Diversity at Work

Helen Henderson has my dream job. She writes about people with disabilities and their everyday battles. She reaches about 1.7 million readers.

If Henderson had her way, disability would be her full-time beat at the Toronto Star. But when she proposed such a beat almost two decades ago, she said her editors at the Canadian newspaper "… verbally patted me on the head and said I could write a column."

The editors, she explained, felt the subject was "too narrow" for a beat, even though Canada has about four million citizens with disabilities. That's more than 12 percent of its population.

Now, with 16 years of columns under her belt, Henderson says she has enough material to write three columns a week. But she has to be content for now with Saturdays only -- not a bad compromise since that's the paper's largest circulation day.

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Henderson went to work for the Star in the '70s as a business reporter. Now she tackles issues of disability on the personal and political levels. She has a form of multiple sclerosis that is slow to progress. But "when it became clear that I couldn't tramp around oil fields anymore," she said, she turned her skills to editing. These days, she's a full-time features reporter/columnist.

While few columns on disability exist in the U.S. media, Henderson isn't the first columnist to write about the issues at the Star. And she's not afraid to let loose when she sees something she regards as an injustice. When Henderson wrote about the push in the province of Ontario for the Ontarians with Disabilities Act, she labeled it "a bad bill." She criticized it because it "has no teeth whatsoever. It's appalling."

"But if you talk against it, you sound like a churlish ingrate," Henderson told me in a phone interview from her newsroom, 90 miles away from mine in Buffalo.

She also wrote a series of columns in the '90s about the high-profile case of a 12-year-old child with a disability who was killed by her father. Henderson received hate mail from people who felt the father was justified because of what his supporters labeled as the overwhelming problems of raising a child with a disability. Someone even mailed Henderson the photo that accompanies her column with her eyes burned out.

Public sympathy was with the father, Henderson recalled. It was not with her position that no one has the right to end the life of a child.

Henderson uses a scooter to get around and works in a newsroom with three others who use mobility devices. When I asked if she felt that her column, and the presence of employees with disabilities, led to better coverage of those issues at the Star, she said, "I keep plugging away at it, and the paper has done some major series."

She cited a story about the issue of accessible trains and a series on what colleges offer students with learning disabilities. But she wonders why newspapers don't devote more time and space to such issues.

With her years of reporting experience, Henderson can succinctly sum up the core problem for people with disabilities who live in both her country and mine: integration vs. segregation, which "impacts all others."

She's referring, of course, to attitudinal segregation.

One of her columns, for instance, underscored the stigma forced on "those branded as mentally ill."

Another 2007 column talked about the need "to recognize the many people who don't communicate verbally [who] are not only able but also eager to live independently and manage their own lives."

But my favorite Helen Henderson column was about Ashley. She is the severely disabled child whose parents opted for surgery that would limit her growth and stop her breasts from forming. On their Web site, the parents refer to Ashley as their "Pillow Angel."

Henderson started that column in a powerful way: "Designer duds. Designer pets. Designer cripples and retards."

And later: "Pillow angel. So sweet. Stays right where we place her."

The words practically jump off the newsprint -- and that's exactly the point. Henderson took the sickly sweet attitude most would feel toward Ashley's story and turned it on its head.

Why? Because "the biggest problem is how patronizing [media] are," she said. "Too often they treat people with disabilities as objects of pity."

"Or they're plucky."

In a follow-up column, Henderson noted that "Seattle Children's Hospital admitted it erred in allowing doctors to take certain measures to stunt the physical growth of the developmentally disabled child known to the world as Ashley."

But she still wondered "how such a thing could be allowed to happen."

For many, the idea of the "Pillow Angel" is much more palatable than the harsh reality of what was done to Ashley and why.

Because of that attitude dilemma, Henderson offers a litmus test for reporters working on stories about disabilities: Substitute the word black for disabled.

Does the story still hold up? It shouldn't.

"We never do those kinds of stories about women or ethnicities," Henderson said.

We wouldn’t dare.