Intimate Citizenship and Learning Disability

  In this blog post I want to speak about something called ‘intimate citizenship’ and people with learning disabilities. This article is written in Easy Read, so that lots of people can read it. You can access this article as a PDF, here: Intimate Citizenship and Learning Disability

What is “intimate citizenship”?

  Intimacy, and being intimate, is about touch, love, affection, privacy, bodies, care and being close.

 Citizenship is about our rights and access to equality, fairness and justice.

 

 Intimate citizenship brings these together to refer to our rights and access to equality within our intimate lives – the spaces in our lives where we love and care for others, ourselves and our bodies.

 Whether we are single, in a relationship, want to have a family, or be part of a family, we should have access to intimate rights which include things like who we love; where we live; and our sexual health.

 

However, for people with learning disabilities intimate rights and citizenship can often be denied, ignored, or overlooked. This is wrong.

 Why does intimate citizenship matter?

 For most people, intimacy is important to happiness and well-being. Many of us enjoy intimacy and closeness in our private and personal lives, whether it comes from friends, family members or romantic and/or sexual partners.

 It matters because being with others feels nice, can be pleasurable and make us feel good about ourselves, and feel safe and secure in our lives.

 We all have the right to have relationships with others and be supported to find and/or maintain our relationships if we need it.

 But, intimate citizenship also relates to our rights to say no to intimacy if we don’t want it, and our rights to not be sexually abused, raped or exploited. Women with learning disabilities experience greater rates of sexual violence than women without learning disabilities.

Our intimate citizenship can also include things like:

 

Accessing contraception and sexual health care.

Learning about our bodies.

 The right to parent and start a family.

 

 Learning about consent (saying yes or no to a sexual act).

 Receiving good quality sex education.

 Building sexual confidence.

 Rights to privacy.

 Choosing what to wear and expressing ourselves with our bodies (e.g. tattoos and body piercings).

 Support to end a pregnancy.

 Where we live: who we want to make a home with.

Researching intimate citizenship?

 In September 2015, researchers Katherine Runswick-Cole, Dan Goodley, Kirsty Liddiard, Jen Slater and Jodie Bradley and Vicky Farnsworth from Speak Up Self-Advocacy are going to Toronto, Canada, to speak with other researchers and self-advocates from all around the world about intimate citizenship.

 The aim of the trip is to think about how researchers and self-advocates can work together in future research to explore how people with learning disabilities can be better supported within their intimate lives.

 

To learn more, check out some of these free Easy Read resources (click on the title or the picture):

 

  Talking about sex and relationships: the views of young people with learning disabilities. 

 Easy Health

 Stay Up Late

 Dating and Relationships

 

Surviving Sexual Abuse

Surviving Rape 

 

 

Written by Kirsty Liddiard, School of Education, University of Sheffield

Images by Easy on the i, NHS UK

60% of MPs believe that learning disabled people can’t work: Big Society research shows that they can

 A recent report by Dimensions, a care provider, revealed that a poll of one hundred MPs found that 60% believe that people with learning disabilities can’t work http://www.dimensions-uk.org/news-and-events/mps-just-dont-understand-learning-disability/ . Our research project Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Ref: ES/K004883/1)[i], clearly shows that people with learning disabilities can and do work.

Take for example, Charlie, a learning disabled man in his fifties. Charlie works five days a week for the city council meals service. He has a range of jobs there from marking up the boards for the drivers, to being responsible for the recycling as well as a host of office tasks. When Charlie got the job at the meals service, he went for a ‘working interview’; this meant he had a work trial, trying out the tasks in order to secure the post. Charlie was also supported by a job coach: a person who specializes in supporting people with learning disabilities into employment.  Charlie’s job coach helped Charlie in his first few weeks in his new job, supporting him to learn new tasks as well as the workplace culture. Charlie has been working at the meals service for seven years, he was forty-seven when he got his first paid job. Charlie’s story shows that with the right support, people with learning disabilities can work, but it also reveals that low expectations and a lack of appropriate support means that many people who can work are excluded from the labour market.

Way back in 1984, The King’s Fund published An Ordinary Working Life that built on discussion in the 1950s about the role and value of employment for people with learning disabilities. And yet, in 2015, fewer than 10% of people with learning disabilities are in paid work. In 2010, the Coalition government endorsed the policy document Valuing Employment Now (VEN) (Department of Work and Pensions and Department of Health, 2009) that recognized the particular experiences of marginalisation faced by people with learning disabilities. And yet, only 4.8% of the Coalition’s Work Programme, the programme designed to support disabled people into work, have a learning disability. In the early days of the new Tory government, reports are already emerging that Access to Work, a fund which offers disabled people up to £25,000 per year on physical adaptation to workplaces, personal aids (e.g. seats, reading machines), job coaches, and money for transport, is under threat with the publication of an Equality Analysis for the Future of Access to Work https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/426416/future-of-access-to-work-equality-analysis.pdf

Charlie’s story is just one of the stories from our research project that shows that people with learning disabilities can work, and yet the supports in place to support people into and in work are under threat. MPs, and others, need to understand that many people with learning disabilities want to work and have lots to offer as employees.

Our research found that:

• Few people with a learning disability are in work;
• Support available to move people into employment varies across local areas;
• Job coaching can work well to support people into employment;
• Social enterprises can also create employment opportunities for people with LD;
• Business circles of support can help people become self-employed;

We suggest that:

• We need to make what works (job coaching; social enterprise; business circles; self-employment) widely available;
• Financial and other support for these services should be increased (not cut).

If you would like to find out more about the project visit: bigsocietydis.wordpress.com or contact k.runswick-cole@mmu.ac.uk

[i] Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities and civil society is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Ref: ES/K004883/1). It is a partnership project between four universities: Manchester Metropolitan University, The University of Sheffield, The University of Bristol and Northumbria University as well as civil society partners: Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities; Pathways Associates; Manchester Learning Disability Partnership; Mencap; SpeakUp Self-Advocacy and Pete Crane, Wendy Crane, Max Neill and Helen Smith, independent living advisors.