If it looks like a duck... Winterbourne View and institutions redux
If it looks like a duck… Winterbourne View and institutions redux “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands. ” (Douglas Adams; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency). When you think of an institution, whether for people with learning disabilities or any other group of people, what image comes into your mind? For me, it’s the prototype of a spooky, Victorian set of large barracks-like buildings (with a chapel, of course) in sweeping, unkempt grounds. And it’s empty of course, in the slightly Marie Celeste way captured so well in @AbandonedPics. Institutions have been on my mind a lot this year. It’s 20 years since my first substantial research job, conducting a sort of systematic review (before we knew what systematic reviews were) of the evidence around the impact of deinstitutionalisation on the lives of people with learning disabilities. The evidence can be sim...