Corporate DispatchPro DR ANNE-MARIE CALLUS
Working with Persons with Intellectual Disability through Self-Advocacy In a crowd, in a street and in most community settings, persons with intellectual disability are conspicuous and absent at the same time. They are conspicuous because having a cognitive impairment is often (though not always) accompanied by particular physical features that mark a person as someone with an intellectual disability and because, in turn, the label ‘intellectual disability’ unfortunately still evokes extremely negative connotations. They are absent because persons with intellectual disability still encounter significant hurdles in their bid to be active participants in their community ‘on an equal basis with others’ as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations 2006) requires. Working with persons with intellectual disability therefore entails striving towards the removal of disabling barriers and towards enabling them to be accepted for who they are. It is important to point out that this work is done with persons with intellectual disability and not simply for them. This approach is in line with the slogan of the disabled persons’ movement ‘nothing about us without us’ (Charlton 1998), a slogan which speaks to the need for persons with disability to be the ones in control of their own lives and to be actively involved in decisions concerning them. For persons with intellectual disability, the principle underlying this slogan is best realised through self-advocacy, and it is in this area that I have carried out a lot of work over the past fifteen years. Broadly speaking, self-advocacy means speaking for oneself and being directly involved in decision-making processes that affect one’s life, whether directly or indirectly. For persons with
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