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Henrietta Spalding: My name's Henrietta Spalding, I head up our Professional Development
Programme. We work with a range of professionals in health, education
and employment and really our remit is to help them understand a lot more
about disfigurement and the impact that that has on individuals in their daily lives.
[Music introduction]
From video: You might not notice what you're doing, but I do.
Adam Pearson: Nightclubs and places are like really bad, because people are drunk
and sometimes they're like really offensive and just stare, get their mates
to do it, which is just really unacceptable. It's just like I'm out for a good
night, leave me alone. And you get just the people that are really nice
to you, but in a really patronising kind of way and you know, that's kind
of uncomfortable, because it's just like well don't talk to me like I'm stupid,
because I'm not. Helen Smith: Well a lot of people tell us that they
feel that they lose some of their social anonymity, so when they meet somebody for
the first time they might ask quite an upfront question, like "what happened
to your face?" or "why's your nose like that?", "why's your eye like that?"
HSp: You can never guarantee that
people are going to behave in a certain way and I think we often find with our clients
here at Changing Faces, that the experiences that people have vary from
staring at people who look unusual, who look different, maybe name-calling,
it can obviously dent somebody's self-confidence and if you're recently
recovering from surgery and are just starting to go out and about
again, then that actually can be very devastating and certainly we will see
people here who very rarely go out of their homes, because they've had some
bad experiences and they don't feel good about themselves.
[Music] HSp: To achieve a harmony if you like, it
needs to work on both sides. We're certainly not saying here that it's all up
to society, you know, the person with the disfigurement does need to learn
a set of tools and strategies to manage society and to manage themselves.
AP: A lot of the help I got from Changing Faces was geared to you know,
how to cope in these social encounters, how to handle people who may
be staring or commenting, because staring - a lot of people make a big
deal of it - a lot of the time staring is as a result of just people's curiosity
and so there are ways of dealing with that, that are confrontational but in
a non-hostile, non-threatening way and it's learning those things that really
enabled me to kind of get my confidence up and really just handle things
a lot better and just conduct myself in a manner that I was happy with.
HSm: If you're getting unwanted attention, say for example if somebody's repetitively
staring, you could meet that with a very simple assertive response, so saying
something like "I can see that you're staring at my scarring, but it's making
me feel a little bit uncomfortable, can you stop doing that please." But with
people that you're meeting for the first time that you're likely to meet again
in other social situations, being friendly, being very socially skilled, making
eye contact for example, are often ways that let people know you're OK.
AP: If it's just someone who's curious, I just try to engage them in a conversation,
you know, if there's a track that I particularly like that's playing at the time,
you start talking about the track and then the band. If it's at the bar, you
know, just get them like a shot or like a soft drink or something and have
a chat with them. It's just a case of you know, in that situation, just like show
you're not gormless, you know what you're talking about and that you're
an approachable guy who's not, you know, stereotypical of what they
believe you should be like. The media does indeed, it paints people with
facial disfigurements as like Bond bad guys or cartoon bad guys.
HSp: People make a set of assumptions about people with disfigurements in terms
of their intelligence, their life's expectation, their - even their quality of life.
HSm: There are often assumptions that surgery can cure all and I think that's
partly due to the rise in cosmetic surgery in celebrity culture, so there's
often an assumption that there is no reason why you should have a
disfigurement and a lack of understanding around that.
HSp: Often these assumptions are ill-formed if you like, they're faulty and
they're based on a set of myths or stereotypes that people have about
disfigurement, which are often reinforced by the type of society that we live
in. So we all are bombarded with images of very beautiful people, whether
we look in magazines or whether we watch the movies from Hollywood and
you know, people are always very beautiful. There's a very subtle equation
that to be successful and happy, you need to be beautiful and if you are less
beautiful, i.e. disfigured, then maybe you don't even have the chance.