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From: Ed Feuer
Date: 10/3/03
Time: 1:36:49 AM
Remote Name: 142.161.176.145
Edwin, First of all, it should be recognized that employers who would discriminate unfairly against people who stutter have kept pace with human rights legislation. They have determined what they can and cannot say.
For example, in hiring, an employer might have said in the past: "You can't get this job because you stutter." Now the strategy goes something like this: "We'll be looking through applications. Thanks for dropping by."
Where human rights legislation exists, the burden of proof rests upon the person making the accusation. That is not easy.
Public education to counter stereotypes about what people who stutter supposedly CAN'T do could ultimately be more effective.
One major difficulty is that the very words stuttering and stammering are used in conversational sense to mean some variant of shame, failure or incompetence. So given the huge ignorance about stuttering, such notions are the only frame of reference most people have when they actually do meet someone who stutters. That in turn leads to unfair social and vocational discrimination.
Many people who stutter find this idea to horrible to contemplate so they simply deny its reality. But that denial does not change the reality, and impedes any movement to act in this area.