This report documents the experience of exclusion of people with intellectual disabilities and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences reveal pre-existing structural inequalities that affected the lives of people with intellectual disabilities and their families before COVID-19, during the pandemic, and beyond, and this report raises up the voices of those most excluded in a time of global crisis and demands an inclusive COVID-19 recovery.
This report includes the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities and families across eight different issue areas. Across these themes, we examined how and why people with intellectual disabilities were left out and excluded in pandemic responses, what pre-existing conditions and inequalities contributed to their vulnerability and exclusion, and how future policy structures could begin to address both this immediate and systemic exclusion.
Together, these experiences and policy solutions form our global agenda for inclusive COVID-19 recovery, an action plan to ensure that government efforts to ‘build back better’ are inclusive of people with intellectual disabilities and their families.
Across the Inclusion International network, many individuals and organisations took part in workshops, surveys and interviews to report:
what self-advocacy means to them
what good support is
how organisations can be more inclusive
the vital role that families play in empowering self-advocacy.
This report provides a snapshot of work, and has some useful information for self-advocates, supporters, organisations and families. As well as containing the results from the global survey, interviews and workshops, this report also provides some useful guidance for anyone who wants to make the world more inclusive for people with intellectual disabilities.
A website (www.selfadvocacyportal.com) has been developed to share good practice and resources.
[Authors' abstract] : The main purpose of this study was to measure the effect of employment on independent living and self-advocacy of persons with cognitive disabilities. The other purposes of the paper were to measure the effect of severity of disability and type of employment, on self-advocacy skills and independent living skills. A ten item-five point rating scale was developed to measure the independence level and self advocacy of persons with cognitive disabilities. A qualitative and quantitative study of fifty unemployed and fifty employed persons with cognitive disabilities was carried out. The results were statistically analysed and a significant difference was found between the groups, with the unemployed persons with cognitive disabilities scoring significantly lower in independent living and self-advocacy skills. Those in open employment showed more independent living and self-advocacy skills than those in group employment. The practical implications of the findings of this study are discussed