Editorial

EDITORIAL Dorothy Atkinson and Jan Walmsley In this issue, we have an interesting collection of papers, and we have used the opportunity to include some of our backlog of reviews and reports. Our `In conversation' piece is with Jo Williams, Chief Executive, Mencap, England's leading learning disability charity. Her views on valuing people, partnership boards, and Mencap's dilemma between tugging at people's heart strings to prompt giving and recognising the equal rights of people with learning disabilities are well worth reading. Patricia Noonan Walsh's Keynote Review, `Human Rights, Development and Disability' complements this well. She argues for a focus on human rights as a springboard for advancing people's rights, ending with a plea to recognise that realising people's capabilities represents a gain for all. Our papers bring us back to the realities of life for people with learning disabilities. Philip Vaughan's paper, Secure care and treatment needs of individuals with learning disability and severe challenging behaviour focuses on a particularly challenging population for which services need to cater. He argues for secure local services for these people that will provide domestic style accommodation near their families. Dora Bennett's paper Death and people with learning disabilities; empowering carers brings back a theme that appears increasingly frequently in the Journal, that of helping people cope with bereavement. This time working with carers working in residential care, she illustrates how educational sessions can help workers deal better with death and bereavement, with positive consequences both for the people they work with, and for themselves. Dorothy Bell's article The assessment of the sexual knowl- edge of a person with a severe learning disability and a severe communication disorder also returns to a recent journal theme, Talking Mats, published in 2001. She and a colleague used this approach to extend therapeutic interventions with a woman who might have experienced sexual abuse, but who lacked the vocabulary to describe what had happened. Remarkably, the careful use of talking mats enabled the therapists to ascertain what she understood about relation- ships and body parts, laying a stronger foundation for possible legal proceedings than might otherwise have been possible. Alison Lillywhite's paper Occupational therapists' percep- tions of community learning disability teams addresses a current policy imperative, multiprofessional working. The results are somewhat dispiriting. However, she makes some useful suggestions for improvement. # 2003 BILD Publications, British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 31, 107 107

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Editorial