Complementing or conflicting human rights conventions? Realising an inclusive approach to families with a young person with a disability and challenging behaviour

Abstract

United Nation’s conventions exist to help facilitate and protect vulnerable people’s human rights: including people with disabilities (Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2006) and children (Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). However, for some families where a family member has a disability, there may be inherent conflicts in meeting stand-alone human rights conventions. These conventions should work together to ensure that young people with disabilities and challenging behaviour and their parents and siblings all have equal rights to full participation in social, economic and civic life. Yet service system deficits mean that this is not always the case. This paper argues that governments need to provide a whole of family and community support approach to ensure the human rights of all family members are met. This is a transnational complex ethical, moral and human rights issue that needs to be debated and addressed.

Keywords:

• human rights
• young people with disabilities
• challenging behaviour
• family
• community

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Helen Meekosha, Kristine Chipps and Anna Green for their contribution to the initial conceptualisation of this paper; and the parents, policy-makers, service providers and practitioners who contributed at the forum on young people and challenging behaviour from which data are drawn. A summarised version of this paper was presented at the Society for Disability Studies Conference at Temple University on 2–5 June 2010.

Notes

1. Under the UDHR, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or in terms of the ‘Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women’ General Assembly/RES/48/104, 85th plenary meeting, 20 December 1993.

2. All names have been changed to protect the identity of the children and their family.

3. Public forum, April 2010; and a conference paper by the children’s mother, February 2010. Further details have been withheld to protect the family’s identity.

4. Public forum, April 2010; further details have been withheld to protect the family’s identity.