Housing and Disabled Children:
The Art of the Possible
Bevan, Mark A. (2002).
Policy Press, London; 26 pages. $17.95. ISBN 1861344643.
The study of the housing needs of disabled children is a much-neglected topic by both housing practitioners and academics. This makes Mark Bevan’s interesting and informative report, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), a welcome addition to a small but growing area of research and scholarship. Bevan’s objective is to highlight the different ways in which the housing needs of disabled children and their families are addressed by particular individuals and agencies in positive and beneficial ways in the UK. The report begins by outlining the broader issues relating to meeting the needs of disabled children in the home environment. As Bevan suggests, a fundamental problem in trying to address the housing needs of disabled children “is the lack of sufficient focus on this group within current legislation” (p. 1). This, for Bevan, is compounded by the disabling nature of much domestic design that limits children’s ease of use of domestic spaces.
Drawing on previous research, Bevan notes that the housing needs of disabled children are often not met by welfare and other agencies due to a lack of money, lack of awareness and service fragmentation. A key problem for families with a disabled child, as the report highlights, is lack of information for parents about where to get assistance to meet their housing needs. Chapter 2 describes some frontline organizations that are proactive in their transparency and clarity about what services are available, and it is suggested that they operate on the principle of empowerment which is defined in the report as “families being able to make informed choices about how to deal with their needs” (p. 9). This, though, seems to be a limited definition of what empowerment is or ought to be and seems to suggest that (a) families have choices, and (b) can exercise them. However, this is not always so, and recent changes to the welfare state in the UK mean that choice is often more illusory than real.
Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which housing services are delivered, and highlights practices in which disabled people are seen as “the experts on their own needs” (p. 10; also, see Allen et al. 2002). It describes various ways in which housing can be adapted and highlights the need for disabled children to have access to play facilities. However, the delivery of good environments for disabled children requires multiple agencies to work together but, in Chapter 4, Bevan notes that a key problem is severe fragmentation of service provision for families with a disabled child. For Bevan, an important task is to ensure that agencies have a common understanding of the extent and range of unmet housing need in relation to disabled children and their families. He also suggests that different agencies should develop specific joint arrangements, such as pooled budgets, that could be utilized to meet housing needs.
While such observations are timely and appropriate, a broader discussion of ideas relating to children, disability, and housing would have been useful. I also felt that much of the material was a regurgitation of already well-known relationships between disabled children, their families, and service providers. I was surprised that there was no reference to, or discussion of, the JRF report by Allen et al. (2002) on disabled children and housing environments in which the authors show how children have potential to develop coping strategies or means to overcome disabling barriers in the home environment. This work is interesting because it challenges conventional views that disabled children are passive or, in Allen’s (2000) terms, “physiological dopes,” without capacities to transform aspects of their lives. This suggests that service users have much to learn from listening closely to disabled children about what they think of their environment and how they use it and adapt it to meet their own needs.
Bevan refers to the term “empowerment” but not in relation to children themselves. I was struck that the examples of good practice that he provided did not say much, if anything, about how children are empowered by agencies seeking to respond to their needs. This is because the examples provided by Bevan appear not to be genuinely child-centered; everything is top-down and filtered through the family (i.e., the parents or responsible individuals). Given this, I feel that the report ought to have been a bit more critical of what appear to be agents’ imposition of a conservative view of children as dependent and passive and requiring things to be done for them. However, the report does seem to suggest that there is still a long way to go to develop child-centered agencies in relation to disabled children.
The brevity of the report means that it lacks depth, and the examples of good practice do not provide sufficient insight to be of use to practitioners. For example, on page seven Bevan refers to “Disability North.” It is claimed that Disability North’s Young Disabled Person’s Project is “user-led,” but no details are provided about important issues, such as what precisely user-led means in this context and how a user-led approach was developed and with what effects. Practitioners will have to follow up the examples by searching for more details, and it is a pity that the report did not provide web site addresses and other contact information. Furthermore, while Bevan notes that the specific examples will not translate into all contexts, it would have been worthwhile for something to have been said about the possibilities of policy transfer or learning from one context to another.
References
Allen, C. (2000). “On the ‘Physiological Dope’ Problematic in Housing and Illness Research: Towards a Critical Realism of Home and Health.” Housing, Theory and Society 17: 49-67.
Allen, C., J. Milner and D. Price (2002). Home is Where the Start Is: The Housing and Urban Experiences of Visually Impaired Children. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York.
Reviewer Information
Department of Geography
Royal Holloway University of London
Rob Imrie is Professor of Human Geography at the University of London and is author of the forthcoming book, Accessible Housing: Quality, Disability and Design, Routledge, London & New York.