Every Right for Every Child: Governance and Accountability by Enakshi Ganguly Thukral

Author:Enakshi Ganguly Thukral [Thukral, Enakshi Ganguly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, Social Policy, Social Science, Children's Studies
ISBN: 9780415678377
Google: N1qZYgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 13715402
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-15T09:06:10+00:00

Gender Issues

Disabled girls are doubly disadvantaged in most societies; being a girl and being disabled are both considered a curse. Thus, penetrating the veneer of resistance that disabled women confront in a society where the dominant norm that operates is that of a perfect/unimpaired body, is a very difficult task. One father in a remote village of Bihar lamented, ‘Wasn’t it enough that we are poor. Why did kismet (fate) have to add to our burden further by giving us a pagal (term used for developmental disability) daughter?’ (Ghai 2001). When the birth is an unwelcome event, the life course is a denial against humanity itself. Disabled women and girls face the same human rights abuses that non-disabled women suffer, but their social seclusion amplifies the abuses.

Even in the case of advocacy the concern for male disability overrides the concerns for disabled women. Any index, whether it is education, employment, marriage, etc., shows that disabled men feature more than the disabled women. What is significant is that despite the same legal stipulations, disabled girls still experience marginalisation in both familial spaces as well as social spaces such as education, employment, recreation and intimacy. Although disabled girls are more exposed to violence the support systems are inadequate to protect them. In an NDTV report (September 18, 2007), a two-and-a-half-year-old girl with cerebral palsy was abandoned by her family. In 42-degrees heat, the girl was lying under the bushes. Workers at the metro construction site in Noida’s Sector 14, near Delhi, found her and took her to the police, who asked an NGO to help.

There are other types of discrimination too. Disabled girls experience forced sterilisation and the reason is the fear of pregnancy. Research on sexual assault in the west indicates that violence faced by disabled girls may be more chronic and severe, and takes forms such as withholding of essential care and medication. In USA, Ashley, a six-and-a-half-year-old diagnosed with static encephalopathy, a condition in which her brain is in a permanent and unchanging state has been cared for by the parents. As she grows she would eventually become too large for her parents to take care of her, including feeding, changing, bathing, and positioning her during the night. They were also concerned at the prospects of her sexual development, including menstruation, breast development, and her fertility. Consequently her parents decided to have a hysterectomy, removal of her breast buds, which would eliminate the development of breasts altogether, and medical treatment to limit her final adult height (known as height attenuation) and weight through hormone therapy. The reason given was that her breasts would cause discomfort with the straps used to hold her in her chair.

Disabled girls and boys are far more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation than normal boys and girls. A child who is physically challenged may understand what is happening and is aware of the consequences of the abuse, but lack of mobility would render her completely helpless. In the case of the mentally challenged children, they are unaware of the consequences of the act and may even submit ‘voluntarily’.

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