TV rights
Mona, 34, says her son Ahmed, a three-and-half-year-old boy with a speech impediment, was no more nor less interested in television than normal children: "He got into it for a while, then that was over. If he watches now, it doesn't make much of an impression on him -- maybe because none of it is meant for him." For his part, seven-year-old Karim, an autistic Christian child, developed a powerful attachment to the televised azan, a cassette recording of which failed to appease him during a summer holiday in Marsa Matrouh... So responses differ. But according to Fatma Saqr, founder of the Right to Live Association and mother of Dina Galal, well-known Special Olympics champion with Down's Syndrome, TV is a crucial tool in the battle against mental disabilities: "Dina was attached to a TV serial, which she watched before sleep. When it was discontinued she asked, 'how can I sleep now?' And this is a family drama -- imagine how much more she could have identified with a serial intended for her or her parents." In the 1970s while Dina was growing up, Saqr and people in her position were completely in the dark: "we had to seek out the information and teach ourselves how to process it." Thankfully the situation has changed since then.
"At least now it's a topic you can broach in public," says Nani Saleh, head of the Right to Live Association. "Still, we're crawling ahead on an upward slope, and the media isn't doing half as much as it should be." Nothing less than "a national strategy" will resolve the issue: "Problems that start in childhood grow up with the afflicted person, especially when clueless parents grow old and tired. Shame, the false notion that mental disabilities are hereditary and the resulting matrimonial boycott on whole families add insult to injury, with parents shying away from therapy as a result. All of which doesn't take into account that social integration actually helps mentally challenged people, with autistic children gaining confidence as a result of repetitious work like photocopying or planting. But, without input from the media, no one knows that..." Few as they remain -- the well- known play Lesson over, stupid, for example -- local works that deal with the issue are, unlike their counterparts abroad, misinformed and insulting. Where the US advertising industry incorporates the mentally challenged, in Egypt this social segment remains the exclusive arena of national TV, whose treatment of it seldom lives up to international standards.
Fayza Youssef, psychologist and former dean of the Higher Institute of Childhood Studies at Ain Shams University, implies that "special needs" is a misleading term: "All children need special care; certain groups are just not average. And even within the mental category generally perceived as below normal, there is great variety; special needs should include the homeless, the physically challenged and the emotionally disturbed as well. Such conditions can drastically affect a child's academic performance. At the other end of the scale, there are those with musical ability or very high IQs; they too are special-needs children." Any uniform approach to such a wide range of needs, Youssef adds, would be a grave mistake: "Rather, what is needed is a holistic strategy construed on the principle of catering to the individual." According to both Laila Karameddin and Elhami Abdel-Aziz, psychologists, this is where the media comes in, with Abdel-Aziz stressing the concept of social rights: "Special needs require special rights, including collaborative work to counter misrepresentation and provide care on the premise that is a right, not a privilege." Mona Omran, children's media specialist, concurs: 15-minute programmes targeting the mentally challenged should be instituted, modelled on the work of universities -- in Germany and the US -- that connect the media with the mentally challenged: "Scholars here should work on developing genuine emotions for this segment of society, which would give them a sense of drive to accomplish this essential mission: "The notion of a cure doesn't hold water -- indeed this is why so many people have no interest in the mentally challenged -- the media can help improve standards of life and raise levels of performance dramatically, in a wide variety of endeavours..."
Addressing the question of the mentally challenged in the media, Mohamed Moawad, vice-dean of Ain Shams University's 25-year-old Higher Institute of Childhood Studies, coordinated the seminar "New attitudes in children's media", which brought Aziza Helmi of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood together with professors from three departments to discuss medical, psychological, social and media aspects of the issue. Presenting hundreds of Institute studies that have yet to be implemented, Itimad Khalaf, head of the media and children's culture department, Helmi assured the participants that, the theoretical phase well nigh complete by now, practical steps are being taken, with programmes implemented in schools, over the phone network and hopefully soon on TV. For his part Moawad explained that with the mentally challenged making up some 10 per cent of the population, society cannot afford to ignore them in the context of holistic development. Saqr summed up: "the 3.5 million mentally challenged people in Egypt are among the 600 million in the world at large; this is therefore a global concern that requires Egyptians to shed all vestiges of shame and denial and face the issue head on. My daughter could have been ignored completely, look how great she has become. Let us pass the information around and give these children what they deserve..."
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