Trabajo Social y personas con discapacidad:

vida cotidiana y empoderamiento para el ejercicio de la capacidad jurídica

Abstract

This article is an invitation to reflect, exemplifying from a particular situation, on the intervention of social work around the right to decide of people with disabilities; specifically about the institute of the “curatorship” or the “judicial designation of support”. For this, the underlying conceptions of disability that operate when intervening professionally are put in tension, differentiating the individual medical model from the social model of disability. Although there are advanced laws on the matter, such as the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, these are not always reflected in practices, since the hegemony of the medical model still passes through judicial operators, families, rehabilitation professionals and even social workers. In order to question our professional interventions, it is not only necessary to rethink from what vision of disability we do it, but also to recognize the laws that we can use as tools so that people with disabilities can exercise their legal capacity, therefore, a brief presentation of the themselves. Finally, it is proposed to reflect on the possibilities of social work intervention in the dispute with the medicalizing and disabling logics that daily violate the right to decide of people with disabilities.