Reframing disability
Driving significant social shift through reframing.
What is reframing?
Framing is about the choices we make in what we say, how we say it, what we emphasise, and what we leave unsaid, and how these choices shape how people think, feel, and act.
Reframing an issue means creating change in the way people think and talk about it. It shifts the underlying lens through which an issue is understood, so that new solutions and actions become possible.
Reframing in practice
Successful reframing drives significant social shifts. An example of reframing using Frameworks’ approach examined the issue of attitudes towards parenting. Australian culture includes dominant views about parenting as something that comes naturally, and as something determined by the way a person's own parents acted. This thinking makes it hard for people to accept there are things we can do to improve parenting, and engage in help-seeking behaviours. Well-meaning communicators were actually making this worse. Focusing on the problems led people to conclude that problems arise because of choices made by individual parents rather than contexts and circumstances, and normalised the struggle rather than normalising support or help-seeking.
This work found that we need a new "master narrative" that involves talking about parenting in terms of child development rather than parents being effective. This "switches on" new and productive ways of thinking about parenting. In practice, reframing how we talk about parenting means changing where we start the conversation, to what children need to develop well, rather than what parents should do to be effective.
The research also identified a powerful tool: describing the parenting experience using a "navigating waters" metaphor really resonates with the Australian public. This reframing strategy helped people see that parents can be supported to steer through challenges, rather than being left to sink or swim on their own.
Reframing disability in Australia
The same reframing approach that transformed how Australians think about parenting needs to be applied to disability, because the dominant ways we currently talk about it are holding us back. Living with disability is a reality for millions of Australians, yet people with disability continue to be marginalised and excluded from society. Much of this is driven not just by policy gaps, but by the stories we tell. The ways we communicate about disability tend to focus on limitations rather than strengths, feeding into medical or charity models that paint disabled people as helpless victims.
Just as the parenting reframing project found that well-meaning communications were reinforcing the very attitudes advocates wanted to shift, we must first understand the deeply held assumptions and beliefs that underpin public attitudes about people with disability in Australia before we can change them. Reframing offers an evidence-based way to do exactly that; moving from a story of injury or sympathy, to one of rights, inclusion, and the shared responsibility of building a society that works for everyone.
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