The Exchange

Sadly, I no longer spend much of my time watching children’s television, but there seems to have been a huge amount of press interest in the last few weeks over the BBC’s decision to introduce 2 new presenters to a popular CBeebies show, one of whom, Cerrie Burnell, was born without a hand and prefers not to wear a prosthetic limb.  Predictably, much of the controversy has been stirred by the Daily Mail and their charmingly titled article, ‘One-armed presenter is scaring children’.

This kind of tabloid sensationalism illustrates precisely the reason that disabled people struggle to become fully accepted in our society.  I fail to see how an individual with limited use of one arm is incapable of doing the job she has clearly been selected for on merit, and equally, how people can view her appointment as merely a product of positive discrimination.

The opinions of viewers on this, particularly the 9 individuals who wrote a formal complaint to the BBC about it, claiming that their children were being scared by the sight of the presenter and likely to suffer sleep problems as a consequence of seeing her on screen, illustrate the ingrained negative attitude towards disabled individuals which undermines fundamental Convention values of equality and fair treatment.  Equally worrying is the statement by many of these parents that they are being forced to discuss the subject disability with their children before they are ready.

I have no doubt that this isn’t the children who are causing the problem here; the vocal objections aren’t coming from the kids who are actually watching the programme, but rather, from adults stuck in a frankly disgusting mindset which should have been abandoned long ago.  I’m absolutely not dismissing the problems of racism, which is still a big problem in all kinds of contexts, but I’d say that the majority of people wouldn’t view someone of a different skin colour to them as being in any way nightmare-inducing and subhuman.

Whilst it’s undoubtedly the minority of individuals who still hold these views, these aren’t pensioners clinging to the anachronistic and fundamentally flawed attitudes of their youth, but rather, young parents who are passing on values to their offspring which directly contradict the basic concept of human rights and the equality of our fellow human beings. These kinds of attitudes need to be stamped out, and quickly, at that.