This is sickening. Trump and his Republican allies are committing gross human rights abuses, right here in America. Trump and his Republican party are the party of child abuse.
This dissertation seeks to show that charities for homeless people have a duty to address disability, and that these charities fail to do so even though more than half of homeless people are disabled people.
The duty to address compliance with disability legislation is examined briefly, and the logical implication that disability among the beneficiaries of a charity must first be recognised is stated.
Two surveys were done to illustrate that more than half of homeless people are disabled people. In contrast, 16% of Britain’s population are disabled people, with a spending power of £80 billion per annum.
A computer search of disability, poverty and homelessness literature was done to find direct links between disability and homelessness. No such links could be found, illustrating that disability and homelessness are not conceptually linked in theory or common practice.
The causes of homelessness were examined, and the question raised whether many of these ‘causes’ of homelessness are directly linked to disability. Might disability poverty cause someone to be unable to meet rent payments, so that “rent not paid” is not the actual cause of homelessness. The causes of homelessness were examined in the light of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
In conclusion I recommend that disability and Homelessness charities seriously examine the links between disability and homelessness, and that University graduates in Disability Studies are appointed to the board as Disability Officers, where they should hold no other portfolio.
I recommend that the leaders in charity governance alter governance methods and objectives in such a way that an awareness of disability and homelessness will filter through to grassroots levels, and permeate our society, as happened in the case of blind people, who are no longer homeless people. If this happens people with unseen disabilities will also cease to be homeless.
I also remembered running across this site several years ago, and managed to track it down again. The author (who also got this foundation going) became homeless for disability-related reasons, and was only able to get off the street after managing to access some services. Funny how that works.
And until I ran across some of his commentary, I hadn’t been aware of some of the bass-ackward discourse around these issues which is apparently too common in the UK. I was more familiar with the US versions going on about the failures of deinstitutionalization causing people to end up on the street, which are often disturbing enough in some other ways.
Never had I run across an approach based on the idea that existing systems are just so great that surely nobody could end up homeless because of disability! Being homeless just coincidentally causes a lot of health problems. (Which is probably also true, but yeah. That’s really unlikely to help the condition of somebody who is already disabled.)
That would indeed be in a political context where “one-third of Autistic adults in the UK have neither employment nor access to benefits” (*raises hand*), and “[r]ates of autism among the homeless population are 3000% to 6000% higher than in the general population”. As just one example. (Another cause of autism: homelessness! 😐 )
It’s kind of a mess, all around–and of course not just here. With the current austerity climate, trying to help get homeless people who need it access to disability services would have to be an even harder proposition, down to things as simple as disabled travelcards. But, glad somebody saw the need.
Ran across this while looking for something else, and it’s unfortunately more relevant all the time.
I just learned yesterday abt this existing and it’s so baffling to me that healthcare determinations wrt CA state law are able to be sent by a state govt agency to a private corporation in VA
Just a little of what they’ve been up to in the UK:
ATOS, Maximus and Capita questioned on ‘gruelling’ medical assessments (“The Work and Pensions Committee questions Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) contractors Atos, Capita and Maximus, who carry out the medical assessments for disability benefits PIP and ESA, putting the disturbing evidence it has heard so far to them. The Committee also publishes the contractors’ written evidence ahead of their oral testimony.”)
The UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity, the United Nations poverty envoy has found.
Philip Alston, the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ended a two-week fact-finding mission to the UK with a stinging declaration that despite being the world’s fifth largest economy, levels of child poverty are “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”.
About 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials, he said, citing figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He highlighted predictions that child poverty could rise by 7% between 2015 and 2022, possibly up to a rate of 40%.
i’m sure the bbc will find this worthy to report on any minute now..
Britain was in breach of four UN human rights agreements relating to women, children, disabled people and economic and social rights. “If you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place,” he said.
“Leading a nation whose citizens felt a mix of unbridled patriotism and raw fear after 9/11, Bush, Cheney, and their crowd abused those sentiments to gin up fervor for a war against a country that had zero connection to the 2001 attacks. Not unlike World War I, Americans have never been given an understandable rationale for a war that had something to do with Machiavellian machinations in a region rich with oil — an abstract exercise of American power that killed more then 4,000 very real Americans on top of those hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, many of them innocent women and children. We do know this: To make their splendid little war happen, Bush and his minions lied again and again — about “ticking time bombs” that had been unplugged years earlier, about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, and about ties between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that never were. The Iraq war has destabilized the Middle East to this day and paved the way for the rise of a new anti-American group called ISIS that remains a murderous scourge. And it made the world safe for oil, right at the moment when the planet’s survival depends on moving away from fossil fuels. The Iraq war alone should be disqualifying, but there’s so much more to this sordid story. Team Bush also manipulated the post-9/11 mood to bring back waterboarding and other forms of torture that are clearly illegal, thanks to a 1988 treaty enacted and praised by conservative icon Ronald Reagan. Detainees who were mostly innocent — rounded up by bounty hunters seeking easy cash — were both abused and held for years without charges at the Guantanamo prison camp, in a stunning betrayal of American values, while others were whisked to CIA black sites around the world or tortured at notorious prisons like Afghanistan’s Bagram or Iraq’s Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration also shredded the Fourth Amendment with its large-scale illegal wiretapping and surveillance of everyday Americans — which makes Sunday’s celebration of all things Bush by a center that honors the U.S. Constitution all the more bizarre. Of course, some of Bush’s unpopularity when he left the White House in January 2009 was the result of things — the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 economic collapse — that merely made W. a very bad president. But what happened in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib made him a very bad person.”
“One in five British people are suffering erosion of their rights because they are disabled, the government-backed Equality and Human Rights Commission has said in a damning report to the United Nations.”
Someone’s rights to their own bodies does not expire when they
get a certain diagnosis
you find them irrational
do something to their bodies you find absurd
are disabled, physically, mentally or intellectually
get pregnant
go against medical advice (if I never went against medical advice I’d be somewhere between bedridden or dead at this point, but it’s still legitimate even when following the advice does not have catastrophic consequences)
The U.N. Human Rights Committee has declared that France’s ban on full-face Islamic veils, such as the niqab and burqa, is a violation of Muslim women’s rights.
The committee, a body of 18 independent experts that monitors how nations implement an international civil rights treaty, said that France has failed to adequately explain why the 2010 law, which has come to be known as a burqa ban, was necessary.
“In particular, the Committee was not persuaded by France’s claim that a ban on face covering was necessary and proportionate from a security standpoint or for attaining the goal of ‘living together’ in society,” the committee said in a statement on Tuesday. “The Committee acknowledged that States could require that individuals show their faces in specific circumstances for identification purposes, but considered that a general ban on the niqab was too sweeping for this purpose.”
The committee, one of the many U.N. rights-monitoring groups supported by the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, added that the ban confines women who wear full-face veils to their homes, “impeding their access to public services and marginalizing them.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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