Fear of the Disability Con: Perceptions of Fraud and Special Rights Discourse

Abstract

This article presents a new framework for analyzing the development and implementation of disability law: the prism of the fear of “the disability con”—popular perceptions of fraud and fakery. We all encounter disability rights and accommodations in everyday life. However, people with disabilities pay a price for the legal recognition of their rights. People who park in disabled parking spots, use service dogs, move to the front of lines, receive Social Security benefits, or request academic accommodations are often viewed as faking disabilities and abusing the law. This disability con stereotype thus serves as an important invisible barrier preventing Americans with disabilities from fully taking part in society, as it not only undermines the public legitimacy of rights but also restricts the design and implementation of the legal regime illustrating those. Nevertheless, this moral panic around disability con in American society and its manifestations has yet to be studied in a systematic‐empirical way, nor has it been addressed in sociolegal scholarship. Using a mixed‐methods approach composed of an original nationally representative survey along with in‐depth interviews, this article fills this gap. The data suggest that the stereotype of disability con applies to multiple disability rights across venues and contexts; that nearly 60% of Americans with disabilities feel that others question their disability; that the stereotype of disability con extends to visible disabilities and to less apparent ones; and that, counterintuitively, the people most suspicious are nondisabled individuals with a personal connection to a disabled person and disabled people who experience suspicion themselves. Based on the richer understanding of the sociolegal phenomenon, this article suggests strategies to increase trust and reduce suspicion of the disability con.

COVID-19, the Immune System, and Organic Disability

“…Obviously, this will not be possible without State intervention to establish rules that meet the interests of people living with this disability. This State intervention should not be done through affirmative action rules, which are not seen as neutral (Minow 1990, 71), but anti-discrimination law, since it is not a matter of specifying rights to a minority group but of generalizing access to a right (Dorfman 2019(Dorfman , 1060.…”

“…The problem with this second group is that it is an invisible disability. This may raise "public suspicion of the 'disability,' that is, the cultural anxiety that individuals fake disabilities to take advantage of rights, accommodations, or benefits" (Dorfman 2019(Dorfman , 1052. We will return to this issue later.…”

Doubt & Social Policy: The Long History of Malingering in Modern Welfare States

“…In a 1998 essay on malingering in the modern era (roughly post-1800), historian of medicine Roger Cooter explained that accusations of feigned illness took on particular force in martial contexts. 14 There is no question that this observation holds for US history, as we can locate anxieties about what Doron Dorfman analyzes as "the disability con" 15 as far back as pensions go in the US. For example, in prefacing William Henry Glasson's 1918 history of federal military pensions, his editor, David Kinley, lamented that "[a]s is usual under all governments when money is to be paid out to numerous individuals in the community, a class of people fastened themselves as parasites on the beneficiaries."…”

The Problems of Access: A Crip Rejoinder via the Phenomenology of Spatial Belonging

“…In the case that concerns us, universities require medical certification of a person's disability in order to protect themselves from potential malingering. In addition to privatizing disability knowledge and discrediting experiential knowledge, the accommodations model thus also implicitly relies on the ableist (and often racist, sexist, and classist) trope of disability fraud, according to which a considerable number of people lie about or exaggerate their disability status in order to unlawfully gain social benefits and sympathy (Dorfman 2019; Samuels 2014). This stigmatizing trope reproduces harmful stereotypes by portraying disabled people as manipulative and ill intentioned.…”