Provedba kombinirane socijalne politike spram osoba s invaliditetom na primjeru udruga za osobe s cerebralnom paralizom u Hrvatskoj

Pantić, Jelena. (2018). Provedba kombinirane socijalne politike spram osoba s invaliditetom na primjeru udruga za osobe s cerebralnom paralizom u Hrvatskoj. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Sociology. [mentor Božić, Jasmina].

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Abstract

My graduate thesis deals with persons with disabilities (PWD), one of the most vulnerable social groups. People with special needs encounter a deprivation of a series of civil rights such as economic, educational, social and political rights, and they are often exposed to a multiple discrimination because the community which they live in often perceives them as incapable of normal life because of their impairment, which is, of course, a completely misleading interpretation. PWD have the same rights and most capabilities as all other members of society and should be equal to them. On December 13, 2006 The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The Republic of Croatia was among the first countries in the world that signed it and ratified it in 2007 (www.posi.hr.). This Convention should demonstrate that it is difficult for PWD to exercise its rights due to the existence of deeply ingrained prejudices in their environment, not due to the degree and type of their disability. However, there has been no extensive application of the Convention in practice and no major improvement in the position of persons with disabilities in the world. In this thesis, I will deal with the issue of public support to the federations of associations of persons with disabilities at the national level and the distribution of responsibility for providing services to persons with disabilities between state, public and civil society organizations (CSO). I will focus the most on the working conditions of associations of people with cerebral palsy. Associations of persons with disabilities as civil society organizations try to help their users in every way. The umbrella organization of the associations for persons with disabilities in the Republic of Croatia is the Union of Alliances of Persons with Disabilities of Croatia. As stated on the website of the Ombudsperson for Persons with Disabilities, such associations assist their protégés in education, social inclusion of children with disabilities and people with disabilities by providing them with personal assistant services, sign language translators, blind escorts, teaching assistants, home care services and many others (www.posi.hr). On the other hand, the state is not actively involved in assisting the PWD and none of the above-mentioned services were provided by the state Instead, the associations have to fight to make them available. Furthermore, the political premise in this work is a combined social policy explained by sociologist Vlado Puljiz, political scientist and sociologist Gojko Bežovan and other authors in the book Social Policy of Croatia. A combined social policy involves a significant involvement of civil society organizations (mostly non-profit) in solving the problems of members of particular community. The government is obliged enable these associations to provide social services and to implement social programs in cooperation with them in order to achieve equal rights of all citizens to a quality life (Puljiz et al 2008: 393, 39). As part of this graduate thesis, I will create the typology of the federation of associations for PWD in Croatia according to the type of impairment, the number of existing PWD organizations gathered in federation of associations and the jurisdiction of the state institutions over their activities. In this paper I will use a secondary analysis of the available qualitative and quantitative data. I will focus on the searching the Internet for information (web page of the ombudsperson for people with disability and web pages of federation of association for PWD), as well as the recent literature (scientific and professional studies) on Hrčak and printed publications. In conclusion, my goal is to identify the role civil society has in improving the living conditions of people with disabilities, more specifically the group of people with cerebral palsy, and how much the state participates in it.

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