“There is soccer but we have to watch”: the embodied consequences of rhetorics of inclusion for South African children with cerebral palsy

Abstract

Twenty years after the advent of democracy in South Africa (SA), there have been some successes in the achievement of greater equality, access and inclusion for many persons with disabilities. The move towards inclusive education may, however, have had unanticipated embodied consequences for people positioned discursively as included, but who in fact may in some respects be further marginalised than they had been under apartheid. We describe ethnographic research conducted in a special needs school in SA to explore the lived experiences of children with cerebral palsy and their involvement in physical activity. Our study shows how inclusive educational practices in SA have impeded involvement in sport for some children with motor impairments because of resource limitations and other historic reasons. This paper raises important questions about the role of community psychology in recognising, naming and contributing to action around injustices, which may be hard to see but which can have profound effects on the lives and bodies of those who experience exclusion.

After centuries of institutionalised segregation, discrimination and oppression, South Africa (SA) became a democracy in 1994. At the core of the constitution of this new democratic state is a commitment to ‘human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms’ (Republic of South Africa, 1996). Twenty years after the advent of democracy, there have been some successes in the achievement of equality. For example, despite very serious challenges in the health sector and huge inequities in health care expenditure (Mayosi & Benatar, 2014), access to health care for people who were formerly the most excluded and disadvantaged has improved (Burger, Bredenkamp, Grobler, & van der Berg, 2012). On the other hand, SA remains among the most unequal countries in the world in terms of income, and may well have become more so than during apartheid (Leibbrandt, Finn, & Woolard, 2012; Statistics South Africa, 2014).

The discipline of community psychology internationally, and South African community psychology is no exception, is centrally concerned with issues of equality (Seedat & Lazarus, 2011). There are interesting questions about how a country that is heralded internationally for having overcome its unequal and exclusionary past deals with the fact of continuing inequality and exclusion, particularlyin settings such as health care and education. Drawing on a small corpus of data concerning the inclusion (or otherwise) of some South African adolescents with cerebral palsy (CP) in physical activity, we shall argue that the contradictions in SA about issues of equality can have embodied consequences for people positioned discursively as included but who in fact may in some respects be further marginalised than they had been under apartheid. By way of introduction, we shall first briefly discuss issues of inequalityand inclusion in education in SA, and we shall then consider how these issues interface with global concerns about inclusion and exclusion of people with disabilities in educational contexts.

Integration or Exclusion in South African Education?

The new democratic state established in SA in 1994 inherited a vastly unequal education system. In general, schooling for White children was good, with far worse provision for children of colour. Since the collapse of apartheid, formerly White schools have become more racially integrated but there has been almost no change in the racial composition of historically Black South African schools. Historically White schools now cater chiefly to White and middle-class Black South African children; the vast majority of children are in schools, which are essentiallyhomogeneous racially and which have very poor educational outcomes (Research on Socio-economic Policy (ReSEP), 2014). It remains as true to say, as it was under apartheid, that poor children receive far inferior education than that available to wealthier children—effectively, despite ostensible integration of education after apartheid, there remain de facto two dramatically different systems (Spaull, 2013; van der Berg, 2007). Schooling in SA has been described as a ‘lottery’, with progression through school still profoundly affected by race (Lam, Ardington, & Leibbrandt, 2011). Differences across school types maintain and are reinforced by other factors which are features of a dramatically unequal society, such as literacy levels and practices at home and access to written texts and training materials (Chisholm, 2011; Heaton, Amoateng, & Dufur, 2014).

There is another sense in which school integration by race has not occurred. Although the demographics of historically White schools have changed, a number of educational researchers argue that the culture of the schools has not changed. Effectively, Black children entering these schools are required to fit in with what are viewed as historically White cultural norms. Soudien (2010) argues that despite some possibilities of change, Black children in formerly White schools are required to assimilate and effectively to abandon or downplay aspects of their own cultural heritage. Although discourses of inclusion may be drawn on to promote the image of formerly White schools as zones of equality and respect for diversity, exclusion and marginalisation of Black children continue (Sayed & Soudien, 2003), but may be difficult to address and think about because the language of inclusion is prominently used. Discrimination and exclusion are difficult to name and address in contexts where there is a dominant discourse of equality, as the international research on what are termed ‘microaggressions’ has shown (Sue, 2013; Wong, Derthick, David, Saw, & Okazaki, 2014). SA is not unique in having moved beyond a situation in which overt racism is no longer tolerated but in which, despite official non-racial and an-tiracist policies, subtle but keenly experienced practices of exclusion persist (Allen, Scott, & Lewis, 2013; Conradie & Brokensha, 2014).

Integration or Exclusion of People with Disabilities?

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities asserts that persons with disability have a right to equal access and a right to full and effective enjoyment of all human rights (Schulze, 2010). There is no question that, over the past 50 years, there have been enormous successes world-wide regarding the greater inclusion and social participation of people with disabilities. It would be naïve, however, to argue that disablism, exclusion and overt aggression towards people with disabilities have disappeared (Goodley, 2014; Roulstone & Mason-Bish, 2012; Watermeyer, 2013). There has, furthermore, been a re-emergence of overtly disablist talk and action in the context of austerity measures following the economic crisis of a few years ago (Goodley, Lawthom, & Runswick-Cole, 2014; Soldatic, Morgan, & Roulstone, 2014). Current international debates about whether some people with disabilities ‘deserve’ social support, and about whether society can ‘afford’ inclusive services for people with disabilities, have unfortunate echoes in them of discursive manoeuvres used under Nazism—the reasons given for the extermination of many people with disabilities at that time were that they were not economically productive and were a drain on scarce resources (Evans, 2010). Historically, many of the resources currently available to people with disabilities in SA were for White people only (Swartz, 2013). In the context of an expanding drain on the fiscus of South Africans of all races claiming social security benefits on the basis of disability, there have been vigorous attempts to root out corruption associated with disability grants (Kelly, 2013). Although there is no question that corruption does exist in a context of widespread poverty and no universal support for people who are unemployed (Swartz & Schneider, 2006), it is noteworthy that some of the language about who may or may not be eligible for social grants and support on the basis of disability veers into the territory of trying to distinguish between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ people, with ‘undeserving’ people constructed as unethical and effectively stealing from the state (Swartz, 2012).

School Integration in South Africa, Disability and the Politics of ‘Fairness’

At the discursive interface between discourses of inclusion in a democratic SA, and those about disability internationally, are situated schoolchildren with disabilities. Historically, schooling provision for White children with disabilities in SA has been relatively good, with much less provision, and in many cases no provision at all, for Black children with disabilities. In apartheid legislation on some aspects of disability provision, for example, Black children were completely excluded from any state obligation for provision of schooling and services as it was explicitly stated in legislation that definitions and provisions applied to White children only (Lea & Foster, 1990; Soudien & Baxen, 2006). Currently, facilities which were formerly open to White children only are now racially integrated, but another form of integration, crucial to the participants in the current study, has also occurred. A number of services and facilities, which formerly catered to children with a very specific range of impairments, are now open to a much wider range of children, a practice which is justified on the grounds of inclusion and equality. Embedded within the discourse of inclusion and equality in this context may be an implicit argument that it is not fair for children with specific impairments to receive certain educational benefits to which others, in the context of scarce resources and inadequate service provision, may have less or nothing. Notions of inclusion and equality, therefore, serve a function not only to integrate schools more, but also to redistribute scarce resources in what is understood to be a more fair and equitable way.

A key challenge with this situation is that, as the extensive literature on inclusive education clearly shows, there is a crucial difference between having a diverse group of children together in one school and achieving true school inclusion (Ainscow & César, 2006). Real school inclusion requires full and adequate provision to provide for the learning and broader developmental needs for all scholars. Furthermore, inclusion requires enabling the highest possible level of participation of all scholars in an integrated environment, making the various accommodations necessary for a range of impairments. If, for example, deaf children who speak sign language as a first language are to be educated in a school with other children, they will not be properly included without the provision of sign language services in that school—it is not enough that they are simply present in the same school as others. It is crucial that inclusion and facilitation of participation takes place across the full range of school activities, and not just in the classroom. Participation in physical activity and sport, as well as in social activities, for example, must be supported and catered for in order that full inclusion occurs (Ainscow & César, 2006; Dalton, McKenzie, & Kahonde, 2012). There are resource implications to the occurrence of inclusion, and on an economy of scale, it may well be that it is cheaper and logistically simpler to have segregated schools—for example, if deaf children are all in a school where sign language is the medium of instruction, this may be cheaper and easier to achieve than having sign language teachers, interpreters and facilitators dispersed across a range of more integrated schools. True inclusion demands the strategic use of a range of resources.

As we have noted earlier, integration of schools by race in SA has not been achieved across the board, and certainly not in the culture or racially integrated formerly White schools, and the question arises as to what the situation is concerning integration and inclusion in schools formerly catering to White children from a specific impairment group.

The Context for the Current Study

The benefits of participation in physical activity, starting in childhood and across the lifespan, are well documented, with a range of benefits in terms of health, psychological well-being and social integration having been noted. School sports, however, can also be sites of exclusion for some scholars, with competitive ethos driving exclusion and marginalisation of scholars who are less athletic than others. Sport has, in general, been argued by many to be associated with a range of favourable social outcomes. The language of inclusion used by the Olympic and Paralympic movements, for example, commonly makes reference to ideals such as tolerance, respect, comradeship and achievement (Howe, 2008, 2011). However, sport may also be used in discriminatory ways and may produce and reproduce rather restrictive ideas about normative bodies, and may even lead to undesired physical outcomes, and abuse of drugs such as steroids, in the service of competition and pursuit of normative ideals (Angelo Corlett, Brown, & Kirkland, 2013; Howe, 2008).

The school in which the current study is based is an historically well-resourced, formerly Whites only school, which was established to cater to the educational needs of scholars with CP,, a non-contagious, non-hereditary and non-progressive neurological disorder of posture and movement caused by damage to the motor areas in the brain during pregnancy, birth or the first 5 years of life (Sherrill, 2004). Participation in physical activity is sometimes difficult for children with CP because they experience limitations in the range of movement, strength, agility and flexibility of their bodies. Thus, physical activities often need to be adapted to compensate for the restrictions imposed on an individual's movement by their impairment. We decided to work in this school because of our interest in sport and CP, and this was the most established school for children with CP in the province.

With the collapse of apartheid and the move to school integration, this school, like others, has become integrated in two ways. First, the school is no longer for White scholars only (and in fact White scholars are now in the minority, as is appropriate given the minority status of White people demographically), and second, the school now caters to a wider range of scholars in terms of disability. Children with CP now represent a small minority of scholars in the school; indeed, most of the scholars have learning difficulties (or intellectual disability, to use the term accepted in SA) and do not have physical impairments. There are 440 scholars at the school; the majority of scholars having intellectual disability, while children with CP constitute approximately 7.1% of the school's enrolment.

In the context of a broader study, we were interested in how scholars with CP and their teachers in the school understood and experienced issues regarding inclusion in sport and physical activity. We were interested in these issues both because of the important benefits of physical activity for the scholars, and in light of the issues regarding integration, equality and inclusion at the interface between the South African and disability rights issues, as we have discussed.

Method

We wished to conduct interviews with all adolescent scholars in the school who have CP. In order to gain a better contextual understanding of the issues in the school, we also interviewed the three staff members most closely concerned with issues of sport, leisure and physical activity in the school—the principal, life orientation¹ teacher and physiotherapist. On a convenience basis, we also had the opportunity to engage in informal conversations with other teachers on the corridors and in the staffroom during tea and lunch breaks. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. We kept detailed field notes to document observations and informal interactions with staff and pupils. We used interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) in order to elicit a thick description of the participants' lived experience of attending the school and of participating in sport and exercise programmes, and have reported in detail on the analysis elsewhere (Conchar, Bantjes, Swartz, & Derman, 2014). The questions put to the children covered their participation in physical activity and their suggestions for any changes and improvements in this regard.

The adolescent sample group consisted of 15 adolescents with CP between the ages of 12 and 18. All adolescents in the school with CP (n = 18) were recruited for the study but two declined to participate and one was absent from school during the time the study was conducted. Table 1 shows the age and gender distribution of these participants.

Table 1. Age and gender distribution of the adolescent participants.

	12 years old	13 years old	14 years old	15 years old	16 years old	17 years old	18 years old	Total
Male	1	1	3	0	0	0	2	7
Female	1	2	2	0	3	0	0	8
Total	2	3	5	0	3	0	2	15

Currently, four of the participants use wheelchairs, one uses an assistive device and 10 have no assistive devices. This being said, most of the participants have used an assistive device (crutches, a walker or a tricycle) at some point during their lives, particularly after a surgical procedure. The group of participants is racially represented with participants from White, Coloured and African race groups. In the results that follow, all adolescent participants are given pseudonyms.

Ethical Considerations

Ethical approval for this study was granted by the Stellenbosch University Committee for Human Research (Reference number: S12/05/130). Furthermore, ethical approval was granted by the Western Cape Education Department to conduct this study in a school setting (Reference number: 20120504-0048). Permission for the study was also granted from the principal of the school who facilitated the process and welcomed the researchers into the school. We created pseudonyms for participants and upheld confidentiality, and stored data safely and securely. We obtained informed consent from the parents of child participants and assent from the children. Participation was voluntary, and no participant withdrew from the study although one participant requested that his interview not be audio recorded, and this request was honoured.

Findings

As a small minority in the school, CP scholars experience themselves as marginalised from physical activities. The life orientation teacher commented that the majority of children at the school are learning disabled but not physically disabled. The scholars without physical impairments are not only in the majority but they have sporting needs, which differ from those of scholars with CP and are easier to accommodate. The large number of children without physical impairments also makes it easier to form sports teams and pair children of equal strength against each other in competitive sports. This seems to result in sport at the school being orientated towards learning disabled adolescents.

Chris reinforces this perception by describing his experience of not being able to find enough players to populate a soccer team because there are so few scholars with CP in the school:

It's hard finding players that are willing to play because a lot of them … I don't know why … but I think they are ashamed, and they choose not to play. (Chris)

Similarly, Ben describes his experience of being marginalised because there are not enough other scholars in wheelchairs to warrant adapted physical activities for him:

There isn't any sport really that they do for us. It's only the wheelchair race, but they don't worry with that. It's only when it comes close to school sports day, then they will tell you that you will be in a race. They don't practice here. They practice at home … It doesn't feel really nice, because then they leave out the wheelchairs. Like it means nothing. There are four or five wheelchair children, and most of the people are walking here, and there is no sport for them. (Ben)

Because scholars with physical disabilities are in a minority in the school, they are sometimes left feeling marginalised because they cannot find a team or sport that can accommodate their particular level of impairment. Adam, for example, describes finding himself in a liminal space (on his own between peers with no physical or sensory impairment and peers with physical or sensory impairments and visual impairments), without any suitable competitors:

Honestly, no, but they couldn't really classify me because I'm not like … I am disabled, but I'm not in a wheelchair or blind … and the only judo they had was blind judo, and that is not fair because I have sight and they don't. So that wouldn't really be fair. I couldn't go with the blind judo. I'm like in between: I'm not blind, but I'm not physically normal. I'm like right in between, and they didn't have competitions for that. (Adam)

Although the school is comparatively well resourced when compared with other SA schools for children with disabilities, partly because of its history as a Whites only school, the principal notes that there are financial constraints and many competing needs (such as the need to repair and maintain buildings, build more classrooms and employ more educators). Thus, money is not available for sporting equipment or specialised staff to supervise adapted physical activities. This perception that resource constraints are a significant barrier to offering more opportunities for participation in physical activity is reinforced by two of the teachers:

Money resources, financial resources and human resources are the main obstacles really. (Teacher) I think it comes down to finances. Finances will be the problem. (Teacher)

The teachers also note that space is a further resource constraint because the school campus is not large enough to accommodate additional sporting facilities:

There's no space, so they've been looking at the old garage to maybe redo and make it into like a little mini gym. (Teacher)

The principal notes that although the educators in the school are dedicated and committed, they are overburdened with their core business (teaching). They are reluctant to take on extra responsibilities (especially on the weekends) because these entail taking more responsibility for the scholars and an additional demand on their scarce and valuable time. Further, she articulates that the responsibility of taking scholars with disabilities out is greater than would be the case if the educator was taking out a group of scholars without physical impairments. This extra responsibility and energy is also a lot to require of educators.

The school faces limitations in terms of a lack of facilities and staff members competent to supervise physical activity programmes for scholars with motor impairments. While there are a number of physical activities offered by the school, it appears that they are predominantly aimed at the scholars who constitute the majority. Ben describes his experience of other scholars obtaining opportunities to practice while those in wheelchairs are excluded:

The children that are running, they get most of the practice here at school, and then they have to do it at home. And there's cross-country for them to practice also. There's not anything for wheelchairs. (Ben)

Because of the restricted amount of space and limited number of teachers able to supervise adapted physical activity, some sports are only offered to scholars with disabilities of a certain age. This makes it difficult for scholars to excel in these activities because they do not have the benefit of sustained and prolonged exposure to the sport:

Well, they didn't stop baseball, but when we were in grade 6 and 7, we couldn't do it anymore because we were in the older phase. So I think only from grade 4 to 5, then you can do baseball. Then in grade 6 and 7, you can't. (Emma)

The school serves a wide catchment area. Consequently, many scholars have to travel long distances to school. Some participants report leaving home at 6:30 am and only returning at 4:00 pm each day. This makes for a very long day and leaves very little time for activities outside of the normal school day. This problem is compounded by the lack of a public transport system in SA. There is a bus service offered by the school to transport scholars home but the buses depart immediately after school, which makes it difficult to organise any extramural activities in the afternoon (as would be the case in the other mainstream schools in the surrounding area). Many of the scholars with CP make use of the school's bus system, which effectively exclude them from any activities offered outside the school day.

Bianca and Sofia describe their frustration and disappointment at being unable to participate in after school activities because they live too far from the school and rely on the school bus for transport:

I don't really like it, because that activity takes place on a Wednesday night and I can't go to them because I live far. It takes lots of money to go. (Bianca) I take part, but I'm not going to be in this year's play. Because there's after-school practice and I live too far. (Sofia)

These sentiments are echoed by a teacher who describes how the problem of transport impacts on sports events, which are organised on the weekends:

Our school caters for children from many areas … uhm … there isn't like, if they want to do sport, they can't stay after school for very long because we've got buses going. They need to leave as the bus goes and they leave like 3 o' clock from high school every single day, so there isn't that leeway as well and if there's anything on like the Saturday or on the weekend that they would want to organise, it's also difficult from a transport point of view. Not all parents have transport. (Teacher)

Extramural activities at the school are timetabled into the school day as far as possible in order to promote participation. One period of an hour is set aside each week for these activities, and scholars are required to choose one activity to participate in per term. Because of the policy of inclusive education, the school has to offer activities that can accommodate all scholars including those with physical impairments. This creates a particular challenge given the limited amount of resources and the finite number of staff.

Because all activities are offered at the same time and all scholars have to be accommodated, there are restrictions on how many scholars can take part in each activity. Consequently, scholars are sometimes excluded or are unable to participate in the activity of their choice:

I wrote on the list that I want to do archery but it was full. I'm doing nothing. I'm at drama for the time being. … No, I'm not doing it. … I just sit here for that period because archery is full. (Sofia)

Scholars who cannot be accommodated in activities are assigned the role of spectators and become audience to the participation of others. For some scholars, the role of spectator is akin to participation but for others, it is an experience of being excluded:

At our school there is not really swimming. It's only the able-bodied people that can swim. And there is soccer, but we have to watch. (Lisa)

Children with CP who want to participate more fully are often required to join teams and clubs outside of school, which may cause parents to incur further costs. This is also not always easy to do because sport in SA schools tends to be school-based rather than club-based. Sport in SA schools is also highly competitive with a focus on inter-school competitions.

Many participants speak of feeling self-conscious when they participate in physical activity and prefer not to be watched, stared at or made fun of when they move. The inclusion of children without physical impairments in the school compounds this because the scholars with disabilities are observed by their peers while they participate in physical activities:

I don't like it when they're watching me. They all sit on the field there and watch me. I don't like that. (Bianca) Ja, I don't like people watching me doing it. (Chris) Yes (I dance), but not with a lot of people watching. I don't like people looking at me and seeing me dance. It's just when I'm alone. … No, it makes me nervous. (Bianca) I just think when the spectators are watching them (the children with CP) run, you know, they obviously run a bit differently. Some people are laughing at them, and they would rather hide in a corner than be exposed to that. (Chris)

Many of the children with CP describe being bullied by the other scholars, who make fun of the way they move and perform physical activities. This exacerbates the participants' feelings of self-consciousness:

But I don't like it when people say cripple. I don't like that word. (Lisa) Like, oh, look, there goes a cripple. Oh, that boy is in a wheelchair and he's cripple. Or, oh, that girl has a crippled arm. (Emma) When they call me cripple. There's a difference between cripple and … I always say I'm disabled … cripple makes you feel like worthless – like why was I born? (Sofia)

The presence of both scholars with CP and others with no obvious impairments in the school sets up a hierarchy of disability. The children with motor impairments experience themselves as more disabled and position the learning disabled children as ‘normal’:

Well, I'm not saying all kids are normal. I'm just saying, okay, there are some kids that have learning problems, so that's what I mean by normal. They are normal because they don't have anything physically wrong with them. Those are the people I mean by normal. Those are the people, the ones with a physical type of brain. And there are kids as well who get very emotional, and there are kids that get short-tempered – they get angry very quickly. So ja, those are the people who are normal to me. (Emma)

Explicit within the hierarchy is a power differential, which results in those ‘on top’ subjugating those ‘below’ through bullying and other forms of verbal insults. Many participants described being subjected to bullying and discrimination. This is evident in the quote later in which Sofia talks about her experience of being made fun of and judged by other scholars who do not have CP:

Yes. I think it's really silly, because they are normal, they've just got the judgment. It's nothing to be made fun of. And we are at a school like that, so I don't see why they do it. If they were so perfect, then why are they here? I don't understand people like that. That's the kind of thing I can't take, people thinking they are better than everybody. (Sofia)

Discussion

It is clear that scholars being educated in a school, which previously catered specifically for children with CP but who now constitute a small minority in the school, experience bodily exclusion in many ways. They have to watch while others participate, and constraints of space and time exclude them. Teachers may not wish to exclude these students but the demands on them in a context of stretched resources play an important part in their not catering adequately to the physical activity needs of these scholars. Paradoxically, the opening of the school to all races, which is to be celebrated, contributes to exclusion. Because of apartheid town planning and a history of spatial segregation by race, which goes back even further than apartheid, Cape Town remains a largely racially segregated city (McDonald, 2012), with only relatively few, generally wealthier, people of colour living in the formerly White areas close to the school. Many scholars live far from the school and the public transport infrastructure is poor, with the school not being close enough to transport routes for people with mobility impairments. As a result, it is a problem to find scholars together for sport, not necessarily through lack of will on the part of teachers but because of Cape Town's spatial inequality.

There is much in the data about the politics of visibility and invisibility. Within a broader group of scholars with disabilities, the scholars with CP and their physical needs, become almost invisible to the institution as a whole, as it focuses on the needs of the majority—children with learning disability but without physical impairments. Regarding participation in physical activity, as Lisa notes, ‘there is soccer but we have to watch’. The children with CP become not participants in an integrated environment but spectators in a space in which their needs are overlooked. And when they are seen in this ostensibly more integrated context, they experience being seen in ways which, to use a term from disability studies, enfreak them (Garland-Thomson, 1997). As Chris notes about being watched and ridiculed as they move, children with CP at the school ‘would rather hide in a corner than be exposed to that’. Their bodies and their movements create a spectacle, which arguably could be moderated and mediated were there greater provision for them to develop skills in physical activity—to move from the status of a freak whose body does not fit in to somebody whose engagement in physical activity could be appreciated if provided a context of inclusive sport.

The changes in this school, from a school catering to the needs of a very particular group of White children to one serving children of all races, and more diverse in terms of disability, can easily be applauded in light of democratisation in SA and international calls for disability inclusion and integration. However, in a context in which the provisioning necessary to make full inclusion possible, on the basis of both race and disability, is not there, it is at the most visceral bodily level that these children carry the burden of the gap between the rhetoric of inclusion and the reality of segregation of a form different from what occurred historically, but nevertheless important. Given resource constraints and economic realities in SA, these issues will not be resolved soon, but to ignore the embodied consequences of the gap between rhetoric and reality is to perpetuate the problem.

Conclusion

During the apartheid years, South African community psychology gained much of its prestige and justified credibility by pointing out the serious consequences of segregation and inequality. The issues now, as experienced by these children, are in some ways much less stark and much easier to hide, partly because people with CP are such a small minority in any country. However, community psychology would be failing as a liberatory discipline were it not to point out the issues of continuing exclusion and discrimination. Our group is planning interventions for children like those who participated in this study, but there are broader issues at stake, and these issues concern the role of community psychology in recognising, naming and contributing to action around injustices which may be hard to see but which can have profound effects on the lives and bodies of those who experience exclusion. The issue of having to watch or be watched in a world in which participation on an equal basis is ostensibly but not actually catered for is an injustice which has implications far beyond the lives of these particular children.