Empowering The Deaf Community to Elevate an Overall Development Society in The Digital Era

Deaf people have skills development training providers aiming to break the stereotype that deaf people are different and less capable than deaf people in specific jobs. They also seek to help deaf individuals take advantage of available employment and educational opportunities and create further opportunities for the deaf community to empower themselves.

The Deaf Community

Default Deafness is probably the most studied and longest-studied type of deafness because of the severe consequences of the child’s early hearing loss in intellectual, behavioral, cognitive, psychological, and social development. In this group, differences should be made between deaf children born to deaf children’s parents, who acquire sign language first language, deaf children born to parents, who ignore the existence or refuse sign language, and deaf children families where other members are deaf.

The consequences of congenital deafness do not differ from that resulting from the obtained deafness in cases where people born with normal hearing and hearing loss hearing in early childhood, right before them, relate to any spoken language. However, they are different from the consequences. The result of deafness is obtained when listening loss occurs in late childhood. This is why we usually talk about preverbal (or prelinguistic) deafness to refer to the first and postverbal (or post-linguistic) deafness to the last. On the other hand, deafness obtained in adults creates different problems for people born deaf or missing their hearing in early or late childhood. Here again, we must distinguish between the working deaf and the elderly deaf. Hearing and deaf communities share the linguistic challenge.

The two meet communication barriers when it comes to dealing with each other. The difference then lies in how these obstacles determine their lives and how they perceive them. For early-onset deafness, fast language deficiency directly affects how the child acquires social knowledge. If social knowledge is naturally tied to language and social meaning, how can a deaf child without language build their world? Low self-confidence, childhood social isolation, and parental stress are some of the consequences of childhood communication disabilities. Deaf people tend to have little education, low-status jobs, and income. Social rejection and alienation from a larger hearing community strengthen and see themselves as a culture and a language minority group. However, culturally deaf people do not see themselves as handicapped or disabled but as a member of the so-called deaf community. Membership in the deaf community must be acquired, and becoming deaf or having a degree of hearing loss is not the only criterion for potential inclusion. Common language, sharing experiences, social participation, and a sense of cultural identity are other recognized criteria.

Moreover, belonging to the deaf community serves as “therapy” for deaf people in most cases. The importance of using the bilingual-bicultural education method with deaf children rather than oralists methods is emphasized. Acquired deafness in adulthood is different. Communication is cut off when the language has been learned and used. People become reluctant to change or customize their usual means of communication and find it very difficult to adjust to the new situation. Changes after losing their hearing seem an insurmountable obstacle for them.

Embarrassment, loss of confidence, anger, and hatred are among the most common daily feelings they have to deal with. Noisy groups and strangers are avoided, and there is a growing preference for staying at home rather than going out, which in many cases leads to inactivity, depression, and isolation. The constant denial of new situations emerges from the view that it is illegitimate, something disgraceful and hidden; therefore, mainly, dislike or aversion to hearing AIDS. Deafness in the elderly can cause additional difficulties, such as the inability to enter earmould, to name just one. Age-related hearing loss means adaptation for hearing loss and old age. Lastly, even though the number is increasing people with hearing loss later in life is much more significant than those with hearing loss in their previous life, the people in the second group tended to become more organized and active. Systematic use of a classification similar to fair explained will significantly contribute to getting the correct numbers on such a difference and conducting and evaluating each course of action.

Beliefs About The Capabilities of Deaf People

Many studies of attitudes toward deaf people have shown that hearing people tend to have negative attitudes and stereotypes about deaf people. They often attribute stereotypical characteristics to deaf people, which can convey negative connotations (e.g., “deaf people are weird,” “ deaf people are a lazy person”), which is misleading. Negative attitudes and stereotypical thinking negatively affect deaf people in various domains. They hurt deaf people’s feelings of self-worth and cause irreversible damage to their personalities.

Their covert nature makes stereotypes even more problematic because stereotyping is a type of discrimination that is not immediately felt. Nevertheless, deaf people are well aware of stereotypes even though they sometimes overestimate their level, believing those hearing individuals have more negative attitudes towards deaf people than they are. Gradually, a chain of stereotyped behaviors is adopted. Hearing people have negative attitudes towards deaf people and attribute stereotyped characteristics to them, and deaf adults who understand and sometimes misunderstand hearing people’s attitudes also react in stereotypical ways. While it is not easy to understand what contributes to negative or otherwise unsatisfactory attitudes towards deafness, relevant factors include misinformation or ignorance on the part of many hearing individuals concerning deaf people and culturally deaf, inadequate learning about deafness, communication barriers, and gaps, cultural differences, and limited opportunities for meaningful interaction. In particular, communication barriers provide the basis for developing negative attitudes and stereotypes. Deaf people experience many occasions where communication within their own family, educational environment, or work is limited because interactions are based solely on speaking and sitting and rarely on sign language. Communication limitations, especially on social media, cause frustration, do not allow deaf or deaf people to learn about each other’s norms and values, and support the formation of inappropriate perceptions.

Methods and Mechanism for Empowering The Deaf Community

1. Three Dimensions of Empowerment: Power-for refers to power as a synonym for capacity — the need to improve people’s decision-making skills. Next can refer to power-with, with the idea that people feel stronger when organized and working towards the same purpose. In that sense, power-with promotes strengthening organizations, social networks, and alliances. Empowerment can also be seen as a power-with, based on increasing people’s self-esteem, self-acceptance, and self-esteem. Strength-to, power-with, and power-inside bring about respect and acceptance of others as emulate and contribute to the idea of ​​a complete ministry rather than one of duality and exclusion.
2. Enhancing Legislation on Communication Barriers: High levels of non-compliance with laws governing the removal of barriers and equal opportunity must be monitored and cut. The legislation on the removal of barriers as well often incomplete, needs to be implemented and managed so that they can be deployed and take effect immediately. In Indonesia, to ensure the fulfillment of the rights of deaf people, the government must monitor and evaluate policies carried out by the central government to local governments, as regulated in Article 27 Paragraph 1 of Law Number 8 of 2016 concerning Persons with Disabilities. Through ministries, universities, city/district governments, and related agencies, the government needs to conduct more effective socialization in increasing public awareness of the rights of persons with disabilities.
3. Providing The Medium for Deaf People: It should be noted that no existing mobile application offers comprehensive speech conversion to real-time sign language. It requires deaf users to read text content, i.e., often inaccessible to many of them, or understand sign language presented by 3D animation hands, not a licensed translator. Create a mobile-based application that supports communication and can enter text which is then translated into sign language. Mobile apps should allow deaf people to have group conversations with others and offer real-time texts for each conversation member.
4. Developing The Programs: Developing responsive programs for family needs as empowerment family has many benefits for deaf people child. For example, developing programs sensitive to cultural and linguistic differences in the disturbed congregation.
5. Providing Important and Accurate Information: One of the obstacles that many deaf people have to face as part of their daily life is a tremendous deprivation of their rights to access information. One of them is that many could not keep up with television or social media news. As a result, many deaf people meet regularly at their local associations, culture, and information exchange. Associations, federations, and organizations of the deaf should be contacted and benefit as a natural place to provide information to the deaf that includes various themes provided by trained professionals in dealing with the deaf people. Television and news subtitle system program must be created or improved (if it already exists) by making rules and not exceptions. Combining sign language to program for it, the preferred means of communication is sign language, or whose reading comprehension is feeble.

The concept of empowerment is extremely complex. Empowerment models are characterised by a bottom up strategy for change and a wide contextual framework. Hearing loss is a social problem than just pathology, therefore is an urgent need to remove the stigma of deafness as pathology. Communication is cutting off because language fails and language, as we know, is an essential tool of human socialization. Understanding the mechanisms that regulate linguistic behavior and production, how language and culture are part of the same reality, what are the opinions, needs, and knowledge, and how people’s attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and assumptions about deafness and hearing are, is an important starting point. Deaf people are more disabled by their transactions with the world of hearing than by the pathology of their hearing loss. Unfortunately, the social image of the deaf is still tagged currently in too many countries not only by deep-rooted pathology stigma but also by negative stereotypes and prejudice towards deaf people. Mainly due to the general social lack of knowledge about communication mechanisms and how they work concerning culture — they have an unfavorable influence on medical, legal, and educational policies for the deaf. For the most part, the world view of deafness has influenced so many problems attention to deaf people that reviews about the subject emerge as vital at this point.

References

Kersting, S. A. (1997). Balancing Between Deaf and Hearing Worlds: Reflections of Mainstreamed College Students on Relationships and Social Interaction. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 2(4), 252–263.

Empowering and educating the deaf community for employment. (2021). Cape Town: SyndiGate Media Inc.

Munoz-Baell IM, Ruiz MTEmpowering the deaf. Let the deaf be deafJournal of Epidemiology & Community Health 2000;54:40–44.