From Darkness to Triumph - Anastasia Charalambakos
Children with disabilities in the child welfare system
The purpose of the presentation is to foster awareness of issues relating to social work concerning raising children, particularly those who are blind since birth. The presentation is intended to help social workers reflect on those issues and to consider the best practices possible when working with families to remedy their circumstances. The decisions social workers and parents make pertaining to where children will live, with which parent they will stay if separation is involved, and whether parents are consistently supportive of their children’s dreams and extracurricular activities, can significantly impact what those children will become as adults. Based on personal experience and the scholarly research in my book, I can affirm the expert’s assertions that my life has been greatly impacted, not only as a child, but as an adult, both positively and negatively, by choices that were made by my parents and social workers while I was a minor. Yet, despite those decisions, I did not permit the obstacles before me to define what I would become in life.
I have become a well-rounded and intelligent individual who thinks positively and strives to work hard in spite of blindness to promote awareness of issues pertaining to raising children and to promote cause for social change among people. What is often most difficult are the attitudes of others towards me as one with blindness, and it is an issue which I cover extensively in the final portion of my book. I address it so that social workers and other professionals can become better informed and work towards eliminating the stereotypes, prejudices, and myths that exist about people who are blind, like me. If old misconceptions about blindness can be broken, social workers will have succeeded in paving an even greater path for persons like me to be employed in main-stream society and to live a more fuller and independent life emotionally and financially. As noted in my book however, only through understanding, self-reflection, and compassion, can we achieve a more prosperous and more peaceful world for all of us.