Hostility to the Handicapped

About 300 million people in the world have highly visible deformities, which cause emotional problems not just for the victims but for the society around them. Primitive cultures often "solve" the problem by putting the cripples to death. Civilized cultures, it now appears, might do the same if they dared.

In a three year study of attitudes toward the maimed, two German psychologists, Gerd Jansen and Otto Esser, questioned 1,600 adults and 1,000 school-age children. To avoid hypocrisy, they even checked some of their cases with lie detectors.

Many of their subjects spoke sympathetically of the handicapped, but they often reacted to the sight of deformity with involuntary revulsion: breaking into a sweat or feeling faint chills. Few of them wanted to be friends with a deformed person, much less to marry or adopt one. Most (63%) thought the victims should be kept out of sight in institutions. Although nobody said openly that the handicapped deserve to die, a number spoke guardedly of the merits of euthanasia on the grounds that "they probably would rather be dead."

Other findings:

The younger the children being tested, the more pronounced their aversion to the handicapped. "Rejection is the spontaneous reaction," says Esser. "As children grow into society's system of norms, they also grow into pity." -- Children dislike slightly handicapped youngsters more than gravely handicapped ones. Esser's explanation is that healthy children at first think of a child with a minor defect as an equal, but then are disappointed and angered when they find he cannot keep up. By contrast, a child on crutches or in a wheelchair is so "different" that the healthy child feels no sense of identification. AND Ignorance is a major obstacle to social contact with the handicapped. Ninety percent of those interviewed said they did not know how to approach such a person: Would it hurt him to shake hands? they wondered. Did he want help, and if so, what kind?

A physically normal person's aversion to the handicapped is based on his unconscious fear of being struck by a similar fate. As Jansen and Esser see it, the burden--perhaps an impossibly heavy one--is on the victim himself, to let others know how he would like to be treated and to shift attention away from his damaged body and toward the self inside.

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