Cultural Barriers to South Indian Families' Access to Services and Educational Goals for their Children with Disabilities

Kalyanpur, M., Gowramma, I.P. (2007). Cultural barriers to south Indian families’ access to services and educational goals for their children with disabilities. The Journal of the International Association of Special Education, 8(1), 69-82.

•       A common concern was the difficulty of accessing information on services in a culture that continues to hold traditional negative perceptions of disability and lacks the infrastructure for dissemination of information (p. 72).
•       Familial attitudes toward disability were a primary barrier…
•       Additional barriers included negative professional attitudes in an environment that does not support parental rights…
•       In this study, the parents repeatedly spoke of service agencies and refused admission to their children on various grounds, including ineducability relating to severity of disability, or age in terms of the child being too young to benefit from intervention, and having to accept these unilateral decisions (p. 73).
•       …the local pediatrician “did not know anything about autism and told [her] that he was hearing this [word] for the first time” (p. 75).
•       In south India, each of the four main states has an official language and every child is expected to learn to speak, read, and write the state regional language, Hindi, and English (p. 76).

      Negative cultural attitudes about disability held by both professionals and families, lack of knowledge about diagnosing disabilities, language demands, and difficulty in getting services are all barriers in education in South India (Kalyanpur & Gowramma, 2007).  In addition to professionals having negative attitudes derived from cultural beliefs, many doctors, especially in smaller cities, are unaware of what disabilities exist, and of course of how to work with these individuals.  Also, parents have been known to feel shame and embarrassment about having a child with a disability where such perceptions are so commonplace.  Parents also fear revealing or bringing attention to disability because they want their child to access education.  Kalyanpur & Gowramma found that the parents in their study “repeatedly spoke of service agencies and refused admission to their children on various grounds, including ineducability relating to severity of disability, or age in terms of the child being too young to benefit from intervention, and having to accept these unilateral decisions” (p. 73).  Fear of revealing disabilities in India is a common theme in the current research on disabilities in India.