The Disabled Family: From Survival Struggles to Collective Impoverishment

Abstract

This chapter looks at the impacts of disability on poverty beyond the individual. Referring back to Figure 4, poor families react in the face of the individual impacts and dynamics mapped out in the previous two chapters, desperate attempts at ensuring their own survival and that of the disabled family member in a context where poverty is lived as a collective. Unfortunately, these panicked reactions by fragile and unprepared families mean they are pushed to shift their own production and consumption patterns, strengthening a deep, dynamic, complex and multidimensional impoverishment, contributing to what is best framed as the disabled family. This is a family entrapped in a chronic, most likely intergenerational poverty, a poverty experienced the harshest by those in the least resilient positions. Critically, family impoverishment sets in motion a number of interactions with the poverty of the disabled person him or herself, initiating other spirals of deprivation across the dimensions explored in the previous two chapters. While impacts and reactions are also experienced by household members (not necessarily blood related), the evidence suggests that it is largely families, especially immediate family, those tied by blood, who live disability on their own skin. This is why I will not be talking about ‘disabled households’.