“Strong Proud Sisters: Girls and Women with Disabilities”

fuckthedisabled:

SELF-ESTEEM, BODY IMAGE AND IDENTITY

Historically, negative assumptions about disability status pervaded research on selfesteem and identity issues for youth and adults with disabilities; disability was inevitably seen as a negative influence or the only influence on how disabled people viewed themselves. Early psychoanalytic literature, for example, viewed early onset physical impairment as invariably leading to defects in body image and sense of self (Rousso, 1985). In recent years, there has been movement away from this “anatomy is destiny” viewpoint and an increasing recognition of the role of family and other environmental factors. However, even this perspective may not be broad enough, as it fails to fully take into account the sociopolitical climate in which youth with disabilities grow up, particularly the societal attitudes and policies regarding disability that influence access, opportunities and treatment. Relatively little existing research reflects this broad sociopolitical viewpoint. Nor does much of it take into account the heterogeneity of people with disabilities based on gender, race, ethnicity, class and other factors that we know influence the self-esteem and identity issues of nondisabled people. As a result, we have a far too limited picture of how girls and young women with disabilities feel about themselves, their bodies and their place in the world.

Self-esteem:

In the past two decades, a substantial number of studies have considered self-esteem issues for children and youth with such diverse disabilities as cerebral palsy, spina bifida, blindness/visual impairments, deafness/hearing impairments, facial disfigurements, cancer and diabetes. Most offer comparisons between disabled and nondisabled youth. Few focus specifically on girls or disaggregate data by gender; even fewer offer a breakdown by race and ethnicity. The relatively few studies that included a gender analysis – comparing girls and boys within and across disability status — provided no consensus but, when viewed as a whole, they suggested that girls with disabilities were likely to have lower self-esteem than their disabled male or nondisabled female counterparts. Doren and Benz (1998) studied postsecondary education outcomes for young people with diverse disabilities, finding that significantly more young women than young men with disabilities left high school with low selfesteem. They also found that level of self-esteem was a predictor of employment status for young women, although not for young men; disabled young women who left school with low self-esteem were three times less likely than those young women with high self-esteem to be compettitively employed one year after high school suggesting that disabled young women pay a high price for low self-esteem.

Many young women struggle with issues of body image. For young women with disabilities, the issues may be compounded by real physical differences and stereotypes of disabled women as asexual, undesirable and unattractive; thus these young women are likely to face considerable challenges in establishing positive views of their own bodies.

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