He’s just not normal: services, families and Deaf identity

When a father of a signing Deaf four year old insisted to me that his child was obviously not normal, I realised how deeply the professional discourse on Deaf children had penetrated the thinking of family members. When we researched the views of parents on professional service delivery and compared to the views of professionals themselves, we found two mutually unintelligible world views. When we consider the assessment of Deaf adults in legal, employment and mental health settings, we see unrealistic normative metrics applied from the majority cultural perspective. In this chapter, I will focus on the nature of family interaction with professionals, the contact between Deaf people and professionals when they are assessed and the appropriateness of the measures and schedules used. Not surprisingly there are validity issues and interpretation issues. However, is the solution to set all assessment in the hands of the Deaf community (as new professionals)? These are continued problematic issues which reflect difference in cultural values and which have the potential to affect profoundly the futures of the Deaf people involved.