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As Children in Need’s appeal programme, the BBC annual fundraising event for “disadvantaged” kids (the majority of whom are sick/disabled), airs tomorrow, I want you to remember these five things:
1. Disabled children shouldn’t have to disclose or demonstrate their disability / sickness or ‘how they came to be’ in order to receive support.
2. The way the charity tugs at our heartstrings is dehumanising to those they’re fighting the corner of. It reduces them to sad mascots of helplessness when the reality is that disabled kids are incredibly resourceful and resilient. The problem isn’t the children.
3. The programme relies heavily on the temporary feel good factor people experience when they donate arbitrary, one-off sums of money, but the issues disabled kids face are systemic and would only ever be temporarily improved by cash injections.
4. Once the charity ‘pot’ dries up, so do the projects it is assigned to. Where are the kids left then? What about after they turn 18? Long-term & permanent solutions need to be sought to improve support and services and the only way to do this is if they’re state-funded.
5. In summary: Children in Need is doing our government’s job for them, in a temporary way, for select people only, at the expense of the privacy and dignity of those people, and we’re controlling the purse strings.
Disabled children deserve so much more.
Disabled children deserve so much more.
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