Hello,
I’m sure I say this all the time but the ableism does feel particularly relentless at the moment. And this week, not even your Friday night telly is free of the stuff.
We need to stop watching Children In Need.
The way it treats disabled kids is gross.
(Before we go any further, let me just say that activists like
andhave been doing great work on this for a lot longer than I have and you should check out what they have to say.)Right, let’s dive in with a (non-exhaustive) list of the issues with Children In Need:
It reinforces the harmful medical model of disability, forcing kids (who cannot possibly consent) to share incredibly personal medical details in return for maybe being treated nicely for a day or two
Charity is never the answer to systematic oppression and disadvantage, both because it can’t possibly compensate for those things and because it’s almost always a short-lived sticking plaster on a decades-old wound
It absolves everyone of responsibility. Obviously, this mostly applies to the government, for whom it is mighty convenient to have disability injustice portrayed as individual problems and not a result of deliberate policy decisions. But it also allows the general public to chuck a few quid at disabled people and then continue voting for the Tories
It depoliticises things that are very bloody political, never questioning why kids don’t have wheelchairs or, you know, enough to eat
It is peak inspiration porn i.e. using the trials and triumphs of disabled kids to make nondisabled adults feel lucky
God, it all makes me livid. But do you know what the worst part is, the bit that makes me feel physically nauseous?
It tells disabled kids that they’re a burden on their family and friends.
I know it does, because that’s exactly what it told me when I was little.
Every time there’s a piece about how hard it is to care for a disabled child or have a disabled sibling, with no mention of the complete lack of support that makes it so hard, it is saying to disabled kids: your existence makes your family’s life worse.
Can you imagine how that feels?
I can’t help but think of all this in the context of Disability History Month, the theme for which is children and young people. What messages are we sending the next generation of disabled people by keeping this nonsense on our tellies?
Speaking of disability history: it’s been 31 years since the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network successfully campaigned to end ITV’s annual telethon - for many of the same reasons we are now calling out Children In Need. People in broadcasting cannot claim ignorance about why these programmes are harmful because we have told them time and time again.
Quite a lot of people who read this newsletter work for the major broadcasters, especially the BBC. Please, if you can, raise these issues internally. Because those of us on the outside are not being listened to.
And for everyone else, I hope you turn the channel over tonight and watch something less ableist. Vote with your remotes. In fact, why not mark Disability History Month and watch Crip Camp or Then Barbara Met Alan? Real, authentic disability stories - with no inspiration porn in sight.
Until next time,
Lucy
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Nothing enforces how much charity is fully intertwined with Capitalism like the way Children In Need use disabled children in their marketing, truly. I am guilty of watching this programme with tears in my eyes in the past, years ago, and gawd is it ever manipulative of the emotions of the viewer.
Imagine if we lived in a world where it was just expected that children should get the food they need to survive instead of being paraded around as objects of pity as a way to distract from a system set up to allow people to literally go without the most basic needs.