Legislation and Learning Disabilities
المؤلف:
MALCOLM McIVER
المصدر:
Caring for People with Learning Disabilities
الجزء والصفحة:
P137-C9
2025-10-25
235
Legislation and Learning Disabilities
KEY POINTS
• Adults with learning disabilities are, for the most part, subject to the same laws as every other member of society.
• The term ‘mental impairment’ is a term used in law – in the Mental Health Act 1983, this is, in effect, learning disability.
• Learning disability alone is not sufficient justification to apply the Mental Health Act; the definitions of both mental impairment and severe mental impairment include the condition of ‘abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct’.
• Legislation at the dawn of the twenty-first century strives to protect.
‘There is no investigator who denies the fearful role played by mental deficiency in the production of vice, crime and delinquency. Not all criminals are feeble minded, but all feeble-minded are at least a potential criminal.’
(Terman 1916)
So wrote Lewis Terman, an eminent and much respected cognitive psychologist, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, his words appear shocking and would be rightly condemned as bigoted. Yet, for much of the last century, and the years that preceded it, the above sentiments were common place throughout Western society. Many young women who had a child outside of marriage were often diagnosed as ‘moral defectives’ and immediately dispatched to an institution, where, quite often, they would remain for the rest of their lives. In some instances, simply to be suspected of engaging in private activity outside of marriage was sufficient to deprive a person of their liberty. Although less likely to be diagnosed as morally defective, unless suspected of different activity, men with a learning disability fared little better. Conviction of a minor criminal offence that would normally incur a fine for most offenders often resulted in detention without limit in a mental institution. Such was the public’s fear of people with learning disabilities that the slightest indiscretion often resulted in what, in effect, was a life sentence.
At this point, you may be asking yourself what has any of this to do with legislation in the twenty-first century? Well, the answer is that none of the above could or would have happened if the legislation of the day had not permitted it. Legislation is the barometer of society’s attitude towards those they legislate for, and those they legislate against. So what does today’s legislation say about people with learning disabilities in the twenty-first century?
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