Why discriminate against children with special needs?

Children are believed to be gifts from God. Sometimes, some women get pregnant and abort – this means they have rejected the gift God has given to them. Sometimes, some women desire to have children but never get.

Some women even give birth to beautiful babies but throw them away into gutters and latrines because they don’t want them or they are deformed – God has given them but they don’t want. At the same time, there are a number of women who have spent all their time and worth to enable them to get a single child, but they have none. 

There is a saying that some have, but they don’t want; some want but they don’t get. These are some of the mysteries of the world.

Children are gift from God

Despite the wildly held belief that children are special gifts from God, there have been times when some parents have rejected their children because they were born with certain levels of deformity. Some even completely abandon such children at birth. In such cases, the abandoned children become the ‘properties’ of society – their care and upbringing become the responsibility of society.

Elsewhere in mostly western countries, such abandoned children with deformities receive the best care ever available to ensure that they don’t become outcasts and as such are trained to fit into society. In Ghana, this is never the case.

Ghanaian children with deformities

Most Ghanaians hold the view that children with deformities are a curse, hence they deserve to be rejected, abandoned, or even killed. Our society is generally, totally anti-children with deformity. Even the state, which must not be discriminatory against any citizen, has always been found guilty of neglecting children with deformity, euphemistically referred to as ‘children with special needs’.

It is worth noting that parents with children with deformity who continue to show them love and support them to grow must be highly commended. This is because one of the difficult situations any Ghanaian parent could find himself or herself in is caring for a physically or mentally challenged child or children, as our society and particularly succeeding governments have never shown any appreciable concern for such children.

Special schools

A visit to any of the schools for the blind, the deaf and dumb, and also orphanages will reveal such horrible treatment our society metes out to children who rather need our love and affection even more than the ‘able-bodied’ ones.

Whereas schools for what many of us unashamedly call ‘normal children’ are seen to be running smoothly in all parts of the country, the very few special needs schools are almost always neglected by the state as if the children who attend such schools are not human beings. In fact, our society erroneously sees such children as second-rate citizens and thought about only after all the ‘normal’ people have been cared for.

There are 24 special needs schools in the country, meant for children with behavioural, physical, cognitive, or emotional needs that have never been met by schools attended by the so-called ‘normal’ children.    

Closure of special schools

These schools are the only ones catering for many children with special needs in the country. It is, therefore, not possible for a child with special needs to attend school in their own vicinity like any other child. Such children are compelled to move to locations far away from their own environment, which could have even helped with their education.

These 24 schools should have reopened on Tuesday, May 13, 2014. Regrettably, however, while ‘normal’ children are in school, children with special needs are at home (that is if they have homes at all), simply because the government has not released their feeding grants for the third term of the 2013-2014 academic year.

According to the Daily Graphic of Monday, May 26, 2014, an agreement was just reached last weekend between the Conference of Heads of Special Schools (COHESS), the Ghana Education Service (GES), and the Controller and Accountant-General’s Department (CAGD) for the release of outstanding grants to enable the schools to reopen next week.

The question is, why should these children stay at home all this while, and why is there any need for the COHESS to reach an agreement with CAGD and the GES before grants that are mandatory are given?

Lack of attention

This shows clearly how we, as a nation, disregard children with special needs and the level of institutional racism against people with deformity in our country. If the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service and the Accountant-General have children who attend special needs schools, would they have been happy to keep such children at home for over three weeks while their other ‘normal’ children were in school?  

It is regrettable that in Ghana, and perhaps most parts of Africa, due to superstition and other ungrounded beliefs, physically, mentally, and emotionally challenged children or those born with deformities are never considered as human beings deserving care and love by society.

The situation gets even worse when state institutions discriminate against such children. 

This neglect leads to many of such children growing up without any training, which could help many of them. Many who could have normally been trained to, at least, care for themselves, become street beggars and social outcasts.

Much as we talk about the need for our society to support people with physical and other challenges, the more we realise that we are only paying a lip service and not showing a genuine feeling for such people. For instance, how many government buildings, especially those in the ministries and district assemblies, are wheelchair accessible?

People with disabilities are human beings; hence we must stop any discrimination against them.

PS: Mr Inspector-General of Police, having Ghana openly accepted that the Police Service had done some wrong in recent past, would you please respond to the children and widow of Adjei Akpor, the 22-year-old man your men killed at Adenta on January 6, 2014 and give them justice? This is the 20th week since the man was killed. Sir, I’m still waiting.

The author is a Journalist and Political Scientist. He is the Head of the Department of Media and Communication Studies, Pentecost University College, Accra. - fasado@hotmail.com