Social Services: Blind Men Are Made

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More than 800 social service organizations and programs seek to help the approximately 1,000,000 blind men, women and children in the United States. According to a devastating and controversial new survey of how the blind are treated, most of these well-intentioned service groups actually encourage a sense of helplessness and dependency on the part of their clients. In The Making of Blind Men (Russell Sage Foundation; $6), Princeton Sociologist Robert A. Scott contends that the agencies have paid far more attention to helping society tuck the social problem of blind people out of sight than to meeting the needs of the afflicted.

"The overwhelming majority of people who are classified as blind can, in fact, see and function as sighted persons in most important areas of everyday life," writes Scott. "There is nothing inherent in the condition that requires a blind person to be docile, dependent or helpless. Blindness is a social role that people must learn to play. Blind men are made."

Invitation to Type-Casting. The making begins with an arbitrary definition: a person possessing 10% or less of normal vision is legally blind; with anything more than that, he merely has "a difficulty seeing." Scott contends that with most agencies this definition is an invitation to relentless typecasting. "A client's request for help with a reading problem produces a recommendation for a comprehensive psychological workup. Inquiries regarding financial or medical aid may elicit the suggestion that he enroll in a complicated long-term program of testing and training. He may be expected to learn Braille, even though special lenses would enable him to read ordinary or enlarged print."

As for clients who resist agency proposals, they are often labeled as "un-insightful," assigned low priorities for job programs and all but written off as hopeless cases. The result, says Scott, is that "the alert client quickly learns to behave as workers expect him to." Too many agencies for the blind offer their clients few choices for job training except a "sheltered workshop," where they make simple handicrafts and numbly acquire "skills and methods of production that may be unknown in most commercial industries." Before long, the trap has quietly closed. Now psychologically blind, Scott charges, the patient is "maladjusted to the larger community, and can function effectively only within the agency's contrived environment."