Disabled and Dutch: Are We Failing Our Disabled Citizens?

This is part 1 of a series of interviews with people responding to a recent UN report on disabilities in Europe and more specifically in the Netherlands.

Source: United Nations

For years, I have told people that to be intellectually disabled in the Netherlands is to live as half a person. Unlike the United States where we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, there are no binding laws in the Netherlands guaranteeing a disabled person an education equal to the non-disabled.

While my son had a handful of wonderful people who worked with him over the years, he was also, regularly, denigrated by professionals, family, and neighbors. He went to a separate school where many of his days were spent drawing, watching television, and picking up trash in a stadium for an internship. There is a reason why almost 70,000 Dutch students sit at home, unable or unwilling to follow an educational trajectory unbefitting for them.

The Dutch have always looked for empirical ways to segregate their society. Regularly, I pass the Camperstraat in Amsterdam, still named after Petrus Camper, an 18th-century Dutch anatomist, whose studies on human skulls were used to scientifically prove racial hierarchy. As Frederick Douglass, the emancipated slave and abolitionist so eloquently said when white people wrongly claimed the cognitive abilities of black people were less;

"What if we are inferior? Is it a valid reason for robbing us of our dearest rights?”

A few months ago, a new report by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities issued a report excoriating the treatment of the intellectually disabled in the Netherlands. The report was mostly ignored by the press and the government, but for parents of the disabled in the Netherlands, especially the intellectually disabled, the U.N.’s findings came as a quiet vindication.

In the 20-page report, the lack of education possibilities for people with intellectual disabilities is mentioned 34 times, almost two times per page. The UN committee noted with concern that there is an “insufficient knowledge of professionals ...concerning non-visible impairments, and the resulting unsuitable treatment or assessment of non-standard behaviour…” Special education teachers in Dutch high schools only need to have the same training as primary school teachers and they need little to no extra training for autism.

The UN committee could have been speaking directly to my son’s situation when they said they were deeply concerned about; “The limited training provided to general education teachers on the rights of children with disabilities to inclusive education and on inclusive education methods of teaching.” And to the school system, which put those with special needs, like my son, in separate schools, out of sight of the general public, “the perpetuation of the dual education systems…” As Peter Vermuelen, educator, author, and prominent disability rights advocate says, care for the disabled should not be divided into therapy, coaching, and education as it is now, but should be done under one roof, holistically and with as much inclusion with the non-disabled students as possible.

Autism awareness in the United States is as remarkable as it is liberating. When my son wears construction-style, sound-cancelling headphones in Amsterdam, people stare. When he wears them in New York City, people immediately recognize that he is not neurotypical and willingly accommodate him. I was ecstatic to read that the UN recommended that the Netherlands should: “Implement measures to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities, including awareness-raising campaigns to combat discriminatory attitudes and promote the inherent value of all persons with disabilities.” Right now, during Neurodiversity Week in the Netherlands, there are very few activities or public displays of pride, while, in the United States, there are events planned in almost every major city.

Over the last few years, the Dutch have come to realize that their famous "Dutch tolerance" is more about looking away than accepting, of separating rather than diversifying, of exclusion rather than inclusion. Worse, I believe, the massive Dutch safety net institutionalizes ableism by promoting welfare over civil rights. And while the Dutch government usually takes U.N. reports seriously, this one was mostly overlooked and gradually buried.

Over the next few posts, I will talk to people in and around Europe (and the Netherlands) who can address this UN report in varying ways.