The UN slammed the government's treatment of disabled people and no one covered it
Hello,
Frustration levels are high this week.
On Monday, the UK government was forced to appear before the actual United Nations to defend its treatment of disabled people. This after it became the only signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People to have been found in breach of its obligations.
The session was brutal, with the committee haranguing the government on subjects as varied as healthcare, education, housing, transport, mental health, suicides linked to benefit sanctions, and forced institutionalisation. The civil servant the government sent to answer questions on its behalf didn’t engage with any of these issues in a meaningful way, instead pointing to efforts to “consult” disabled people and making some vague reference to, would you believe, the Equality Act. That’ll do it.
For more info, it’s worth checking out Disability Rights UK, one of the disabled people’s organisations which attended the session.
For now though, I’ll return to my own wheelhouse, because I want to talk about the media response to this huge event. Or rather, the media silence.
Do you know how many mainstream media outlets covered the session on Monday? None.
Do you know how many ran comment pieces reacting to the government’s abysmal defence on Tuesday? None.
(My pitches on the matter were unsuccessful, which is absolutely fine, except they didn’t assign the topic to anyone else, either.)
Eventually, the BBC and the Mirror ran stories on Wednesday, after Labour sort of called it out (the Mirror piece appears to have been written by a journalism student, so…). The best coverage was in the dedicated disability press, particularly from John at Disability News Service.
In isolation, a story not getting much coverage is par for the course. There’s only so many column inches or spaces on a website homepage. Fine. It happens.
But for there to be such little coverage of a frankly massive, should-be-shocking story does say something about what and who this industry prioritises… and it sure isn’t disabled people.
One wonders: had the government been forced to give evidence on its failure to protect the rights of, say, women, would there have been the same shrug of the shoulders? At some point it stops feeling like apathy and starts feeling like, well, complicity.
I’m lucky to work with brilliant editors who do care about this country’s treatment of disabled people, but as I’ve written before, there’s still a pervasive sense across the industry that these issues are “niche”.
But the numbers don’t back this up. I don’t know how many times I can possibly say this but: one in five people are disabled. That’s 20% of your audience. And you’re ignoring a crucial story about the violation of their internationally-defined rights. Do we see how absolutely unacceptable that is?
Anecdotally, too, there are ample signs that the demand for coverage is there. My tweet about the UN hearing was shared more than a thousand times. Multiple people commented that they were shocked not to have heard about it, several others DM’d me for links to news stories about it. I had nothing to send them - and they wanted to know why.
As ever with disability, build it and they will come. Write it and they will read.
Instead, we are failing disabled people over and over again.
Hire more disabled journalists. Commission more disabled freelancers. Cover more disability stories.
I’m so sick of saying all this. But I won’t stop until it changes.
See you next week,
Lucy
Learn more about disability inclusion with my book
Women's lives are shaped by sexism and expectations. Disabled people's lives are shaped by ableism and a complete lack of expectations. But what happens when you're subjected to both sets of rules?
This powerful, honest, hilarious and furious memoir from journalist and advocate Lucy Webster looks at life at the intersection; the struggles, the joys and the unseen realities of being a disabled woman. From navigating the worlds of education and work, dating and friendship; to managing care; contemplating motherhood; and learning to accept your body against a pervasive narrative that it is somehow broken and in need of fixing, The View From Down Here shines a light on what it really means to move through the world as a disabled woman.