deviance

Last night, as I was having dinner with D. I remarked that the place where we had dinner was across from the Visio building and that all services to the blind are housed there. This is next to the Opthalmology Clinic, and so the area is lavishly signposted by guiding lines. Something that caught my attention when I walked to the restaurant. Only later did I connect this to the presence of Blind institutions. But that’s not what they call themselves: Visio, I think, is a euphemism, something to sugar-coat the truth: you’re not a client there because of your vision, but because of your blindness. My experiences with such places are not wholly positive. Maybe I’m too much of a rebel: I notice the subtle, coercive character, the system of reward and punishment if you don’t conform to the doctrine of such places. In The Making of Blind Men, Robert Scott describes how this works:

The personal conceptions that blinded persons have about the nature of their problems are in sharp contrast with beliefs that workers for the blind share about the problems of blindness. The latter regard blindness as one of the most severe of all handicaps, the effects of which are long-lasting, pervasive, and extremely difficult to ameliorate. They believe that if these problems are solved, blind persons must understand them and all their manifestations and willingly submit themselves to a prolonged, intensive, and comprehensive program of psychological and restorative services. Effective socialization of the client largely depends upon changing his views about this problem. In order to do this, the client’s views about the problems of blindness must be discredited. Workers must convince him that simplistic ideas about solving the problems of blindness by means of one or a few services are unrealistic. (…) For most persons who have come this far in the process, however, dropping out is not a particularly realistic alternative, since it implies that the blind person has other resources open to him. For the most part, such resources are not available.

Ah, resources. Yesterday, in a discussion at the flickr’s “Blind Photographers” site, we were discussing initiatives to bring about universal access, in developing nations too. T. remarked on the cost associated with acquiring assistive technology. This is exactly why it is so difficult to break the vicious circle of aid and assistance, and why it is so important that grass roots, activist organizations exist or form themselves. The fact that assistive technology cannot be acquired without subsidy means that agencies control who is eligible and who is not. Here, deviance is not helpful:

The ability to withstand the pressure to act, think, and feel in conformity with the workers’ concept of a model blind person is further reduced by the fact that the workers have a virtual monopoly on the rewards and punishments in the system. By manipulating these rewards and punishments, workers are able to pressure the client into rejecting personal conceptions of problems in favor of the worker’s own definition of them. (…) The uncooperative client is assigned low priority for entering preferred job programs. Workers for the blind are less willing to extend themselves on his behalf. As a result, the alert client quickly learns to become “insightful”, to behave as workers expect him to.

Further on he writes: “There is evidence that some blind people resist the pressures of the environment of agencies and centers that adopt this philosophy [the restorative approach] by feigning belief in the workers’ ideas for the sake of “making out” in the system”. The result is, however, that unless you have a good social network of other blind people, you only receive the assistance an agency thinks is appropriate: acquiring some skills and assistive technology, to the detriment of other skills means that this limits you in scope and possibilities. Organizations like the NFB (essentially a civil rights group) are trying to counteract this oppressive model, by indeed being a grass-roots organization. But this is applicable to the US, where there is a tradition of civil rights activism. In Europe, this is hardly the case. Here, the conformist model still applies, and it finds its expression in the entire structure of “social assistance”. I’ve always been in favor of “playing along”, but I also see the dishonor in this: it leaves the stereotype intact. But, anything to get the braille display I need.