Disability hate crime – does it even exist?
The Equality and Human Rights Commission are launching an inquiry into disability hate crimes. And not before time. Every working day, on average, at least one person appears in court charged with a crime against a disabled person. Nearly half of these involve violence. 
A disability hate crime is a criminal offense motivated by hatred or prejudice towards a person because of their actual or perceived disability. It is also a criminal offense in which immediately before, after or during the offense the perpetrator demonstrates hostility towards a person because of their actual or perceived disability.
Usually disability hate crimes are not treated as such. The following are a few examples from many incidents which were not treated as disability hate crimes:
May 2006, Warrington
Craig Dodd and Ryan Palin were convicted of the manslaughter of Raymond Atherton (who had learning disabilities), who was beaten, had his benefits stolen. His flat was used by them and he was urinated on.
July 2006, Cornwall
Steven Hoskin, a man with learning disabilities, was murdered by friends. Made to wear dog collar and lead and taunted. Money stolen regularly by his tormenters, who eventually forced him off a railway viaduct.
September 2006, Forest of Dean
Kevin Davies (epilepsy and learning difficulties), was tortured, kept in a shed, had his benefits stolen before dying.
October, 2007, Leicestershire
Fiona Pilkington killed herself and her daughter Frankie, who had learning difficulties, after a hate campaign by local youths in the Leicestershire area in late autumn 2007. Local police recorded Ms Pilkington’s complaints as evidence of anti-social behaviour, not as on-going hate crime.
October 27, 2007, Hartlepool
Christine Lakinski collapsed near her home. A crowd gathered, including her neighbour, Antony Anderson. He urinated over her as she lay dying, and encouraged a friend to film the event. Anderson was convicted of outraging public decency.
July 31, 2007, Birmingham
Craig Robins was left brain-injured by an attack (he was a wheelchair-user before the assault). He was attacked after a series of vandalism attacks on his adapted car, allegedly by the “WS12 gang”. A mob of 30 people attacked him.
August 1, 2007, Birmingham
Disabled man who used a wheelchair (Jonathan Lea) struck by a pole-wielding motorist he was taunted about his disability by a gang of youths and mocked for his disability by the perpetrator
October 19, 2007, Middlesbrough
A disabled man, Alan Marshall, had his false leg torn off in a nightclub attack.
Remember – none of these were considered to be disability hate crimes. And these are just the tip of a very big iceberg.
Disabled people are four times more likely to be victims of crime than non-disabled people – and there is evidence that many more incidents of violence or hostility go unreported or are not dealt with properly by social housing bodies, social services teams, crime prevention units, public transport and other public bodies in Britain. People with learning disabilities and mental health conditions are particularly at risk and suffer higher levels of victimisation.
The main problem is that these incidents are still seen as anti social behaviour rather than a crime. Let’s hope this changes. And fast.
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19 Responses to Disability hate crime – does it even exist?
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If I have understood this correctly Jane, if the incident involves a person with a disability it's *downgraded* to anti social behaviour?
In the case of Fiona and Frankie Pilkington, their lives had been made a living hell and it was only anti social behaviour… I wonder how many incidents of anti socialness make it a hate crime or escalate it up a notch? i recall reading of them in the paper and feeling utter sadness (not something I feel for people I dont know, very often), and feeling very ashamed of the services that had let them down.
It beggars belief to see how close humans come to animal behaviour and worse in cases like these. Some species will deliberately hound out a weak member of the herd, but only because its weakness could hold up the whole herd's progress and lead them all into danger. Humans don't have that excuse.
If it were possible to draw comparisons, it would be interesting to see how crimes of racism are considered versus those against disabled people. I suspect the law currently comes down a lot harder on the former.
Much as racism is a hateful and disgusting practice, disability hate crime is the lowest form of bullying/cowardice that seems to bring out the most vile, putrid cruelty.
“Anti-social” behaviour? That's rather like describing a mass shooting in a junior school as a “cull of excessive children in the neighbourhood.”
Twitter: SuzeStMWrites
Each of those examples is horrific alone, but when you see them collected together like this, it becomes apparent that there is deep underlying problem.
What do you think lies behind it? Is it simply that disabled people make easier targets, or is it motivated by fear or hatred?
Clearly these actions are criminal in any case, whoever the victim – but I would have thought that the crime should be considered to be so much more serious taking the nature of the victims into account.
WOW! Outrageous- the level of discrimination against disabled people is truly astounding. I remember having several arguments with people when I worked as Support Worker for adult with learning difficulties. The view that some people have of them is that they are slow or stupid and tend to treat them that way even those that should now better. A woman at an Age concern shop said to me or “I am not sure people like her are what we are looking for, I mean what can she do” this was when I approached them for voluntary work for one of our Residents E who was with me at as all this was going on. Not one to go quietly i put in a written complaint to their HQ and got an apology for E
As a nation we are getting slightly better at recognising race hate as a crime now ('tho we still have a very long way to go). But we are still appallingly bad at recognising disability hate and gay hate crimes as such, sometimes in the face of blatantly obvious evidence.
Twitter: evenbreak
From Stephen Brookes MBE. Coordinator – Disability Hate Cruime Network.
While the overall approach to your article is OK, the conclusion is far from accurate. Hate Crime is recognised as such, ans has its own defintion agreed by the CPS and ACPO 'Any criminal offence which is preceived by the victim to be motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a persons disability.
There are good and bad areas in police response, but the challenging of disability hate crime is high on the agenda, and it is not downgraded to ASB, so please do take care when writing such descriptions.
It was in my response that I use the term 'downgraded' and not Jane in her blog, she points out several instances where the crime appears to be a hate crime but is classified differently – in particular the case of the Pilkingtons, where the crimes that went on were seen as ASB but tragically led to their deaths.
At my nephew's school in Canada the kids each had to do a certain number of hours community work to gain credits towards graduation. At the age of seventeen he opted to work with learning disabled adults, teaching them basketball (I think it was, anyway).
As a result he got to know each of them as individuals and their personalities beyond the disability and it definitely contributed to growing his character in a positive way.
You can pass all the laws you like but it's a sea change of attitude we need for better, safer, happier communities – and I believe it's education that will best help bring that about.
Twitter: Linda_Mattacks
Thank you for your reply Stephen. I am happy to correct any inaccuracies you feel my article may have implied. It is certainly not my intention to mislead or give a false impression.
My understanding is that a disability hate crime should be treated as such if disability is perceived to be an influencing factor by any person involved in the incident, whether victim, perpetrator or witness, in much the same way as a racist incident is described as such since McPherson and the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report.
The basis of my article was to highlight a number of sample cases where clearly one or more people involved had perceived that disability was a material factor and yet still the iincident was not recorded or investigated as such. For example, the police had been approached about abuse and bullying to Fiona Pilkington's severely disabled daughter, Francceca on numerous occasions about the taunting and bullying she had received about her disability from local young people over a number of years. However, the incidents were dealt with separately as “anti social behaviour” rather than as a campaign of disability hate crime. In this case, Fiona was driven to kill herself and her daughter after numerous requests for help had failed to produce protection for the family.
If it can be demonstrated that I have reported facts incorrectly I am happy to retract them and print an apology. My motivation in writing this article was to highlight how crimes can sometimes be committed against a group of people who may not always be aware of their rights or of how to seek appriopriate support if necessary.
Twitter: evenbreak
Personally, I'm of the view that all children at the upper end of school should be involved in community work like this, to turn them into compassionate human beings. I am glad to see that this works in at least one Canadian school.
It's an excellent scheme, and one reason I chose to educate my son in Canada. He was involved with puppet shows which toured schools and playgroups teaching about disability. The puppets had a mix of disabilities and the scripts were about how their friends could be hurtful by not understanding some things, but everyone ended up friends in the end. They were fun and funny and it was always great to see the kids talking to the puppets afterwards, asking them questions they might not have asked a person.
Not only do all the youngsters have to complete 40 hours community service to graduate, but the community has to provide volunteer work for them to do. This leads to a volunteering culture where schemes are set up for the kids to be involved in, so everyone ends up doing a bit more.
Not all kids benefit, there are dropouts and problems as in any society but a high number do learn how satisfying it is to give back and carry on with the involvement throughout their lives.
It's an excellent scheme, and one reason I chose to educate my son in Canada. He was involved with puppet shows which toured schools and playgroups teaching about disability. The puppets had a mix of disabilities and the scripts were about how their friends could be hurtful by not understanding some things, but everyone ended up friends in the end. They were fun and funny and it was always great to see the kids talking to the puppets afterwards, asking them questions they might not have asked a person.
Not only do all the youngsters have to complete 40 hours community service to graduate, but the community has to provide volunteer work for them to do. This leads to a volunteering culture where schemes are set up for the kids to be involved in, so everyone ends up doing a bit more.
Not all kids benefit, there are dropouts and problems as in any society but a high number do learn how satisfying it is to give back and carry on with the involvement throughout their lives.
What these hate crimes show is that civilization is a very fragile facade. It is ironic that the underlying reality of these crimes is so ignored because we as a society are so feeble to even try to look at truth. Instead at the lowest denominator, in the face of anything different from us, the human animal in its release of fear subsumes the human being.
I am not advocate of trying to dress up reality in positive language but I am an advocate of doing anything or promoting anything where disability primarily is viewed as an ability and much more importantly, as an intelligence. We are all disabled as human beings through a lack of compassion and humanity but only a few of us have the courage to view this as a disability.
What I learn from disabled people is an intelligence that I cannot muster on my own. I also recognize that for those on the receiving end of hate crimes (whoever they maybe) it is a reality that requires the law to be prudent about what human beings are capable of doing to each other.
This prudence must be balanced with seeking a view of disability as an ability, so that we are not left solely feeling sorry for people who want others to treat them as people and not as victims. This is the irony here, that people who society shuns because they are too afraid of how different a disabled person is, cannot come to terms with the victimization of people they already avert their gaze or attention from.
To find the human being in the disabled person is an act of great human consciousness because it means we look at the world through the eyes of utmost courage and learn how to come to terms. I do not believe in superficial association that comes with promoting people as something to be understood, the problem here isn't the disability, it is the association and positioning of disability.
By associating with the ability and the humanity and intelligence a disabled person can teach a world which considers itself “able” (which is equally a foolish and naive distinction), is that any of us who even for a moment tried to consider how we would learn to come to terms would recognize how much cowardice we “abled” people of the world possess.
Until we the non-disabled people of the world come to terms with how much we shut out the world because it is too unpleasant for us, or that we don't have time for stuff which “has not happened to us”, then there is no change. There is no coming to terms when there are no terms for us to come to term with. The only association that matters is the underlying and generally unknown intelligence of disability.
The fact that disabled people have to acquire intelligence in order to overcome their disability is only a beginning of a journey of transformation which brings us closer to a collective humanity, that we create a world that is designed for disability means we are creating a world designed for both humanity and collective intelligence.
All of that thinking is lost when we consign our minds to what the worst of civilization does, that thin veneer of illusion that somehow people can be shamed into becoming human. It is important to list out these horrible crimes but in the appropriate context. That this does not become the only image we walk away from but that there is a human factor that is far more important to our society to learn.
Let's raise the bar on the top end of intelligent disability i.e. the intelligence we can learn from appreciating how to learn from people who have no other choice to learn what means to be more human. When that intelligence is in view then the baseline which is where we identify the crimes, the assaults on human dignity, the fears that ignite violence which for some reason the perpetrator does not seem to view as ugly, all of these lowest denominator traits, can begin to operate with a new baseline.
I think it just makes sense to raise the bar so that the baseline becomes that much identifiable and that we acknowledge that this is a new beginning for our society, and not an effort to get the “rest of society” to identify with the victims of this violence.
This then becomes an invitation to humanity and it reframes disability from the most human point of view possible. We live in a world where mainstream news is all about fear, so the challenge is how to raise ourselves above the effluent of common fear. There is a courage in making the world a smarter place to live in, a world designed with disability in mind is automatically a smarter place.
That is the horizon which changes the face of disability but in the meantime, it is important to note what human beings are capable of doing to each other. The only way one does not make mainstream news a competition for attention is by focusing on the highest level of realization, that not only uplifts the human spirit, but it can change the baseline of human dignity and respect.
I for one am glad I found this thread because in reading this I am learning about my own humanity and intelligence and in this regard I am but a student of life. It is a tragedy to see what human beings can do to each other, but it is an equal tragedy that we call such people “human beings” in the first place.
The status of “human being” is exactly that, a mere status – it needs to become a state and that is something that everyone must learn, even if they believe that they have earned that status. There is intelligence in a disabled world and the people who care most deeply about that world must endeavor to collectively reveal it.
[Em]
Sarah, due process says that we are all innocent until proven guilty, human nature itself as a problem dealing with innocence, it is the very point where process takes over and it seems that at this moment we have made our first disconnection with humanity.
We can argue over issues and points in a world that is saturated with attention. We used to live in a world where media was sense making for us, but today we must make sense of a proliferating and increasing information space. Clay Shirky refers to this as our “filter failure”.
Filture Failure
http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/
What this view taught me is that the way I command my attention is my own decision. Otherwise I am creating a disability in my own capacity to understand that which is relevant to my own life and maybe even to my orderly functioning in an information enriched society. I therefore prefer to focus on the wisdom that is in disability rather than disability as due process, which includes the way we think, make judgments and decisions.
I was inspired to this way of thinking about disability after a supper one evening. Our host had to take a phone call from her friend who happened to be recovering from a period of hospitalization. What amazed me about this individual was when I discovered that not only was she thinking about others and talking to our host about issues related to a disability bill, but she was making these efforts while she was not well and as a disabled member of the House of Lords, fighting with great dedication and spirit as she could for disability rights.
The person our host received a telephone call from that evening turned out to be Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, or “Jane” as she was to our host. I am not known to be a great admirer of authority figures, but this was an unscripted and private moment where I gained an appreciation of those that are trying to do their best in the cause of disability rights.
Lady Jane Campbell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Campbell,_Bar…
It was an accidental phone call that got me thinking about disability and I saw its most human face, that which sits between the white spaces of written issues. The one thing in our life we have an abundance of are issues. The one thing we lack is the ability to recognize our innocence, not just our capacity for compassion or to forgive, but that life comes with its accidental nature, which we are apt to forget.
We make an issue of “Little Britain” and its “Andy Pipkin” character, and this where the idea of innocent until proven guilty surpasses due process. We may have misunderstandings, we may make errors of judgment, we may be right when social mores tell us we are wrong, but malice is not the default state. Inappropriate comedy may set our minds to a default state, but in our age we have information resources at hand to change our own minds and deal with our own defaults.
Andy Pipkin
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/2008/10/little_…
Sarah, you are from Essex and so a default state might be that mindless attitude about “Essex Girls”, in a world where we were at the receiving end of broadcasted media, there was no interaction. In an interactive universe, there isn't simply the opportunity to change the default ourselves (as it pertains to our own existence) but we can challenge this whole notion of broadcasting because interactivity provides us an opportunity not only to think but to challenge our own understanding.
This requires us to discover our innocence because otherwise in looking at defaults, we also remain bound with faults. As long as we focus on fault IMHO we diminish disability. In appreciating disability we appreciate how we can overcome the deficiency in existence, and here disabled people can certainly teach me about patience, humanity and purpose in ways that so called “abled” people cannot.
Then there is a certain group of people who I have an uncompromising admiration for. These are the caregivers, the unsung heroes that live among us. There are countless caregivers who deserve our attention, and certainly much more so than the stories that catch us as news watchers but which we are keyboard or remote control removed from.
When I see ordinary caregivers looking after their loved ones this is where head and heart meet. We can argue until we are blue in the face regarding the issues which fill our media environments, but in the environments where media is not, where love must be, we find a countless untold stories of those who fill their environment with incredible acts of devotion, perseverance and daily dedication.
The media can inundate our attention with issues which can only serve to overwhelm us but when we are witnesses to disability in our own given lives, then I say we surrender to that innocence and we then rethink the soundbites of media, with the real sounds of people.
Last week at a wedding I was with a family whose 19 year old daughter had MS. This disease has ravaged her slender body and without her mother physically looking after day in and day out, she would be lost to that sense we all call family.
At the wedding while most danced, in the largely empty round banquet tables, she was sitting with a couple of our family members far away from the dance floor. I came over to her and asked her if she would like to join us at the dance floor. Her reaction was one of delight.
When she was with us, her face lit up as only natural glow of one's humanity can. At the same time it overwhelmed me that she could join in and be human, instead of being confined and sidelined.
At these moments we don't replace the caregiver (in this case the girl's mother) but we rise above the cerebral issues of disability and we begin to notice things that we once did not. If that is the symbol of progress then this is what I would care for as a new beginning.
This is when head and heart find the innocence within us rather than the issues that sit around us. We laugh, live and love with the world and we overcome not only the default but our collective disability, which is simply of being and remaining human.
The great issues are important but they are not the be all and end all of our future existence, in a world where every voice matters, I write this not as a broadcast but as a sincere innocence that I have much to learn as a student of my own life, never mind the meaning of life. I have my share of filter failure if I am guilty of overthinking but I am an innocent in a world that requires the renewal of our collective innocence.
Did I answer Jane Hatton's question or the case of the Pilkington's? No. All I have done is put a personal perspective around it because today one cannot find the answers without it, for those answers are within reach of the very people we can touch. This is my learning for these are the only things that I can personally change.
[Em]
I did not mean to return here but for a very good R.O.L. (return on learning) today. The first of these came from a visit to a site run by Stephen Meyer who wrote a post called “When talking of disabilities – put people first”. Lesson No.1 – the content of my response shows that I used the term “disabled people” instead of “people with disabilities”. It is just a simple little lesson but profound none the less.
Put People First by Stephen Meyer
http://bit.ly/aoRIUC
Lesson No. 2 came from linking to Jane Campbell PDF (linked above) where she wrote an interesting paper on the importance of words in regards to disability. The lesson for me here is that she referred to her paper as a “think piece”. I like that because what we engage in a Disqus environment should be viewed as “think pieces” rather than positions.
The final lesson came tonight as I was reading Rollo May's book “Power and Innocence”. The lesson was my naivety about the word “innocence”. Rollo May described a very compelling form of innocence he describes as “pseudo-innocence”. It is a form of innocence that he describes as “childlikeness”. It is far removed from the form of innocence I would personally describe as “christlikeness”.
What I found compelling about Rollo May's formulation of childlikeness is that his example fit perfectly with the type of mentality which is described in the list of horrid, gruesome and inhuman acts listed in Jane Hatton's article. Viewing “innocence” as a pseudoinnocence made me realize that there can be evil that stems out of innocence, or viewed from a christlikeness perspective “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”.
The difference between these two forms of innocence is that one is disgrace and the other is grace. It is difficult then to find the good in innocence where there is no grace. Moreover the people who do these terrible things won't even read that which is on a label of a baked bean can. How can people who care not for conceptions understand that which we greatly think about. It is a total mismatch in both communication and gravity of understanding.
This exercise in thinking however was useful to me because tonight as I go to sleep, at least my world is fundamentally changed and in that regard, what Rollo May says about finding the balance or tension between one's individuality and group is something I appreciate in an entirely new way. That tension is an intelligence that I can move forward with. So thank you for providing this forum, this “think piece” as Jane Campbell describes.
To go to sleep with an even greater regard for “people with disabilities” and see relationship to “people without disabilities” is as great accomplishment as I can think of sharing this space with you today.
[Em]
Just to respond to the difference between “people wirh disabilities” and “disabled people”. There is a (mainly American/British) divide between these two terms. The British model favours the social model – which suggests that people aren't disabled by their impairments, they are disabled by society's inabilities to accommodate them. So, for example, in a world with ample ramps, lifts etc a person using a wheelchair would not be “disabled” by their environment. The medical model (favoured largely by the Americans) puts the disabiity as the problem of the person. The social model will use the term “disabled people” to mean people who are disabled by society's inability to accommodate their needs.
I generally favour the social model (e.g. if the world was built to accommodate people who use wheelchairs only, the poeple who would be disabled would be those who didn't use wheelchairs) but can also see the merits of the medical model (no amount of societal adjustment will stop my pain, and I'd be grateful if the medical people could keep working on this for me please).
It's an interesting debate – teminology – but my concern was more about the lack of emphasis placed on crimes against people who are disabled by whichever model you prefer to use.
Twitter: evenbreak
Thank you Em,
I cannot speak for disabled people generally, just as this one particular disabled person. The dilemma you mention is a constant battle when trying to “promote awareness around disability”. On the one hand we, I, seek to prevent pity and promote respect for those of us with different abilities. But by doing so we risk denying the additional vulnerabiity that someone with a disability has to face on a daily basis.
The answer is simple and yet unreachable. When people who face additional needs are finally recognised as just as worrthy, just as valuable, having just as much to offer as those who aren't yet labelled “disabled”, the desire to harm, tease, bully, manipulate and prove superiority over them will disappear. How do we achieve that? I wish I knew.
Twitter: evenbreak
Jane, thank you for making the semantics clear this was very insightful and I find both the social model AND the medical model useful. The “Power of AND” is what is important to me but it is what that AND links to which gives us the power to think.
When I search for hate crime on Google I am seeing the UK media far more predominate in at least trying to bring attention to hate crimes. Having read through various pieces and angles of this issue I am of the persuasion that focusing on “hate crimes” masks the indifference because we assume such hate is only the domain of a few.
The comments on the BBC article below tell me that good people understand this indifference but it is the law which is an ass. Instead of this becoming a conversation that we should all be having, it becomes a marginalized and/or niche discussion.
Does Disability Hate Crime Exist?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/757…
Instead of drawing a line between what is hate crime and what isn't, I think it is important to determine graduations of indifference. A “7″ may indicate severe actions which the legal world would otherwise constitute or argue over the definition of “hate crime” in short it is as bad as it gets. Level 4 Indifference might constitute bullying and Level 1 ignorant humour. The point is that no matter where one is on the indifference scale, any act of indifference is classified and understood as a continuum that recognizes indifference.
Otherwise we deal with cracks and canyons, the non-legal world turns cracks into casual opinion and the legal world turns canyons into intellectual debate and/or legal opinion. The reality is that canyon's are created from cracks that have eroded and anything that makes our society erode requires us to understand more than the sum of the parts. Most of that erosion has been institutionalized through media which focuses on sensationalism as a product rather than a cure and an education system which itself is as fragmented as the way we look at indifference.
The third leg, the legal system is designed for an industrial age world and itself requires a new orientation to be more representative of the way discourse and judgement is applied in an interactive and database age.
Indifference means that disability is caught up in a viscious self-defeating cycle. I don't think politically correct mechanisms can accommodate intelligent and streetwise conversation, what it can do is turn indifference into news that is shaped to entertain rather than educate.
In America there is a storm brewing about Mel Gibson and it takes a Hollywood star to cut through indifference, but once that news story is finished, attention is cast somewhere else but the underlying factor that keeps people glued to superficial or transient news is indifference.
Indifference knows no nationality, it is a global phenomena and though it seems the UK has done a lot more than other countries to raise the awareness of these issues, tackling indifference means recognizing how indifference applies to disability, as well as how it contributes to other areas which the law today seeks address as hate crimes.
Yes, there is no “answer” to this but if this serves to raise my own awareness about whatever it is I am indifferent to, then I have made a difference at the level of one person. It is the cumulative effect which ripples into change, raising the bar on this requires a conversation which can embrace and cut through boundaries and segments.
Instead of disability “competing” in the arena of hate crimes, my takeaway from thinking about this is that to make a difference we need to know what causes us to be indifferent. Maybe by saying that the “law is an ass” I am being indifferent about the law itself, then it is clear that the task of dealing with indifference is continuous learning.
Thank You again for your insightful response.
[Em]