ABSTRACT
Empowerment and advocacy are both fashionable words. They are liberally scattered across many texts on services for people with learning difficulties,1 but what do they mean? Used interchangeably with terms like ‘participation’ and ‘consumerism’, there is a danger they will simply become tags to indicate a generalised desire to be progressive. While most people would agree that people with learning difficulties are one of the least powerful groups in society-a group whose views have not only been ignored but, almost by definition, discounted as worthless-there is much less agreement on how to change things.
