INCLUSION

The Concept of Inclusion in the 21st Century

The Concept of Inclusion in the 21st Century

Introduction

Improvement in quality of life and the welfare of the citizenry is top priorities for governments and for developed societies. Nevertheless, some more groups still remain at risk of exclusion, such as immigrants, the disabled, ethnic minorities, the elderly, etc. Here, we have focused on the disabled. We began under the premise that young people are most likely to be sympathetic toward this group. Here, we have focused on the youngest and most highly educated sectors of the population with a view to identifying those variables which would make citizens more inclined to assist disabled people consequently helping to facilitate their integration in society. We will explore the concepts of social exclusion and inclusion from a multidimensional viewpoint. These concepts will in turn help us to identify those indicators for exclusion or possible risk of exclusion. Furthermore we will discuss the day barriers that serve to exclude people with profound and multiple disabilities from community life.

The concept of Inclusion

The concept of social exclusion is attributed to René Lenoir (1974). A wide variety of people fit this category: not only poor but also the disabled, the suicidal, the elderly, abused children, and so on. Later this term was used to refer to various types of social disadvantage, related to new social problems that would appear as a result of crisis situations: unemployment, marginalization and fundamental changes in the lives of families (Cannan and Warren 1997).

Sociologists have refined this concept and associated it with the dimension of poverty. Thus, increasingly more emphasis has been put on the duration and recurrence of periods (episodes) of poverty. The dividing line between poverty and social exclusion is really diffused. The focus of the "abilities" proposed by Sen (1985) clarifies the situation in the sense that what is really important in social exclusion is to take into account that it is multidimensional and dynamic, multifaceted and evolving, since it varies according to geographical location, social norms, and the present moment. Yet the synthesis that Sen (2000) draws throughout his many valuable contributions suggests that the key is for individuals to be able to leave or avoid a situation of social exclusion. An interesting read about the definitions of social exclusion is the well-known work of Hilary Silver (1995). Silver analyzes various definitions of social exclusion and integration, depending on the context, and points out that all of them have "an ideological bias", which leads her to propose three main "paradigms".

In the international arena, the United Nations Development Programme has been at the forefront of attempts to conceptualize social exclusion in developed countries and developing countries. A number of studies in some countries have led to the formulation of a rights-based approach, referring to social exclusion as a lack of access to civil society institutions (legal and political systems). The program defines the basic levels of education, health, and the financial well-being necessary to make access to institutions a ...