Sociology in the Global Community
throughout history and around the world. people with disabilities have often been subjected cruel a inhuman treatment. For example, in the early twentieth the disabled were frequently viewed as subhuman creatures who were a menace to society. As one result, many state legislatures in this country passed compulsory sterilization laws aimed at "handicapped people". In Japan more than 16,000 women with disabilities were involuntarily sterilized with government approval from 1945 to 1995. Sweden recently apologized for the same action taken against 62,000 of its citizens in the 1970s. treatment
Today, such blatantly hostile treatment of people with disabilities has generally given way to a medical model, which views the disabled as chronic patients. Increasingly however, people concerned with the rights of the disabled have criticized this model as well. In their view, it is the unnecessary and discriminatory barriers present in the environment- both physical and attitudinal---that stand in the way of people with disabilities more than any biological limitations do. Applying a civil rights model, activists emphasize that those with disabilities face widespread prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. For example, most voting places are inaccessible to wheelchair users and fail to provide ballots that can be used by those unable to read print.