Editorial [BJSE September 2022]

Editing a journal such as BJSE gives us something of a privileged insight and, perhaps inevitably, a concomitant responsibility to explore and appraise practices around the world from which we can all learn – powerful case studies of the abuse of human rights being one such example. This month, the British Broadcasting Company released a documentary called Locked Away: Ukraine's stolen lives (BBC News, 2022). The focus on the war in Ukraine certainly gives documentaries of this nature an international platform, but one of the organisations in the film, Disability Rights International, has been attempting to raise awareness of breaches of basic international human rights conventions for children with and without disabilities placed in orphanages in Ukraine for many years (Matthews et al., 2014). The consequences of segregation are clearly highlighted in both the documentary and the report that accompanies it, but the extent of segregation, neglect and abuse can have the unintended consequences of complacency in those national contexts that do not place children with disabilities in orphanages.