Deprived of human rights

Abstract

In June 2018 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities published a report on the educational system in Spain, in response to some complaints submitted by SOLCOM (Association for Community solidarity and social inclusion of people with functional diversity). The report has had a substantial impact. A few months earlier, in February 2018, people from all over Spain had taken part in a workshop held at the Universidad de Málaga, as part of a research project entitled ‘Emerging Narratives about Inclusive Schools Based on the Social Model of Disability: Resistance, Resilience and Social Change’. The project aims to gather accounts of activist experiences from families and professionals who determinedly struggle to make schools places where all children are recognised through presence, participation, learning and success in the pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education stages. Both the Committee’s report and the statements made by relatives and activists at the workshop illustrated and bore witness to a systematic violation of many children’s right to education solely due to their disability.

Keywords:

• Human rights
• resistance
• Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
• inclusive education
• disability

In February 2018 around 100 people (students, families and activist professionals committed to inclusion) took part in a workshop at the University of Malaga, Spain. The workshop was aimed at exploring new approaches to school counselling and combating segregation in order to improve the situation of children in the Spanish education system. The meeting included an extremely intense egalitarian dialogue about the current situation in many schools. Inclusion was defended as a genuinely ambitious social and educational project that consists of all children being educated together. These assertions were not about political correctness. Institutionalised exclusion exists in the majority of Spanish schools. A total of 23 different testimonies (some of them can be watched online: https://bit.ly/2OYREGL [accessed 22 August 2018]) were the starting point of the meeting. These reflected the hidden reality of many children’s experiences in schools, including the following quote:

I always believed that when our children were labelled, this was intended to help them in their achievement, but now I have found that this was not the case. The label was used to smother them and push them to one side. This is my experience. Unless parents engage in a daily, continuous struggle, our children will inevitably end up in special needs education. (M. Carmen, female; her daughter Clara is a compulsory secondary education student)

There are different schooling options in the Spanish education system: ordinary schools, a specific classroom within ordinary schools just for students with ‘Special Educational Needs’, and Special Needs schools. Not only do Special Needs schools continue to exist, but new ones are being built. This segregated schooling is based on the psycho-pedagogical reports made by school counsellors. The education administration uses these reports to decide whether a given student may stay in an ordinary classroom or not. This inertia in schools leads many children to be irremediably segregated. In the early 2000s my brother Rafael experienced this process. This is how I became aware of the existing institutional violence, which aroused my interest in linking academic work to human rights activism. In my brother’s case, we identified the use of concealed segregation strategies that were almost insurmountable, as they were legitimised by the institution and its professionals. These strategies and the actions we took to resist them are described in detail in Calderón-Almendros and Habegger-Lardoeyt (2017).

The institutional tradition and culture are not based on an inclusionary logic. Even though Spain has ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations [UN] 2006), this has not changed. As a result, in some cases the families have decided to resist segregation by taking legal action. The cases of Rubén and Daniel are good examples of this. Both were forced to attend special needs schools despite the opposition of their families. When the educational administration prevented their enrolment in ordinary schools in the following years, their parents opted for home schooling. They were charged with neglect by the Prosecutor's Office and, after years of litigation, which included appeals to the Constitutional Court, each of the parents’ claims filed to defend their child’s right to inclusive education were dismissed and denied, respectively (Gaitero 2014; ‘El Constitucional’ 2014).

All of this is supposedly intended to be in the child’s best interest. By arguing that there are not enough resources in ordinary schools, and that an individualised approach is needed, the most explicit and blatant exclusion processes on grounds of disability are taking place in schools. This is happening with the support of a medical model of disability, which only focuses on the ‘ailing’ bodies of the children and generates a bureaucratic process by educational administrations backed by ‘science’. Judgements are presented as neutral and therefore incontestable, despite having been strongly challenged by the social model. Questioning these processes, which are carried out by qualified professionals through the use of objective tests, is considered to be tantamount to arguing against reality. In this way, the vast majority of families can only resign themselves to the situation and accept what schools so intensely advocate. Since this has been the traditional way of operating, where our educational systems compete to climb positions in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ranking and schools continue to be based on meritocracy, it can be difficult to think about other options.

The claim that this approach is the best for the child simply does not hold. Abundant literature has been published for decades that solidly explains disability as a social phenomenon. It has also proven, for example, that constructing one’s identity within this social category entails an irreversible devaluation, because it involves a process of social exclusion that affects identity and intelligence; and that educating everyone together is positive for all students, and not only for those labelled as having a disability.

These considerations were openly discussed at the workshop held at the University of Malaga, as well as the emotional costs involved. The discussions on the attendees’ experiences were streamed and became a trending topic on Twitter in Spain. They evidenced that the pain and discrimination described by these mothers was not anecdotal, but rather a widespread feeling.

The view that a significant number of schoolchildren continue to be subjected to unfair and discriminatory treatment underlies the categorical report issued by the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2017 : 6-7). The report followed an investigation conducted on the educational system in Spain arising from complaints by SOLCOM (2018), an independent organisation aimed at ensuring that the human rights of people with functional diversity are enforced through recourse to the Courts of Justice.

This is well known to those of us who, either on a professional or a family basis, are in close contact with people who live with the stigma of being labelled as having ‘Special Educational Needs’ or requiring ‘special needs education’ or ‘aided education’. However, the complaint and the report that addressed the issues raised in it are an unprecedented initiative:

The Committee considers that the information available reveals violations of the right to an inclusive and quality education. These violations are primarily related to certain features of the education system that have been maintained despite reforms and that continue to exclude persons with disabilities – particularly those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities or multiple disabilities – from mainstream education on the basis of assessments conducted according to the medical model of disability. This, in turn, results in educational segregation and denial of the reasonable accommodation needed to ensure the non-discriminatory inclusion of those with disabilities in the mainstream education system.

These are grave and systematic violations of the right to education (a fundamental human right) which, following the ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN 2006), now includes the right to inclusive education. The Convention is intended to be a tool to ensure that the human rights of those people who had been excluded from humanity are enforced. Indeed, these students are excluded from humanity. It is inexplicable that certain children are forced to leave their ordinary environment, uprooted from their neighbourhood, and made to stay away from their siblings to attend schools only for those who have been labelled as having a disability. What is more, nearly the whole community sees this as being logical. The Convention aims to change this intolerable conception: that human rights are only applicable for some people and not for others. Article 24 establishes that the right to education is the right to inclusive education. The States Parties to the Convention agreed that ‘persons with disabilities can access an inclusive (UN, 2006: 17), quality and free primary education and secondary education on an equal basis with others in the communities in which they live’. However, this is not the case in our society. Let us not fool ourselves.

This situation was denounced by some mothers at the University of Malaga a few months ago. Some of those people reported that they were portrayed as being mad, because they refused to abide by the institution’s logic. What they defended made a lot of sense both then and now: the fact that a child has autism or Down’s, Williams or Angelman syndrome, for example, cannot be a reason for segregation. If disability is a social phenomenon, how can educational evaluations become individual tests that limit the issue to a given child’s body? How does a social and cultural matter turn into something supposedly individual and biological in nature?

This regulatory power that the public administration exercises ruthlessly, which causes pain to many families, has been remarkably devalued since the UN Committee's report was issued. Now the position held by those mothers who were branded as ‘crazy’ for wanting the impossible or holding a position that was supposedly skewed by ‘blind love’, who refused to see their child's disability in biological terms (a view that is still deeply ingrained in many schools), has been endorsed by the UN. The argument has not only been made by a few mothers, but by the legitimate international body whose job it is to interpret the Convention. And this is unquestionable. Psycho-pedagogical evaluations are still clinically based, and this only serves to label and place the child in a certain category. The school reports based on these practices perpetuate the discrimination of the entire group. Individual curricular adaptation measures condemn students to not gaining qualifications and prevent the system from being transformed. It is precisely this transformation of the system that the social project called inclusive education is concerned with. This is not a purely cosmetic transformation, but requires a profound revision of the school system to change it into a space for democratic participation.

The Committee has made a very clear statement: schools violate the human rights of a large number of children in Spain. This is inadmissible, but perhaps what is the most disturbing fact is what the UN has left unsaid. Thanks to the Programme for the Promotion of Inclusive Education in the Americas by OAS and Oritel (http://oritel.org/oea/seminarios/ [accessed 22 August 2018]), through the testimonies of young people, families and professionals, we recently had the opportunity of verifying on the ground that the situation is the same in Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Mexico. An avalanche of questions arises at this point: how many of the countries that ratified the Convention are systematically engaging in serious human rights violations in schools? What is the role of academics and professionals in maintaining this illegal and ethically despicable situation? What can be done to ensure that human rights are respected once and for all?

The UN Committee’s report on Spanish schools has been categorical and unambiguous. We must force our political representatives to adapt the current legislation, and we also have a moral obligation to transform school cultures and practices. It is no longer possible to look the other way: either we respect human rights or we follow a tradition and a set of regulations that violate them. The meeting in Malaga came to a close with an uncomfortable, challenging question posed by one of the mothers: ‘And YOU, what are YOU going to do about it tomorrow?’ That humble question is now posed to this international forum, to States, politicians, professionals, academics and citizens in general:

So, what are YOU going to do about it tomorrow?

Acknowledgements

The author thanks SOLCOM and all of the people who have collaborated in preparing and publishing the UN report, especially those families who have been involved in the struggle to resist and transform the school system. All their suffering and the work carried out by them form the basis for the defence of the rights of thousands of children.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.