Over the years there’s been an overwhelming rise in hate crimes towards women, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ people, etc, but why is ablism still not taken seriously?
Earlier this year I watched a program on the BBC called Targeted: The Truth about Disability and Hate Crime, and it was to do with the hate crimes towards people within the Disability Community. As someone who both helps support people with various disabilities in my line of work and lives with one as well it was a real eye-opener. After I finished watching it raised some questions, one of which is something I’ve always found myself asking whenever such stories make the news pages:
Why’s it not taken seriously and what’s actually being done to tackle it?
In the program, we were introduced to a number of people that had suffered social problems due to the lack of understanding around their problems, and some were made to feel that they were the cause of the problem. Others were made to feel like they’re in a freak show.
In one statement there was a woman who was visually impaired and couldn’t get around without the aid of their guide dog. She was attacked near her home yet when she reported the incident to the police, they offered little help. In another statement a woman who lives with a form of dwarfism was walking along the road when a young boy shouted abuse at her, he even recorded images of her and put them on social media. He even labeled her a freak. When she confronted both the youth and his mum about what he had done to her she was even more shocked by what the boy’s mum said to her.
In short, she lambasted her saying that she was a freak, even implying that her son had done nothing wrong and if he wanted to say anything, he should be able to as it’s free speech.
It was this sort of comment that thoroughly disappointed me as here was a semi-educated boy verbally abusing a woman based on a characteristic that she had no control over, and then you had the boy’s mother, also semi-educated, practically gave him a free pass to continue.
Over the past two years, there have been around an estimated 124,000 disability hate crimes and more than 7,300 estimated disability hate crimes were reported to the police across England and Wales in 2019/20.
As someone who lives with a disability and has faced prejudice based on that, I find this utterly disgusting and unacceptable. A few years ago, the son of a friend of mine who, like me, has a learning disability was attacked by a gang of youths. After an investigation was done all the attacker got was a warning.
If that was the punishment, where’s the justice? Incidents like this cannot be allowed to continue.
