Robert’s name was scarcely mentioned online in the shared posts, and only barely touched on in the news articles about the photo. He was never interviewed about the incident, and the only thing mentioned about him was that he was a man who has Cerebral Palsy (a mobility related disability) and a hearing impairment. In contrast, Coutto’s name was always mentioned in the first three sentences of the news articles. The articles written about this photo also tended to frame Robert as a person with “special needs,” but did nothing else to illustrate his character, or touch on why he initiated the hand holding in the first place. It would not have been difficult for the people writing these news articles to find American Sign Language interpreters (as Robert is fluent in ASL) and ask him these sorts of questions. On the off chance that he was approached and did not want to give a statement, this could have been communicated easily in the article.

I want to know what kind of dialogue Robert and Coutto had while holding hands on the bus, if any.  I want to know why Robert wanted to hold Coutto’s hand. I want to know if Godfrey reminded Robert of someone he cared deeply for. I want to know why he enjoys riding the HSR for hours as his family has stated he does, and what his favourite stops in Hamilton are. Most of all, I want to know how he feels about the photo and the articles written about him. Not telling readers what Robert was thinking at the time this was taken tells us that he is more useful when silent. That he is to be used by society to teach others a lesson about compassion, as opposed to having his own personal intentions behind his actions. It says that even though the story would not have gone viral without him, he wasn’t an important piece of it.

When people with disabilities aren’t given the opportunity to have a say in the way they portrayed in the media it strips away at the pieces of autonomy that people with disabilities have fought to have for years.  Canada has a hushed history of institutionalizing people with disabilities, taking them away from their families and putting them in homes, because people with disabilities were considered burdens on society with zero autonomy. It was only recently, on March 31, 2009, that Ontario closed the last three of its large-scale government operated institutions meant for people with disabilities.

In a lot of places around the world — mostly because of our warped tendency to view human productivity (and our limited understanding of what that entails) as the standard of who deserves to be treated with respect in society — people with disabilities are hardly given the space to voice their opinions. Considering that the leading cause of disability in Canada is old age (which is inevitable for us all), and considering the fact that people with disabilities exist in every culture, race, religion, region of the world and can have any sexual orientation, making them the largest minority in the world, we need to be careful that when covering acts of kindness in the media, we aren’t accidently erasing the identity of people with disabilities along the way.