Empowerment different meanings for Organizations and Disabled.

Does empowerment mean the same for the disabled as it appears to mean for disability organizations? The answer appears to be a resounding no. Empowerment for the disabled may mean the regaining of rights which may have been illegally lost, whereas for the disability organization it may be just a buzz word designed to placate the disabled while at the same time giving them the appearance of legitimacy. Empowerment for them may mean that the disabled are being granted, given, or permitted the ability to speak on their own behalf. So you see the definition of empowerment differs between organizations and the population which they are supposed to serve. I did find that the disability definition is much closer to reality than that of the organizations.

To find a definition for empowerment I looked in the dictionary but I could find no definition for it. What I found was a definition for empower. It means to give power or authority to, authorize, enable or permit. So empowerment means that we have been permitted, granted or authorized to speak on our own behalf. I guess our voices became mute when we became disabled. On closer look, empowerment may mean that we have illegally lost that power for which we are now being empowered. According to the dictionary definition it appears that you may only be empowered to do something if you never possessed that capability in the first place. You cannot be empowered simply because you have a disability. If you have a disability and are being empowered then this implies that you illegally lost that capability and are having to be re-empowered. Maybe instead of being empowered we should refer to it as regaining our human rights or rights which we were never supposed to have lost in the first place. If they are in fact determined to be human rights then we may discover that many countries which were co-signers of the Helsinki agreement are treating us illegally by denying us these rights while extending them freely to others. Maybe this is why the unemployment for the disabled is at an all time high. In my country this figure is between 70 & 75% while unemployment for the non-disabled is considered be good if it is around 6%.

If we find that these rights were illegally denied then we need to try to discover why they were and fight to correct these inequities in the law. When we truly do this then we

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