Back in June last year BBC South East Today interviewed me about the rise in disability hate crime as the result of DWP propaganda portraying us as universally fakes and scroungers. The BBC gave Mark Reckless MP (Conservative, Rochester and Strood) a chance to put the government view. Unfortunately rather than condemning the abuse, he chose to come out with the appalling line "A lot of my constituents, hard-working people ... they feel real anger when they see people ... they don't believe are disabled" (it's a long, convoluted sentence, but I don't believe I've distorted his meaning). No thought that people are not competent to judge the disability of others, no thought about whether the disabled person is entitled to what they receive, no thought they might not even be a benefit claimant (I had abuse even while working and claiming nothing), just a chilling Conservative assertion that jealousy legitimises hatred against the disabled.
As the rise in disability hate crime is in the news again this came up in discussion today, and someone pointed out that the interview with Mark Reckless is actually up on his web-site. Apparently he's proud of what he said.
I was going to put up the letter that I sent him, and to which he never replied, but I think his words speak for themselves, and for the attitude of his party.
Showing posts with label disability hate crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disability hate crime. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
Sunday, 4 December 2011
Vulnerable
(I'm a day late with my post for the International Day of Disabled People, and some people may have seen this before in other places, but I think it bears repeating)
I sail, I fly gliders, I go white-water rafting. I did draw the line at jumping off a mountain (even with parascending chute attached), but there are few things I won’t try if given the opportunity. I’m also that proverbial forty-something, middle-class, white guy who is least at risk of anything of any part of the population. And yet in the past fifteen years or so I’ve been physically assaulted once, had one false accusation of benefit fraud and been verbally abused about once every year to 18 months (and I don't actually get out that much). You wouldn’t think I was an obvious target, all of the attacks have been in broad daylight on well travelled streets, and in the main I’ve been taller and heftier built than most of my abusers, not really someone you would attach the label ‘vulnerable’ to.
Yet mention that I walk with crutches and that whole assumption changes.
To judge from the viewpoints we hear parroted by the police and the authorities, as a disabled person, and therefore inherently ‘vulnerable’, I am some frail, ethereal, slip of a figure, risking serious damage just by daring to be out in public, never mind actually interacting with society. And there is something to that, no attacks on me until I reached thirty and started to use crutches, then about one every couple of years since – and I don’t spend much time on the streets compared to many. But ‘vulnerable’? Let’s not be shy, ladies and gentlemen, let’s call a spade a bloody shovel and label it for what it really is, hatred of me for having the audacity to be out on the street as a disabled person.
I am not ‘vulnerable’ because I am disabled, I am targeted because I am disabled. Each attack has specifically and deliberately singled out some aspect of my disability to focus upon. As I said, I have been taller and heftier than pretty much all of my abusers, but taller and heftier doesn’t count for much when the bigots run in packs. If I was ‘vulnerable’, then it would have been me who was injured when a bigot thought it would be funny for he and his friend to knock me to the ground, rather than the reality that left him gasping for breath around bruised ribs. With one exception, and he was drunk out of his mind, every attack on me has involved two or more people. There isn’t a person in the country who isn’t vulnerable when facing odds of two or more to one, so why apply that label specifically to disabled people?
Or does that ‘vulnerable’ label reveal more about the people conferring it than the people it is applied to? If we are ‘vulnerable’ to them, then are we not, inevitably, seen as less than adult, less suitable to be out on the street unsupervised, flying in the face of good sense, responsible for our own downfall? Doesn’t this label suggest someone who thinks that opening the locks that kept us safely shut-away in society’s collective attic was a bad idea, who, deep down, is profoundly uncomfortable with someone who doesn’t meet his definition of ‘normal’. We know those attitudes predominate in the community at large, it is unreasonable to expect that they aren’t also present in the deeply socially conservative police and legal authorities.
So when someone listens to our experience of hatred and catalogues us as ‘vulnerable’, they aren’t being part of the solution, but establishing themselves as part of the problem. If we want to solve the problem of disability hate crimes, then we need to stop the crimes, but that means routing out the fear of disability wherever we find it. And when someone labels us ‘vulnerable’, that’s undoubtedly the language of fear.
I sail, I fly gliders, I go white-water rafting. I did draw the line at jumping off a mountain (even with parascending chute attached), but there are few things I won’t try if given the opportunity. I’m also that proverbial forty-something, middle-class, white guy who is least at risk of anything of any part of the population. And yet in the past fifteen years or so I’ve been physically assaulted once, had one false accusation of benefit fraud and been verbally abused about once every year to 18 months (and I don't actually get out that much). You wouldn’t think I was an obvious target, all of the attacks have been in broad daylight on well travelled streets, and in the main I’ve been taller and heftier built than most of my abusers, not really someone you would attach the label ‘vulnerable’ to.
Yet mention that I walk with crutches and that whole assumption changes.
To judge from the viewpoints we hear parroted by the police and the authorities, as a disabled person, and therefore inherently ‘vulnerable’, I am some frail, ethereal, slip of a figure, risking serious damage just by daring to be out in public, never mind actually interacting with society. And there is something to that, no attacks on me until I reached thirty and started to use crutches, then about one every couple of years since – and I don’t spend much time on the streets compared to many. But ‘vulnerable’? Let’s not be shy, ladies and gentlemen, let’s call a spade a bloody shovel and label it for what it really is, hatred of me for having the audacity to be out on the street as a disabled person.
I am not ‘vulnerable’ because I am disabled, I am targeted because I am disabled. Each attack has specifically and deliberately singled out some aspect of my disability to focus upon. As I said, I have been taller and heftier than pretty much all of my abusers, but taller and heftier doesn’t count for much when the bigots run in packs. If I was ‘vulnerable’, then it would have been me who was injured when a bigot thought it would be funny for he and his friend to knock me to the ground, rather than the reality that left him gasping for breath around bruised ribs. With one exception, and he was drunk out of his mind, every attack on me has involved two or more people. There isn’t a person in the country who isn’t vulnerable when facing odds of two or more to one, so why apply that label specifically to disabled people?
Or does that ‘vulnerable’ label reveal more about the people conferring it than the people it is applied to? If we are ‘vulnerable’ to them, then are we not, inevitably, seen as less than adult, less suitable to be out on the street unsupervised, flying in the face of good sense, responsible for our own downfall? Doesn’t this label suggest someone who thinks that opening the locks that kept us safely shut-away in society’s collective attic was a bad idea, who, deep down, is profoundly uncomfortable with someone who doesn’t meet his definition of ‘normal’. We know those attitudes predominate in the community at large, it is unreasonable to expect that they aren’t also present in the deeply socially conservative police and legal authorities.
So when someone listens to our experience of hatred and catalogues us as ‘vulnerable’, they aren’t being part of the solution, but establishing themselves as part of the problem. If we want to solve the problem of disability hate crimes, then we need to stop the crimes, but that means routing out the fear of disability wherever we find it. And when someone labels us ‘vulnerable’, that’s undoubtedly the language of fear.
Friday, 23 September 2011
How the Papers Help Make Disability Hate Invisible
I've just been on a visit to my family in Durham and while I was up there the Northern Echo, the main regional daily, reported on a rise in hate crime statistics. I wanted to comment on the figures then, to compare and contrast the way that the Echo had treated race hate and disability hate crime, but I couldn't get online, so had to wait until I was back home and could look the two articles up on the net. That made things even more interesting, because instead of the two articles, one on race hate stats taking up the top quarter of page 5, and a tiny two paragraphs on disability hate stats buried on page 7, there was only a single article, still entitled 'Rise in Race Hate Incidents', but with disability given nearly 50% of the coverage and the quotes and background to show that the reporter had actually gone out and done a good job of it. Somewhere between his writing a good article, pointing out that even if race hate incidents are up 4%, disability hate crimes are up over 20%, and the paper going to press, someone in the Echo's editorial staff decided that disability hate crimes just weren't worthy of the same degree of coverage, chopped them out of the article and buried the facts on page 7 without the context to say the reality is likely even worse because we can't get people to pay attention. I'm not sure whether that counts as irony, or tragedy.
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