Learning disability and advocacy: obstacles to client empowerment

Abstract

Citizen advocacy, with its aim to empower, has the potential to transform the lives of people with learning disabilities, but an inevitable consequence of client empowerment is professional disempowerment. Professional workers are unlikely to relinquish power, control and influence without some resistance. As this paper seeks to show there are a number of ways for statutory agencies to neutralize the effect of citizen advocacy. If this challenge is to be met then a number of radical changes need to be made in the way advocacy programmes operate: the volunteering principle should be abandoned; full-time advocates should be appointed; generic rather than specialist advocacy services should be established; and, in order to protect the operational independence of advocacy programmes, funding should come from central and not local government sources. If the kind of fundamental changes, proposed in this paper, are not introduced then the credibility of advocacy services will be irretrievably damaged with the result that people with learning disabilities will continue to remain disadvantaged. If people with learning disabilities are to be empowered they need strong, independent, informed and expert representation.