Disabled students empowered by new society

**A new society for promoting the interests of disabled students was launched at Warwick on Tuesday 22 January. **

Around twenty students gathered in Curiositea at 7pm for the launch of Warwick Enable, which featured a talk by the National Union of Students disabled students’ officer Hannah Paterson.

Andrew Thompson, president of Warwick Enable, said he hopes to create a community for disabled students, their enablers, their friends, as well as anyone interested in disability education.

“We want to be able to have a society where disabled students can provide a sort of informal support for each other,” he said, “with those of us who have been at the university for longer able to provide information and advice from our experiences.”

The idea for the society came about last year during the Students’ Union’s (SU) first disabled focus group organised by former SU Welfare Officer Izzy John.

“One of the things we all agreed on was that we were all individuals that suffered with our disabilities at Warwick on our own, and we all agreed that there needed to be some sort of a disabled community,” said Mr Thompson.

Sam Fry, disabled students officer at the SU and treasurer of Warwick Enable, said that the society is a way of putting disabled students back on the agenda.

“I think the biggest issue for disabled students is that very few people are aware of the challenges that are faced,” he said.

“For example, recently there was an issue with contractors parking vans and putting skips in disabled parking bays in central campus. Clearly the contractors are completely unaware that disabled parking spaces are put there for a reason and that disabled people very regularly use them.”

The talk by Hannah Patterson advocated a ‘social’ rather than a ‘medical’ approach to disability.

Whereas a medical approach views a disabled person as having something wrong with them that needs to be fixed, a social approach focuses on how society ought to adapt to better suit the needs of disabled people.

Ms Patterson told the _Boar_ some of the problems disabled students can face in the education system.

“If you’re not picked up at school as having a disability, you might struggle along with the learning process,” she said.

“At university there’s really no system for that. So you might get into your third year and all of a sudden have that ‘eureka’ moment: ‘I’m not actually stupid; I’ve just got to learn in a slightly different way or do things in a slightly different way’.”

She said that normal socialising activities like club nights are particularly troublesome for disabled students, as strobe lighting and flights of steps can cause problems.

“Having a society that can identify with and think about those issues is really exciting because it’s something that’s often neglected with the mainstream society events,” she said.

The other Exec members of Warwick Enable are Maurane van der Stoep (secretary), Konstantin Fritz (publicity officer), Laura Tucker (social secretary) and Charlotte Corrigan (campaigns officer).