Box-Ticking Exercise: Children in Need Shaped me, but I Wish it Hadn’t

Box-Ticking Exercise is the new monthly(-ish) column by Melissa Parker in which she dissects ableism and the portrayal of disability in tv, film and media. Being M, this is of course all done with her pen as a scalpel.

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The silence pulls you in at the moment the camera lingers on a distressed child. Then images of disabled children in despair are artfully, soullessly, woven and twisted around the generically insincere Coldplay song “Fix You”, breaking the accidental, fleeting moment of compassion. 

This is Children in Need, the yearly telethon for disabled children.   

Adult experiences and emotions burden disabled children who have seen too much. They will then, for charity, be instructed to showcase their broken bits – to generate fleeting, monetisable empathy.    

We’re forcing a message onto disabled children that will last and echo throughout every era of their lives.   

These, after all, are and were our early formative experiences. The only time I saw children like me on television was during these instants – glimpses of black and white images – the camera honing in on haunted eyes searching for the cracks in a child’s voice as they recount their trauma.  

I don’t know who I would be without this television style, but I should.  

 I have grappled for years with the effect 90s culture and media had on me. Yet, we’re still ready to pass on the same burdens and duties to the next generation.   

When you’re young, you form an image of your life. Society has told us for generations that our narrative was set. We can taste the anger rolling on our tongues now. But, back then, we were raised in a society which told us that the only way to be a disabled child and a disabled adult was to evoke pity – this will all have to come undone.  

When personal stories are woven into the heart of fundraising, the question should be: can this child consent?

Will that child who will have intimate details about their life committed to celluloid one day recoil in disgust? One day when they understand that their narrative was used and mined for its most compelling content, will they agree it was worth it?  

As a child who watched and crawled far too close to the television, peering up at it as though it could tell me the story of life and my place in society. it can’t ever be right to push those images on trusting disabled children, we didn’t know any better, but we do now.    

It’s what we’re fighting for – what generations of disabled people have fought for – most notably the “Piss on Pity” protests of ITV’s Telethon in the early 90s. 

But I didn’t know about that until I was 30. What power would that knowledge hold if it were widely taught to disabled children to understand our history? We’re the generation that continues to push on for those who fought for our ability to say confidently and unapologetically Piss Off.  

For those disabled people in our future who will learn these lessons, know their history and will say with conviction and pride: Of course, we told them to piss off. They were taking the piss.  

Endless threads on social media also articulate the problem so beautifully, so messily, with such warmth, including notably Nina Tame’s. Unfortunately, those snippets of videos, and the general tone of Children in Need, could not communicate such flawed, considered humanity.    

The only way to truly fix this is to allow the disabled people in these threads – the people liking and sharing them – who have lived experiences to engage with the project. 

Find a new way of framing and contextualising stories. Ask yourselves, will the disabled adults these children become one day feel exploited or exposed by our methods? Will it impact how disabled people interact with the world and how the world perceives them?    

Acknowledging this obvious truth seems even more vital: charity buckets and celebrity cameos are no replacement for a well-funded support system.    

 Poverty and the rights of disabled people are, at their core, political issues; to cleanse the government of its responsibilities and put a charming sheen on it – to willfully ignore the causes – is to harm the disabled children we are trying to support. We can directly place many of the hardships described in those videos on the government.  

With recent calls to revamp the PIP system and ONS statistics show that disabled people were more likely than non-disabled people to have reduced their spending on food and other essentials because of increased costs.  

Through a haze of deception and gradually lowering standards, our leaders have persuaded us that it’s normal for a developed global economy to expect a partially sighted, put-upon, frayed, yellow bear to prop it all up.  

For the disabled children whose stories were cleansed to fit, mined for the most manufactured manipulative content, and the generations of disabled children who watched as it unfolded: the chant “Piss on Pity” should ring out anew.   

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