Denmark: 80 years united

Stig Langvad is Chair of Danske Handicaporganisationer, Denmark’s umbrella of disabled people’s groups. He talks about how, even though they can operate at the centre of politics, disabled people remain marginalised in Danish society

I have a spinal cord injury which I got from a traffic accident in 1973. Being dependent on society, taking services from society, meeting and facing society’s stereotypes in relation to disabled people, that became my reality. So of course I’m interested in such issues.

I’ve always been a person who wanted to be engaged in changing society or being active with others in trying to turn the supertanker where I wanted it to go.

So it was an obvious thing for me to join the disability movement, at first at local level, then at national level and at European and international level.

Denmark has approximately the same proportion of disabled people as all other industrialised wealthy countries. I believe you have to distinguish between impairment and “being disabled”, because you meet barriers in society when you try to participate on an equal footing. We have a lot of people in Denmark facing challenges, not just people with impairments, but also those who are disabled by association because they have a relative or a child who’s disabled. So they do not have the potential to have the same career as someone else. They might be turned down in relation to jobs because they have a disabled child and they have to go to hospital and so on.

So if you calculate the number of disabled people in relation to the social model, focusing on barriers, I think we’re around 20 per cent.

Denmark is a so-called modern welfare state. We pay a lot of taxes, we expect a lot of services coming from society. So when you look from the point of view of disabled people, there are a lot of challenges in Denmark. Of course, these challenges depend a lot on the nature of your impairment.

If you have an intellectual disability like Down’s syndrome, then you face a lot of challenges in being able to represent yourself, have your personal autonomy, choose where you want to live, be able to go to mainstream school in inclusive education. You’re not taught in the way you could be if you had teachers with the right qualifications or if you had the right assisted devices. So you are not equal with others.

The same is true for other impairments but in different ways. If you look at visually impaired people, if you go back 10-15 years, a lot of them were in employment. Today, hardly any of them are. That’s partly changed because investment in technology is costly so employers, municipalities, whoever is going to pay for this don’t want to make that investment in visually impaired people. Transportation is also a big problem. People simply can’t get from their home to the job and if the job involves going out and about, then they can’t do that.

Similarly for deaf or hard of hearing people, access to sign-language interpretation is difficult.

In a way I was pretty lucky for many years. I went to university and got my qualifications. Then I got a job which I had for 15 years. After a while I didn’t have the necessary physical stamina and so had to withdraw from the labour market. Working with DPOs I can use skills which don’t demand so much of me.

But if you look at my potential to participate on an equal footing within society, I meet a lot of barriers. Inaccessible transportation, inaccessible housing, inaccessible theatres, cinemas, soccer stadiums. Every time I’m going to travel by air, they always ask for medical information which is unnecessary for them to know, but they ask so that they can tell me that I have to be accompanied on board.

Then there are other sorts of attitudes which determine how people treat me as a disabled person. Sometimes people speak louder when they talk to me. If I go shopping, they ask my personal assistant what kind of clothes I want to wear.

So, even though we in Denmark are pretty well off, we still face those sorts of challenges.

The only anti-discrimination legislation that we have in place is what we’ve been forced to have by the European Union. That’s predominantly in relation to discrimination in the workplace. But if you go out and face discrimination when you want to go into a restaurant and they won’t let you take your guide dog, you have nowhere to go. If they don’t want you in there with your wheelchair, you have nowhere to go. No sanctions, nothing.

So one of the big challenges for us in the movement is to help Denmark come up with a law banning discrimination in all spheres of society.

But the politicians don’t want that.

Today, Danish politicians do not like human rights. It’s not that they’re against treating human beings with dignity. But it is about being handcuffed by international laws and conventions not allowing them to be the good guys and good girls giving the people what they need. If they feel forced into doing that, they feel why should we be politicians if someone has already decided. They can’t see that in the frame of human rights, they can build a society which is totally their own invention.

We have a disability movement in Denmark which has been united for almost 80 years. We are very active in trying to influence decisions made by politicians or bureaucrats. No law is going to be passed in parliament without input from the DPOs.

• Stig Langvad was talking to Ian Macrae