Defining Disability, Impairment

For someone new to the disability rights studies and advocacy, certain terms can seem as bewildering as international development jargon can seem to a grassroots disability rights advocate. Before we even begin to discuss in detail what we can do to mainstream disability in both developmental work and daily social life, we must first discuss and understand the basic concepts that are often used in such work, as such terminologies may inevitably pop up once in a while in the subsequent articles.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines Disability as “an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions.” On the other hand, the Handbook On Mainstreaming Disability developed by Voluntary Service Organisation (VSO) defines disability as “the disadvantage and exclusion which arise as an outcome of the interactions between people who have impairments and the social and environmental barriers they face due to the failure of society to take account of their rights and needs.”

However, authors of the Handbook, Daniel Jones and Li Webster, observe that there is a vital distinction in this definition between impairment and disability. In day-to-day speech, the words impairment and disability are often used interchangeably. It is easy to think that they are the same and that persons with disabilities’s participation in mainstream society is limited purely because they have an impairment.

An impairment, write Jones and Webster, is a physical, intellectual, mental or sensory characteristic or condition, which places limitations on an individual’s personal or social functioning in comparison with someone who does not have that characteristic or condition. In other words, impairment is individual. There are as many different impairments as there are impaired individuals. An impairment can be the result of illness, injury, or a congenital condition. For example, different impairments can affect someone’s physical mobility or dexterity, her ability to learn, to communicate or interact with other people or to hear or see.

In contrast, disability is social. It is the exclusion of people with impairments, due to social and environmental discrimination that acts as a barrier to their full and equal participation in mainstream society. Disability is fundamentally an issue of rights.

However, having an impairment does not necessarily limit or exclude people. For example, in marathons wheelchair users compete separately from runners, because they are so much faster over a long distance on level ground. Yet the same wheelchair user who beat all the runners might not be able to attend a social event after the marathon, if it is held in a building with steps. This is not because she uses a wheelchair but because the building was not built in an accessible way. This is not because of cost – building a ramp would have cost the same amount as building steps – but because the architect and builder did not consider persons with disabilities’s access.

In other words, the wheelchair user is excluded because her needs are not considered as important as those of other people – she is excluded as a result of (often unconscious) discrimination.

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