by Lívia Moraes
It is not uncommon for social inclusion measures and policies to overlook the awareness of the world's largest minority. Data from 2011 collected by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank indicate that more than one billion people have some kind of disability and, in Brazil, recent data indicate that more than 8% of the population fits the same situation.
Evidently, the Covid-19 pandemic further worsened a scenario of invisibility and exclusion: historical problems of lack of access to education and work, for example, which affected the Brazilian population as a whole, found in people with disabilities a more open wound. Less than one-third of working-age PWDs were welcomed into the market, and more than two-thirds of PWDs were uneducated, according to 2019 data collected by IBGE.
With the beginning of spring comes the National Day of the Struggle of Persons with Disabilities (Law 11,133/05), so let the reflection proposed by the Brazilian Law of Inclusion, in force since 2015, emerge in us. With an international basis, our legislation changes paradigms, reneging on welfarism to recognize that what prevents effective social inclusion is not something physical, mental, intellectual or sensory, but rather the obstacles and barriers that we ourselves, the collectivity, have built, and that it is up to us to break down.
