Welcome to D-MAP
We established the Disability & Media Alliance Project (D-MAP) to work in alliance with the media industry to change inaccurate public perceptions of disability and replace them with informed and realistic stories and images. We want to broaden the range of popular ideas about disability to go beyond the usual suspects: condescending stares for tragic lives on the one extreme, and admiring awe for superhuman transcendence of obstacles on the other. People with disabilities are neither inspirational heroes nor social parasites, neither courageous underdogs nor charity cases. We are ordinary people with ordinary and highly varied lives. Like everyone else, we'd like to see our lives depicted in the news and in entertainment.
Where do the deep-seated social stereotypes come from? Plays, films, novels, and television shows that include people with disabilities have a literally "storied" history from ancient times to the present: Hephaestus and Tiresias, Quasimodo and Captain Hook, Heidi and Tiny Tim and Pollyanna, Dr. Strangelove and the Phantom of the Opera, the Seven Dwarfs and the Munchkins, Captain Ahab and Richard III. These and other characters reflect and reinforce the idea that disability is dangerous or evil or pitiable.
Such characters continue to appear, from scary Freddy Krueger to sweet Forrest Gump. Their images hover over the disability community because their influence is so pervasive that it echoes in common public idea about disability. The negative perceptions create distrust and distance between people with and without disabilities. The apparently positive perceptions do damage because they suggest that people with disabilities should aspire to be superheroes or to "overcome" their impairments. The perceptions that seem sympathetic often instead invoke an isolating model of charity. And none of these perceptions reflects day-to-day life with a disability.
We need new images, new stories, new perceptions. To meet this need, D-MAP emphasizes the "alliance" in our name. We work with the media to bring our community into the light, with realism, respect, and thoroughness. We want to be bystanders and incidental characters, people in the street, people with opinions, crusaders and villains and just folks.
The cross-disability rights movement in the US emerged in the early 1970s, was jumpstarted during the 1977 Section 504 sit-ins, and rocketed into a degree of political power with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
We've come a long way and can be proud of nearly 40 years of advances in disability civil rights law and policy. But we still have not achieved full community inclusion. We must blast away old stereotypes, assuage fears, correct misinformation, become more visible. In other words, the hardest part lies ahead—changing hearts and minds.
We begin with a focus on news coverage. Disability rights and journalism cross paths every time a disability issue comes up and is reported and every time a person with a disability finds herself in the news. Yet despite valiant attempts by the National Center on Disability & Journalism and the Center for an Accessible Society, the disability community has not yet succeeded in engaging fully with journalists and the news industry.
That is what D-MAP hopes to do: to work with, support, and promote discerning, educated, informed news coverage of people with disabilities and the issues that affect us.
Comments
In Australia and it seems
In Australia and it seems within global disability organisations there does seem to be any written policy. Therefore I'm looking to develop this policy.
Disability Promotion, Community Awareness, Media Reporting & Fund Raising Policy Statement
(Adapted from Blind Citizens Australia Policy)
1. Introduction
1.1 AFDO is the united voice of People with Disability in Australia.
1.2 This Policy Statement reflects our concern that fundraising, community education, awareness campaigns, media reporting and health campaigns, within and external to Australia, have not always depicted people with disability in a manner that is positive, dignified and respectful. Too often these practices have focused on the negative impact in peoples’ lives.
1.3 We require all agencies, organisations, media and governments to uphold the principles of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to overcome discrimination and negative cultural and ethnic beliefs and practices and educate the community by providing information and depicting people with disabilities, in a manner which promotes positive images through focusing on opportunity, independence, and achievement.
1.4 We affirm that as mandated in the CRPD, all people with disabilities have the same rights as others to be regarded with respect and treated with dignity.
2. Principles
2.1 People with disabilities are individuals who have specific needs as a result of their disability who may not have the resources to meet their own needs. Governments at all levels, National, State and Local must ensure the allocation of resources to address the specific needs of people with disabilities regardless of age, race or religion.
2.2 The fundamental rights of all people with disabilities are sacrosanct, and must not be compromised in any way in fundraising, media reporting or community education projects. These rights include:
• the right of community understanding and acceptance of their individual situation,
• the right to be recognised and valued as equal members of the community,
• the right to have their contributions to society recognised and valued, and
• the right of informed consent regarding involvement in any fundraising, marketing or community education project.
3. Policy Actions
3.1 These principles should govern the practices of any organisation reporting news, raising awareness, providing services or raising funds for people with disability within or outside Australia. As the national voice of People with Disability, AFDO calls upon organisations, agencies, media and governments, to ensure that news reporting, fundraising or community education undertaken about people with disability accords with the above principles.
3.2 We call upon individuals, employees, staff, organisations, agencies and media to:
• monitor the news reporting, awareness campaigns, fundraising practices and policies of agencies, organisations, governments and media and if they break these principles to publicly speak out against these practices.
3.3 We call upon agencies, organisations, governments and media to:
• ensure that their media reporting, awareness campaigns and/or fundraising practices honour the principles set out in this statement and the CRPD.
• ensure that all practices are age appropriate to the people with disability directly affected. Where an agency or organisation provides services to or represents a wide age range their general portrayal of people with disability must be balanced to reflect positive images of all those people with disability.
• ensure photographic exhibitions do not dwell on tragedy and are balanced and finish with positive images of how people with disabilities can over come adversity.
• ensure people with disabilities are involved in every aspect of these activities as equal partners.
• enable and resource consumer reference groups that will monitor the development and implementation of fundraising, community awareness, media campaigns by agencies and government according to this policy.
• ensure that "competition" between agencies to secure what they see as an appropriate "slice of the cake" is not detrimental to those whose needs are to be served, or to other agencies working in similar or related areas.
• prepare and present all fundraising, promotional or educational material in such a way that it reinforces full human rights and promotes the basic truth that "people with disability regardless of cultural background are individuals with the same right to dignity, respect and opportunity as all other members of society".
• Implement an accessible, informed consent strategy that enables individuals, families or groups to make an informed decision about their involvement in each specific project.
• recognise and address the need to break down the myths, misconceptions and negative images regarding people with disability held by the broader community, and in particular misconceptions within the CALD community regarding disability.
• ensure strategies are in place for people from non english speaking background to reflect positive images of people with disability.
• accept the challenge to enhance community perceptions of people with disability and their contribution to Society.
• avoid negative wording etc.