International Women's Day

Baroness Grey-Thompson Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Grey-Thompson]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to speak in today’s debate on a very important subject, but first I am delighted to pay tribute to and to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to your Lordships’ House, and I thank her for her wonderful contribution today. Her experience through her work in the media, business, education and the public sector will be a great asset to this House. I am also delighted to learn that we share a love of football—but in my case it is Middlesbrough, so I say that in the loosest sense of the word—and swimming, but perhaps sadly not her love of cooking. It was wonderful to hear her passion and warmth in promoting the rights of disabled women, which is also close to my heart. I am sure I speak for the whole House when I say that we look forward to the noble Baroness’s future contributions.

I raise the particular issue of disabled women’s participation in society, especially in sport and physical activity. Through research from the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation, for which I chair its commission on the future of women’s sport, we know that the drop-out rate for non-disabled women in sport is around the crucial age of 16. If we could only encourage British girls to take part in just two hours of physical activity every week, they would be less likely to be teenage mothers or involved in abusive relationships and would be more likely to stay in education. Who would not want that for any young woman?

However, we know that it is considerably more difficult for disabled women to achieve inclusion in sport. A recent report from the Office for National Statistics looked at social participation across a range of themes, including a European barometer of public opinion. The biggest barrier for anyone wanting to participate in physical activity is time. How many of us in your Lordships’ House today could say that? The second biggest barrier to participation is being disabled. I am very lucky in that I can say that in my life I have rarely experienced discrimination due to being a woman, but if discrimination were a top trumps game, disability would receive nearly maximum points. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was told several times by a variety of people, including a nurse and a doctor, that people like me should not have children.

I have in my work with the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, of which I am trustee, seen this even more starkly around the world. The charity uses sport as a tool for social change across a range of countries and projects. In the past couple of years I have been fortunate to visit projects in India, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and have seen the issues that face disabled women internationally.

On a recent visit to the image project in Rajasthan, I spoke to girls who had polio. It is a great worry that girls aged 14 and 15 are living with this condition. They had been abandoned, ignored and abused just because they were disabled. They were living in a school that doubled as a children’s home for many of them. So many girls were living there that they were sleeping 20 to a five-bedded room. They were sleeping on the floors in the corridors and the teachers had to sleep on the roof because there was nowhere else for them. The teachers experienced discrimination because they were working with disabled children and they found it difficult to live in their own communities because of the work that they were trying to do.

Sport and physical activity played a crucial role in helping all these young women adapt to their impairment, to feel valued and to get access to education. It also gave them an opportunity to contribute to local society. It gave them skills that enabled them to have a job and to be able to change the way in which the local environment thought about them. Because where they lived was so inaccessible and they had few wheelchairs, they needed to be introduced to physical activity so that they could be strong enough to live their everyday lives. One of the most dramatic and upsetting things that I have ever seen was the girls having to crawl along the corridors between their bedrooms, study rooms and the kitchen because they did not have enough wheelchairs. They had to share the wheelchairs and take turns to use them. When visitors came they were brought out in stages because they could not all come to meet me together. For someone who takes the use of a wheelchair completely and utterly for granted, that was a devastating experience.

When I spoke to the girls, their aspirations were simple. They want to be treated like non-disabled women in their local community. The dream of full inclusion and equality, and to have the same rights as a man, was a step too far. When I asked one of the girls whether they believed that they could achieve that, they looked at me and said, “No, not in my lifetime”. Whenever the battle for true inclusion for women perhaps gives the impression that we are close to the finish line, this is a stark reminder that there is still a long way to go. Today, I ask what steps we can take to ensure that disabled women receive more support, whether through international aid or other sources, to ensure that they have a chance to succeed. I know that we can all do more to make this better.