Dr Sally Austen: Deaf Awareness- Why are hearing people so bad at it? (BSL)

If you put ‘deaf awareness’ into google you can find plenty of lists of advice aimed at hearing people, that will benefit deaf and hard of hearing people. If you asked most hearing people to guess what is on that list, they would probably do pretty well.

And yet, walk into any school, court room or hospital and you will still see hearing people talking to back of deaf people’s heads. Or turning away so their face is not lip-readable. 

In my most recent attendance at court , I marvelled that the system had enough deaf awareness  that BSL interpreters, lip speakers and deaf advocates had been booked but still saw it as normal to have the deaf witness at the back of the court staring at the back of the heads of their solicitor and barrister – and too far away to lipread or hear the judge who they are facing.

In fairness, a deaf-aware judge called Judge Patel has plans to tackle this. But hundreds of years of bad habits and old court buildings with the floor benches fixed to the floor, will take time to change.

While we are waiting for significant infrastructure changes, what about the behaviour changes that would require little effort but result in massive improvements that need to be made. The GP who turns away when explaining the diagnosis, the restaurant manager turning the background music up loud, the work meeting where people talk over each other. 

What stops the hearing person making the appropriate changes?

But also, what stops the deaf or hard of hearing person insisting on the hearing person’s behaviour change?

The psychology of communication is odd. It is both amazingly sensitive and horrendously clunky.

Imagine that you are saying/signing to your friend. 

‘I love eating mud’.

The tiniest movement of your eyebrow changes your sentence to 

‘I love eating mud – not!’ . 

Or the tiniest movement of your friend’s eyebrow replies 

‘No you don’t’

These tiny communication movements are the basis of our safety as human beings. From our caveman days we have a survival mechanism called the Fight-Flight-Freeze mechanism, which drives us to make living saving decisions in a fraction of a second. The cavepeople would have communicated to each other the instruction to Fight, Flight or Freeze in a way that was so subtle that it was almost unconscious. The language could have been in their voices, their hands or their bodies. 

In her book ‘Sound’, Bella Bathurst interviews Andy Hearn, a deaf senior software engineer. His journey to work involves walking through Gatwick Airport. But he gets stopped by the airport security guards a lot more often than any of the hearing people. He suggests that being deaf had created some subtle differences in the way he walked through the airport – perhaps in the way he looked around him. Any unusual body language or social habits alert the security guards, who stop and check him. And all he did was walk – and be deaf!

Differences in communication (including body language) alarm people – even if they are entirely harmless. Imagine you are chatting to a neighbour and they change their eye contact. Instead of looking into both your eyes they change to only look into one of your eyes. You would likely stop, confused and uncomfortable.

The same happens to hearing people when they are asked to maintain face to face contact for lipreading. Even though it makes logical sense to them, their caveman brain (deciding if it is necessary to fight flight or freeze) is feeling anxious.

So, is it any easier for deaf people to change their communication style? Not really. The ‘deaf nod’ is a pretty well known phenomenon. The deaf person hasn’t really understood the hearing person but nods as though they have. In chapter B2 of my book we discuss why this is. Maybe they don’t want to cause a fuss, they might be embarrassed, they might hope they will catch up later. 

But hearing people do this too. The ‘hearing nod’. They don’t keep trying until they are sure they have understood either. 

I recently asked a group of a 100 legal professionals how many times they would be willing to ask someone to repeat themselves if they hadn’t understood their speech. The general murmuring was that 2 or 3 times would be comfortable but beyond that they would be inclined to ‘nod’. 

What about deaf people? How often would you be comfortable to ask someone to repeat themselves before you just nod and pretend you understand?

Although the cavepeople developed a powerful Fight-Flight-Freeze mechanism for us, they were actually pretty stupid. They have left us with a system that sees any changes to communication style as a threat – and nodding as safe. 

Humans would prefer to miss the crucial information if it means they can keep from having to change their communication style! Surely missing out on the actual information is the bigger threat. How daft is that?! Humans are not fully evolved yet. We have a lot of work yet to do!

‘Working with Deaf and Hard of Hearing Clients’, Austen and Holmes. Chapter B2, Nodding. 

An Introductory Guide for Professionals Working with Deaf and Hard of Hearing Clients in Clinical, Legal, Educational and Social Care Settings: Amazon.co.uk: Austen, Dr Sally, Holmes, Dr Ben: 9798520594826: Books