What Does It Mean to Be a College Student for Youth with Intellectual Disabilities? : A Survey on Department of Rehabilitation Independence of Korea Nazarene University

<strong>Background:</strong> Governments in several countries are facing problems concerning the accountability of regulators in health care. Questions have been raised about how patients’ complaints should be valued in the regulatory process. However, it is not known what patients who made complaints expect to achieve in the process of health-care quality regulation. <strong>Objective:</strong> To assess expectations and experiences of patients who complained to the regulator. Design Interviews were conducted with 11 people, and a questionnaire was submitted to 343 people who complained to the Dutch Health-care Inspectorate. The Inspectorate handled 92 of those complaints. This decision was based on the idea that the Inspectorate should only deal with complaints that relate to ‘structural and severe’ problems. <strong>Results:</strong> The response rate was 54%. Self-reported severity of physical injury of complaints that were not handled was significantly lower than of complaints that were. Most respondents felt that their complaint indicated a structural and severe problem that the Inspectorate should act upon. The desire for penalties or personal satisfaction played a lesser role. Only a minority felt that their complaint had led to improvements in health-care quality. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> Patients and the regulator share a common goal: improving health-care quality. However, patients’ perceptions of the complaints’ relevance differ from the regulator’s perceptions. Regulators should favour more responsive approaches, going beyond assessing against exclusively clinical standards to identify the range of social problems associated with complaints about health care. Long-term learning commitment through public participation mechanisms can enhance accountability and improve the detection of problems in health care. (aut. ref.

Submission to United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Draft General Comment on Article 12 – Equal Recognition Before the Law

We support the Draft General Comment on Article 12 – Equal Recognition Before the Law (‘Draft General Comment’). Our submission is primarily concerned with drawing the Committee’s attention to issues around mental capacity. We argue that despite the Committee’s urging in the Draft General Comment for a split between legal capacity and mental capacity, mental capacity (and the related disciplines, professions, institutions and practices of psychology, psychiatry and neuropsychology through which mental capacity is defined and assessed) will continue to have cultural and material significance to the realisation of article 12 and the human rights of people with disability generally. We therefore make a number of recommendations concerning how the Committee might address mental capacity in the General Comment

Freedom of Opinion and Expression: From the Perspective of Psychosocial Disability and Madness

This article argues that civil mental health laws operate to constrict how people think, understand, and speak about psychosocial disability, madness, and mental distress. It does so with reference to views and experiences of mental health service users and psychiatric survivors (users and survivors) and their/our accounts of disability, madness, and distress, such as those articulated by the emerging field of Mad studies. The analysis considers the application of the rights to freedom of opinion and expression that are enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other international human rights instruments to the mental health context. The article explores the suppression of freedom of opinion and expression that is effected through the symbolic violence of psychiatry and the mental health paradigm. Focusing on Australian legal frameworks, the article discusses how the material violence and coercion characterising mental health laws compound this process. It is further argued that civil mental health laws, by codifying the tenets of psychiatry and the mental health paradigm so as to render them largely unassailable, validate the ontological nullification of users and survivors. The foregoing analysis exposes dangers of adopting a functional test of mental capacity as the pre-eminent legal standard for authorising involuntary mental health interventions. It is suggested that considering freedom of opinion and expression from the perspective of psychosocial disability and madness reinforces the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ interpretation that such interventions are incompatible with international human rights standards

Income Management and Intersectionality: Analysing Compulsory Income Management through the lenses of Critical Race Theory and Critical Disability Studies

This article investigates the relationship between racism, ableism and classism inthe context of compulsory income management, with a focus on difficultiesencountered by people experiencing these intersections. We analyse governmentcommissioned evaluation reports of income management in the NorthernTerritory, using Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies as analytical tools.Experiences of social security recipients falling within the ‘vulnerable’ incomemanagement stream who participated in the evaluation indicate that Indigenouspeople with a disability are at greater risk of social exclusion due to the negativeimpacts of compulsory income management law. We argue that diminishedfinancial autonomy caused by the ‘vulnerable’ income management measure hasproduced significant harm for some recipients, undermining their capacity tosecure basic needs. We also consider human rights compatibility problems with‘vulnerable’ income management, drawing upon international human rightsprinciples, and conclude that it produces indirect race and disabilitydiscrimination

The cashless debit card and rights of persons with disabilities

The Cashless Debit Card (CDC) was triggered by a recommendation in the 2014 Forrest Review, ostensibly to address substance abuse and gambling issues. The CDC applies to a broad range of social security payments, defined as ‘trigger’ payments, including a Disability Support Pension (DSP). This article contends that people with disabilities are likely to encounter a range of specific issues with the CDC, and that the scheme squares poorly with Australia’s international human rights obligations to persons with disabilities. We argue that the CDC has pernicious effects in terms of deprivation of autonomy, subjection to stigma and denial of dignity

Sexual assault offences - review of penalties

In the wider community, recidivism rates among sex offenders continue to be widely over-estimated and imprisonment rates under-estimated. The authors of this submission to the NSW Sentencing Council\u27s review of penalties for sexual assault offences believes it would be in the interests of justice for government to ensure that the community has better access to clear, accurate and comprehensible information on these issues

Introduction to Disability, Rights and Law Reform in Australia: Pushing Beyond Legal Futures

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities1 (CRPD), which entered into force in May 2008, has been hailed by disability rights scholars and activists as effecting monumental shifts in the status of people with disability2 under international human rights law. A key reason is that the CRPD embodies a ‘social model’ understanding of disability, focused on systemic factors and barriers to equality, that is in contrast to the earlier reductive, individualised ‘medical models’ of disability apparent in international human rights law that legitimated differential treatment of people with disability on the basis of their purported internal, pathological deficits.3 Some have even claimed that the CRPD moves beyond a social model, to introduce a ‘human rights model’ of disability. Theresia Degener, the current Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the UN Committee), argues that although the social model holds strong explanatory power in identifying the formation of disability, it does not affirm the inherent human dignity of people with disability and attribute them with the capacity to hold human rights regardless of impairment.4 According to Degener, the human rights model creates a broader framework for achieving social justice, offering not just an explanation, but a prescription for change.5 Perhaps time will tell whether this is true or not, but it is certainly the case that the CRPD is among the longest and most detailed of all UN human rights treaties, elucidating rights in the disability context in a range of areas of life, including rights to work, education, health services, transportation, access to justice, and accessibility of the physical and social environmen