Neighbourhood opposition to relocation of people with disabilities in Lithuania: ‘fake ethics’ in the community discourse

Abstract

Like other post-Soviet countries, Lithuania inherited large residential care institutions for people with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities. The reform aimed at relocating these people to community-based group homes has been met with opposition, and the communities see it as a threat to their habitus. The news media has become an important actor in this process, in its attempt to reproduce public discourse accompanying such social change. Research using case study methodology was implemented to explore the ethical aspects of community participation in deinstitutionalization. It involved observation of different public meetings between central government and communities, content analysis of gathered data and discourse analysis of the news media publications on a resonant case of opposition to the deinstitutionalization. Although other accounts of ethics privilege those of the individual worker or organization, this article looks at the ethics of multiple actors—including the community as an actor, and thus understands ethics as multiple, dynamic and intersecting. In this sense, the account is less about individual workers and more about communities and how they change and develop. Different ethical attitudes of the main actors—Ministry of Social Security and Labour, local authorities, social care institutions and communities, shaping public and news media discourses about deinstitutionalization—were identified in the data collected. Initial unethical community discourse was met with critique from the society at large, and it forced communities to switch to ‘fake’ ethics arguments for opposing deinstitutionalization. Fake ethics was manifested as intentional disguise of prejudices against people with disabilities through citing ethical phrases of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, even though these words contradicted the actions of all parties participating in the discourse. Moreover, people with disabilities themselves, directly affected by the community prejudices, were absent both in public and media discourses, and this entails a risk for their successful inclusion into the community.