History of Social Care

 So before I even start getting into this one I want to warn you that it won't be an easy read. I am going to reflect on a training session I went on recently and some of the information is harrowing and hard to hear so if that is not something you can handle right now feel free to click off completely or go find a different one of my blogs to read instead.

The premise of this training course was looking at the history of Social Care and included discussions around asylums, the laws and legislations surrounding this that defined the terminology of the time and a conversation about Nazi Germany. The thing they all have in common is that they were looking at how people with disabilities were treated throughout history.

We were shown a list of reasons that someone may be sent to an asylum or similar and I find it so interesting that one of the reasons you could be sent is for using medication to stop conception but it was enshrined in law that you could be forced to be sterilised. This makes it out that the choice to not become pregnant was only acceptable when it was being made by someone else. Another example of the rights of people being taken away or disregarded based on someone else's decision or opinion on it. Further examples of this were given in regards to India where women were either offered money to be sterilised if they were seen to be of a lower class or quality whereas educated women were offered money to become pregnant so that intelligent and apparently better genes remained. Thinking about situations such as Nazi Germany where there were very specific opinions on what was seen to be desirable.

One of the main threads that I noticed through the whole day was the language used to describe the people and the actions that they were taking. It was all very clinical and dehumanising. An example given was people being referred to as units and that they had been processed. When what that should actually read is people being killed, being murdered because they were seen as less than. Talking about it in simple terms is what people avoided because then they felt they could not go through with it. A big part of the discussion today talked about how many people that died were children, killed because they were trying to stop inferior genes from staying in the gene pool and making it worse over time.

One set of parents wrote to Hitler himself asking for permission to have their one year old killed because they were born with deformities. As a parent I cannot imagine any planet where I would even dream of asking someone to end the life of my child, this just shows the amount of brain washing and conditioning that went on in places such as Nazi Germany. People were made to believe so much that people with disabilities or with specific diseases were such a drain on society and potentially could bring down the whole human race that it was easier to just kill them. A 6 year old was taken from her parents, moved around hospitals so they could not find her and then killed all because she had epilepsy, the cause of death was put down as something completely different so there was no paper trail of killing by legal injection. There was a film included where it had a Nazi nurse talking about working on the ward and killing children because that is what was needed to support Hitler. She had been going to rallies since she was a child and I mentioned that it gave me cult vibes because of the way that she spoke and was able to justify killing innocent children. When someone is brought up in a specific situation they may potentially believe things that are not true because it is all they have ever known. This would translate even now to examples such as racism where people are racist because their parents are and their parents were so it is passed down through the generations. They have been brainwashed to believe that people of a difference race are drains to society or that they are to be blamed for the negative in their own lives.

The scary part about the examples given today are that when Hitler died and the war ended the killing did not stop. Nazis at this time believed so much what they had been told that they continued the killings because they could not understand how any society would have a need for people with disabilities either mental or physical. They are repeatedly described as less than throughout history, going back to the days of asylums, madhouses and funny farms. They were seen as drains on society and that they did not have anything meaningful to bring to the world so ending their life was the humane thing to do. Ending their life early was seen as a mercy killing and releasing the parents from the burden of having a disabled child. Some may argue that people choosing abortion once they find out a child may have a chromosome deficiency such as down syndrome potentially continues this thought process that life is easier than having the burden of a child with a disability. I personally believe in a woman's right to choose but I am just comparing these actions to those of history and where the thought process potentially comes from.

I saw an article recently that was talking about Autism charities and the types of language that they use to describe the people they support such as using the word burden or saying that they are helpless and it immediately had me thinking about this training and what we had discussed because that is an example in 2025. We believe we have come so far since Nazi Germany but some things seem to still continue through.

Linking back to a previous blog I wrote where I talked about the fact that everything should not come down to money, the majority of the justification for ending lives especially in Nazi Germany was financial, there was a lot of propaganda about the cost of someone with disabilities and comparing this to the cost of a “normal/typical” family. It is reducing a human down to what they can provide or how much they can bring to the economy and overlooking the fact they are a person, a human being with feelings, thoughts, opinions which should be heard. It shows how money can have such an impact on someone's perspective or their situation, this is still relevant because how many people that we work with live in poverty. Are having to make choices between feeding their families or keeping them warm. Are feeling that they cannot do enough for those they love because we are in a cost of living crisis. The additional costs or expenses that come from having a child with a disability are definitely there and can be a deciding factor for a lot of the decisions people make.

The worrying thing is that there have been suggestions made that we as a country get rid of the Human Rights Act and replace it with something else instead. What kind of impact could this potentially have on the experiences that people have if there is nothing in law to protect them. We saw in Covid the laws that were rushed through to allow blanket decisions to be made about people because of a world wide pandemic, what else could get through under the radar that would have major implications for people and their rights. Recent law changes for Trans people are an example of using law to strip people of rights.

How long is it before rights of everyone who isn't seen to be ideal are removed. How close could we potentially be to another World War. We like to think that it is far away however as I learnt on this training Germany was quite left wing and liberal less than a decade before World War 2 where they killed millions for not being what was seen by Hitler as acceptable or ideal.

I know this one is a bit heavier than a lot of my other blogs but I felt that I needed to write it because the training was so enlightening. Don't get me wrong I knew things weren't ideal in the past but I do not think I realised just how much negativity there was or how people were treated even just a couple of hundred years ago.