RNID New Trustees.

RNID recently announced the arrival of five new trustees onto the board. I don't seem to recognise any of these names from the deaf world. Can anybody enlighten us? Are they deaf or hoh? What is their connection/interest to/in deaf people?

From what little information there is, it doesn't sound as if they have that grassroots empathy with deaf people and thus an understanding of our issues and priorities. Do they know what it's like to be treated as inferior or ignored because you are deaf and/or don't hold the "right" opinions? Do they know what it's like to spend years on the scrapheap? Or to be made to feel that your voice counts for nothing?

If this is yet another extension of paternalism then it won't be enough to say that RNID are not listening to deaf people. It would be fairer to say that they are deliberately ignoring deaf people, even some of their members. After all, we have in many different ways been expressing our discontent about this 'everything about us, without us' approach for years.

If you have any information or comments, please let us know.

Edit: Here's the response from RNID: Of the five trustees, two have hearing loss, one has a deaf brother, one is a Professor of Audiology and the other owns a nightclub chain and has worked with RNID on protection of hearing for his employees and customers.

Whether or not that is satisfactory is, as always, a matter for deaf people. My opinion is that it could be worse, but I would like to see at least a few people from more humble or grass root backgrounds who understand things like disempowerment and unemployment.

Different rules for Deaf People?

When people talk about the importance of better representation for minorities or women, it’s very clear exactly what they mean – to actually increase the numbers of the relevant people in the places where they are underrepresented. So if there are not enough women or ethnic minorities in Parliament, for example, they will try to increase the numbers.

Yet when it is shown that deaf people are underrepresented in Parliament or even their own organisation, all of a sudden the rules change. All of a sudden it’s not all that important to increase the numbers of the people who are underrepresented. It is now acceptable to water down that principle and have third parties representing us instead. It’s suddenly acceptable to have somebody who is the father, the mother, the grandson, the sister or the brother of a deaf person step in and do it for us. Sometimes the connection is even looser.

So why is there one rule for deaf people and another rule for everybody else? Could it be because some people have decided that we are ‘not good enough’ to represent ourselves? If so, that is not genuine representation, it is paternalism.

If somebody was a true friend of deaf people, wouldn’t they want the same things for deaf people as everybody else? Wouldn’t they want deaf people to have the fishing rod and fish for themselves rather than keep them dependent, throwing little fish at them from time to time? Wouldn’t they want deaf people to do things for themselves, to act and speak on their own behalf?

When Jackie Ballard was in Parliament, she worked to improve the representation of women. She has been described as a feminist and in one website, as ‘one of the driving forces in campaigns to get more women into Parliament.’

Now Ms Ballard is in the best position to do the same thing for deaf people in Parliament and especially at RNID. I hope she will do it.

RNID agrees with us!

I was thinking recently about the few times that RNID have commented on the specific things we complain about and the strange thing which occurred to me was that they actually agree with us. One of our main complaints is that they do not employ enough deaf and hoh people at senior management level. At present they only have one (allegedly.)

When John Low was interviewed on Read Hear (BBC2 Ceefax pp640-5) he said that one of his biggest disappointments was that he did not have any deaf or hoh people on his senior management team (he left with that problem unfixed.) Much later, Jackie Ballard told me in an e-mail that she ‘agree[s] that there should be more deaf and hard of hearing people in our senior management.’

So if RNID agree with our complaint, why do we often get hostility in the form of curt and frosty replies or are just ignored? To be fair, I got no such hostility from Jackie Ballard, who replied in a way which I thought was sympathetic, nice and polite. Low, on the other hand, criticised me personally, saying things such as ‘[y]ou have been asking about the number of employees who are deaf or hard of hearing for many years,’ as if that is a heinous crime. But why was Low being curt and frosty to me for pointing out something which he agreed with? I can only guess that he wanted to deflect criticism away from himself and instead shoot the messenger. After all, that’s a lot easier for him to do than actually fix the problem.

I should point out at this stage that even if RNID did not agree with our complaint, they still have no right to ignore us or attack us personally. I have spoken before about the wrongness of personal attacks, which are described on one political website as an ‘intellectual cheap shot.’ Even if it could be argued that complainants were rude, that is likely to be because of valid anger and frustration about the injustice not being fixed.

This shooting of the messenger is the wrong thing to do for various reasons. First, the RNID have acknowledged that the message was valid. Second, it maligns a person for committing no worse crime than delivering that valid message. Third it maligns people who the charity is supposed to care for. Fourth, it causes members of the public, RNID staff and trustees to treat genuine deaf complainants as villains or pariahs.

This is a sorry and shameful case of injustice. If Jackie Ballard wants to know why some of us are reluctant to approach the RNID with our concerns, she may find some of the answers here.