Putting on the frighteners

Charities which cynically play on the fear factor, says Peter White, are seriously missing what should be the point and purpose of their own existence

There’s a man who frequently stands at the entrance to Oxford Circus tube station, shaking a tin, and intoning mordantly: “Help the handicapped! Please help! Help the handicapped”. I have not yet struck him, but it’s always a close-run thing.

The policy-makers at most charities involved in disability would now stoutly deny that any such crass slogans could get past their gatekeepers of appropriate portrayal. In which case, how come three of the major charities could be seen at the party conferences, cheerfully playing the sympathy and warning cards to raise money.

Now admittedly they’re not shaking tins and crying “Help the blind! Help the deaf”, but in many ways they might just as well be. All three: the RNIB, the RNID, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society, have been emphasising the negatives of the situations they represent: the RNIB with its “Lost and Found” campaign; the RNID with its pressure for hearing tests, and the MS Society with its stress on the early debilitating symptoms of the condition. In all honesty, the only difference between such campaigns and blatant tin-shaking is that while the latter is designed to appeal to the “sympathetic” gene, the former is targeted at the “selfish” gene: in other words, rather than asking you to feel sorry for those who’ve already got it, you ask people to think how terrible it would be if they got it, and to part with some cash quickly.

I know charities have to raise money: the golden age – which like most golden ages probably never existed – when we could at least try to believe that statutory funds and services could provide for disability need without a lot of tin-shaking, have gone. A combination of Blatcherism and demographics have seen to that! But couldn’t we at least attempt some consistency about the images of disability that charities display?

It’s as if the army of fundraising consultants, and the army of right-on portrayers, never talk to each other; and it seems highly likely to me that this is the case: or at the very least, never listen to each other! Can positive images of disability really not raise as much money and awareness as the”give us some money, or this will happen to you” approach? It seems to me that if charities want any claim to consistency, and any credibility in their assertions to campaign for people’s rights, they have a duty to try rather harder than they are at the moment!