Whilst considering how disability hate crime features in the eyes of the police and the courts; it is also important to take a look at how these crimes are seen and dealt with through a lawyers eyes.

David Edwards is a lawyer from Dorset who has worked on disability discrimination cases.

So David, in your experience of disability employment cases, how has discrimination tended to come about?

“ I think it is a general reluctance on behalf of the population at large to accept that in many cases disabled people can do as good a job as anybody else. I suppose its still almost an ingrained, irrational, adverse feeling towards people with disabilities; and I think that people that are disabled will say that it is very very hard to break that down. Particularly is you are talking about an employment situation – to persuade an employer either that the risks of taking on a disabled person are minimal or that they can be easily overcome.”

Have you ever come across any cases of disability hate crime?

“I have no idea to what extent there is intimidation of disabled people. I’m sure it goes on but I think it is a different situation from, for example, racial intimidation. I suspect probably the group of people who have the potential to be intimidated is probably larger in relation to racial intimidation than disability intimidation. I think it is probably harder if you are going to demonstrate that someone is being intimidated on the grounds of their disability. It can be quite difficult to show that; much more so, for example, than in the case of race.”

How would you prove any type of hate crime?

 “If it was something like race you could prove it possibly by the language used – if they use racially negative terms that’s pretty clear evidence - you could do thing like look at their computer to see if they had any affiliations with racially prejudicial organisations. So there are a number of avenue you could use to prove it for something like race. For disability it is much harder as there is no political organisation which is equivalent to the BNP for example.”

Where do you think that it is most likely that discrimination crimes happen?

“This isn’t based on any direct experience but I would image the sort of environment where you would get them in would be place like a care home where you had people that were either mentally disabled or perhaps just elderly people who were infirm. Again it would be difficult to prove that the motivation for the intimidation was a prejudice against those disabled people as opposed to an individual dislike or whatever of the victim.”

Thank you for your time.