Disabled Children’s Rights in Post-War Britain

Human rights campaigns accelerated in post-war Britain, driven by the National Council for Civil Liberties, the United Nations, and charities, which increasingly advocated rights-based activism rather than paternalistic philanthropy. Emerging disability rights and children’s rights movements sought respectively to dismantle the medical model of disability and assert disabled people’s rights to independent lives; and to position children as independent political actors or protect the rights of children as a vulnerable, dependent group. Attitudes towards and experiences of disabled children changed significantly after 1945. Mass vaccination programmes curtailed fatalities and impairments from infectious diseases, leaving a cohort of disabled survivors. Paediatricians developed treatment approaches for infants born with congenital anomalies, improving life expectancy but fuelling debate about the value of disabled babies’ lives. Thalidomide led to a cohort of children born with limb impairments, while prenatal screening and diagnosis caused a drop in the number of babies born with congenital anomalies. In social policy, educational integration and community support slowly displaced institutional care and special schools, while medical and social understandings of disability expanded, including more invisible impairments and chronic illnesses. This project will build relationships with Down’s Syndrome Association, Shine, Scope and Wellcome Collection to examine whether the emergence of children’s rights and the disability rights movement transformed attitudes towards, and experiences of disabled children, and identify policy implications from this history. Did disabled children benefit from sitting at the intersection of disability and children’s rights activism, or were they doubly disadvantaged by their age and impairment, and overlooked by both sets of campaigners? When and how did this change? I’ll scope diverse primary materials, and collaborate with partners to develop a robust methodology for a large research project which writes disabled children in as subjects and agents, identifies appropriate approaches to study different eras after 1945, and addresses beneficiaries’ needs. Aims and Objectives Scope sources and develop methods for a research project that examines disabled children’s rights, highlighting how experiences varied by age, impairment, ethnicity, class and gender. Build relations with beneficiaries, identifying scope for research collaboration and potential benefits for partners from historical research. With partners, pilot an inclusive, participatory approach to cataloguing relevant archival collections. Author an article on methodological approaches to locating disabled children in historical records, and another on writing disabled children into histories of childhood and disability rights. Potential applications and benefits I’ll develop tools to locate disabled children’s experiences in historical records, aiding historians of childhood and disability. Piloting an inclusive approach to cataloguing materials, it’ll help unlock archival collections for researchers and disabled people. It’ll examine intersecting constructions of childhood and disability, interrogating whether disability challenged typical future-oriented constructions of children as the citizens they will become and exploring debates about which lives merited investment. It’ll identify how historical research can support disability organisations’ campaigns to enhance services, policy, and advocacy, producing outputs for these organisations. This research would establish a large research project that exploits diverse primary sources to systematically examine the development of disabled children’s rights in postwar Britain.