Equality Legislation
write an article on Equality Legislation: A Critical Analysis. It needs to be at least 1750 words. “Direct discrimination .is where a person is .treated worse than someone else because of their disability. In order to show that there has been discrimination, a person must show that there is a link between their disability and the way they were treated. For example, if a person is told that she will not be promoted because she has schizophrenia but that her colleague will be because she does not have any mental health problems, this would be direct discrimination. The person with schizophrenia has been treated less favorably than her colleague, and the reason for this is her disability” (Civil Legal Advice Service, 2014). The Disability Discrimination Act was accepted by the Parliament of Great Britain and signed in 1995. The Act aimed to protect the civil rights of the people, who suffer from different disabilities. Besides social protection, the Act gives disabled people the ability for receiving the appropriate workplace and accommodation, which is the concern of the employee. The emergence of this Act caused the question of what disability is. “The federal definition of a disability is a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a record of such an impairment, or being regarded as having such an impairment” (Arnold, K., 1999). It means that the standards of disability include both physical and mental deviations of the individual. “Many of the beliefs, misperceptions, and attitudes about mental problems and the people who have them are deeply rooted and stem from a lack of knowledge about what it means to have a mental disorder” (Fielder, J. F., 1994, 9). The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission identified the criteria of disability and provided such examples of it as blindness and deafness, cancer, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and so forth. .The emergence of the Act was predetermined by the historical background and was thoroughly developed. It protects the rights of disabled people in various spheres of public life such as education, work, transport, and so forth. .
