Should disabled children be kept out sight?

As a mum of 8 adopted children 33-8 years with special needs all classed educationally as SLD (sadly 3 have died) there is no way I will keep them hidden, they are human beings!!!

What about elderly people still working - and how would you know who was working and who wasn't?

Cross Country Trains' booking system is farcical. Time and again (including last week) I have got onto a train, looked for my seat only to find it marked as 'available' - in fact, all the seats in the carriage are so marked. Having the evidence of my booking usually persuades the occupant to give up the seat but it causes embarrassment. So it is possible that the people who organised this trip may have booked seats and been caught out by this useless system.

Any discrimination against children with disabilities is abhorrent. They should all be treated with the dignity they deserve.

This type of discriminatory behaviour can also be directed at elderly people. A letter I read in a newspaper suggested that elderly people should not shop, use the post office, the bank, etc., during lunchtime hours as these hours should be reserved for "working people".

One comment I read asked "Why did the organisers not reserve places for these disabled children?"

They must have thought that even in a rush hour, they would find seats. That does show a certain casualness in taking the children on a trip - I don't think I would take a group of able children away at a busy time, let alone disabled ones, without being sure that they would travel in comfort.

I am not excusing the train company for their lack of sympathy, just pointing out that the facility to book seats is there. Was the trip a spontaneous one, or planned in advance?

According to the newspaper report the children were on a trip organised by the Stage Right Theatre Group and several pieces of information were included in the article. Presumably any newspaper would check that the details were correct.

We find it difficult to believe that anyone can behave in this way, but I recently read an article in which people with disabilities recounted how they had been insulted, spat at, threatened or manhandled just because they were disabled.

That was what I though, FlicketyB All the references to it point back to the Daily Record. I have not seen any independent reports. I am not saying it is therefore untrue, just that there may be unreported details and other sides to the story.

This petition asserts that this event happened, but I would like to see the detail of when, where ,what train etc etc plus confirmation from one of those involved, police, railway staff etc etc.

The incident reported on this link is so vague that it sounds like an urban myth.

When I was a teenager one of my friends had a disabled brother, we went to a party one night and as he loved music I got on the dance floor with him and danced around his wheelchair - he enjoyed it, I enjoyed it and no-one made any negative comments.

Nina - right click on the link, you will get a drop down box and at the top you click on 'Open'.

Do you need to read it. nina? You can just click on it to go to the URL without knowingwhat the link says.

Is it just me who can't read the link.

Other families with children who paid the same fare were allowed to sit in business class. Should they too have waited for rush hour to be over (and was it rush hour). If there weren't enough seats why let any extra passengers on the train.

They have apologised, and said (more or less) that it was not because of any policy of theirs.

There a lot of comments after the online news items, which seem all to refer back to the Daily Record. Most of the comments are horror at the train company, but a few people have pointed out that taking a group of disabled children on a train at rush hour without booking seats was not very sensible of the organisers.

There are ignorant people in all countries. They have a thing called Kids Flicks in Adelaide where some children with disabilities were sometimes given free tickets to the cinema. My cousin took her son and she said one day those children with the Kids Flicks tickets all had to wait outside while the "normal" children were seated in the front rows. This particular day it happened to be raining. When all the normal bodied children were comfortably seated those families with children with disabilities were then allowed in and seated at the back of the cinema.

My daughter knows a young woman whose baby was born with half his arm missing. The mother was out shopping with her baby and an older woman poked her head in the pram and when she saw his arm she loudly said she didn't want to know and stormed off. You can imagine how this young mother must have felt.

I wonder how these ignorant people would react if any one they love is ever severely disabled in an accident.

Have the train company responded? At face value it sounds like a jobsworth acting out of turn and very inappropriately but we only have one side..which could be the truth...but I would like to hear both sides of the story before I sign anything.

How do we know it wasn't simply the noise any bunch of kids would make, that meant they couldn't travel in the business class seats?

Disgraceful! I received that link earlier today. I don't want to turn this into an issue about how different countries treat disabled children because, hopefully, this was about terrible staff and managers acting on bad policy, but a few years ago we had a similar experience that made my family recoil in horror. We were on holiday in Majorca, on a large hotel complex on the beach, 10 of us including a 13 year old child with learnng disabilities who can walk a little but needs a wheelchair as her coordination is affected.

We went each evening to the open air enterainment, and in the middle of our holiday, we took the children to their show before bedtime, where there was disco dancing. The 13 year old loved music and liked to get up with her dad, who would dance around her doing silly dad moves to make her laugh. She was obviously much older than the other children, and few teenagers wanted to join in. A very angry German woman walked over to dad and berated him in fluent English for bringing his daughter out and 'displaying' her to the public. He felt humiliated and was in tears. As he walked away without attempting to explain anything to her, she called him a stupid Englishman with no understanding about sick children. Another member of our party went to speak quietly to her, but she was adamant that you should not 'lark about' with a disabled child, and we were equally adamant that she had misunderstood what she saw, but she wasn't having it, nor were her adult companions.

Of course disabled children should be protected and cherished, and enabled to join in as much as they can, including being priortised for seats and being helped to dance and have fun.

Surely that's against the law?

If not, it should be...