OP details various first-hand accounts of disabled children across the UK who have been edited in their school photos. This is not a new phenomenon as one of the accounts is from the 1970s.
Some quotes from the article:
Behind the erasure of disabled children lies the frightening belief that they don’t belong in ‘perfect’ pictures – or public spaces.
If that feels somewhat chilling, it is because it should. Few of us – even at a time when someone, somewhere will always find a way to excuse bigotry – cannot understand the connotations of wanting to pretend disabled children don’t exist.
Children have had their disability aids removed by photographers. Other children have been altered with editing software or banned from their class photos entirely.
That is the thing with true ugliness. It does not come in the shape of a wheelchair, a cleft lip, white cane or scars. It sits in prejudice, digging and clawing its way into our culture until one day the nice man who is taking your child’s school photo asks her to hide her hearing aids. That this prejudice will follow these children into adulthood is perhaps the bleakest part. If only society had the desire to edit that out.
People don’t realise how common this is in our society unless you are a minority. Its everywhere. The state abuses disabled people via the DWP, the doctors do the same to disabled people by refusing to treat or put secretly DNRs on their records. Access is awful everywhere and people with wheelchairs fail to get on buses because the spot is taken by a pram which its not allowed to be used for, then there is the removal of accessible bridges for the train network replaced with ones that aren’t accessible, the lifts barely work when they are installed. Then there is all the attacks and verbal abuse on the streets from random people and so much more besides. Its everywhere in every place a minority would go.
Despite whatever self reported level of discrimination the UK gets as one of the best in the world any minority in this country can tell you how many times a day they are abused by someone else. Its every single day. The Police, NHS and other state functions all do it and there are no consequences for any of it. It is so common infact its not news and rarely makes the news, this one is odd for making it into the press because this happens in schools across the country every year and it certainly happened at my school photos.
It is hard to accept this basic reality as someone who isn’t a constant victim of our society but if you listen to the people who are the victims of this stuff its relentless.