The Barbados Council for the Disabled (BCD) has rapped newspaper columnist and public relations expert Al Gilkes over his comments about parking spaces for the disabled, and for describing them as being “handicapped”.
Gilkes, writing in the last SUNDAY?SUN, said while he did not want to be misunderstood, he had a problem “with the number of seldom, if ever used, parking spaces that are provided by both the private and public sector for people with disabilities . . . [and] reserved for the handicapped only and therefore forbidden to regular drivers”.
He came under sanction yesterday from BCD president Senator Kerryann Ifill, who is also President of the Senate. She said it was her intention to “clear up some of the misconceptions and obvious ignorance displayed in the article . . . regarding parking and persons with disabilities”.
Ifill, who is blind, was adamant that people with disabilities were not “handicapped”.
“Horse racing and other sporting disciplines still use the term, but we who live with disabilities refuse to be. A handicap is a very derogatory term which conjures up images of the poor man sitting alongside the road cap in hand – begging for alms,” she told the DAILY?NATION. (JS)
