Disability In Australian Society

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1.0 Introduction In Australia there are 4.2million people who experience disability (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2013). About 80% of these people have specific limitations on activities of self-care, mobility, communication or restricted in schooling or employment (ABS, 2013). So how does the Australian society perceive disability and what impact is it having? This essay will develop an argument about how disability is perceived in contemporary Australian society through beliefs and attitudes, theories surrounding disability and the Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992. 2.0 The impact of attitudes and beliefs towards people who experience a disability In highly developed societies, such as Australian society, studies …show more content…

In film, disability is often stereotyped as a scary and unaccepted such as the Disney movie, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). The main character is Quasimodo, a man who has a hunched back. He is abandoned at birth because his mother did not want him. He also rarely leaves his home in the bell tower because the people of the city, due to his appearance, despise and ridicule him. This is an inaccurate representation of people with a disability, teaching children that anyone who looks different is not treated …show more content…

The medical model is commonly used and views disability as a problem with the person that requires medical treatment in order to “fix” the person (Goering, 2015). The social model however believes that society physically impairs people not their disability and that society needs to change (Oliver, 1996). In a real-life example a news article describes how a mother negotiates whether to use the medical model or the social model when deciding whether or not her daughter should undergo surgery to allow her to hear (Barnet, 2016). The mother explains that the deaf community doesn’t see deafness as a medical condition and it doesn’t need to be fixed (juxtaposing the medical model) yet the mother wanted to “fix” her child to give her to best possible life because disability leads to disadvantage (Barnet,

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