DAA, Disability Awareness in Action (Kampanjen för medvetenhet om funktionshinder), är en internationell upplysningskampanj riktad mot allmänheten för att främja, stödja och samordna nationella kampanjer för målen i FN:s två program United Nations Decade of Disabled Persons (De funktionshindrades årtionde, 1983-1992) och WPA, World Programme of Action Concerning Disabled Persons (Globala aktionsprogrammet för funktionshindrade).
Imagine how shocking it would be to pick up a newspaper today and read a front-page story about a "colored" or "Negro" politician or businessman. Yet, the print and broadcast media still describe people with disabilities with equally archaic and demeaning phrases such as "handicapped," "differently abled," "challenged" and "special."
Furthermore, while journalists do not include a person's ethnic or racial minority group status in articles unless it is a crime report or pertinent to the story, a disability inevitably gets mentioned regardless of the story's topic.
Here are some guidelines for writing about people with disabilities.
Dr. Theresia Degener, legal adviser to the German Council
of Centres for Self-Determined Living and lecturer
at the Universities of Frankfurt, Mainz and Leipzig
Princeton University's Center for Human Values recently employed Dr. Peter Singer as a professor of Bioethics. Dr. Singer states "Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."
