Samantha Clark
"I know people with learning disabilities who get called names, abused, things thrown at them, treated differently BECAUSE of their apparent learning disability; and that’s the abuse that’s thrown at them.
The whole issue of hate crime was lots and lots of direct support workers and people in services historically have not supported people with learning disabilities to report hate crime as a crime, so people often talk about it as bullying.
It might be bullying in certain situations but actually what we need to do is it’s a citizenship agenda for me.
We thought one of the most interesting things that came out of that survey (Crime and Disorder Reduction Plan) was the real difference in perception between the Community Safety Partnerships that have the duty from the government to be looking at issues around hate crime and the perception of the people with learning disabilities themselves- from the specialist learning disability boards.”
Tom Shakespeare
“It’s a common analogy comparing disability to gender, to sexuality and to race but I think it’s a false analogy because I think that there is nothing intrinsic which is a problem. These are not problematic forms of embodiment; whereas I think that for many disabled people there is an intrinsic limitation connected with being disabled. It may not explain all of their experience. It may still be that social, cultural and political factors are more important but there is an element to do with impairment which is problematic. I don’t think you would be neutral about having impairment.
On the one hand you could imagine that disabled people might happen to be victims of crime – like everybody else. Well everybody has a certain likelihood of being a victim of crime so that’s not disabilist; that’s just because disabled people are in the population – they are going to experience crimes.
Secondly there are instances where disabled people or older people are exploited because they are more vulnerable. Because, for example, if you steal my wallet I wont be able to chance after you. So these are all exploiting the vulnerability of disabled people, and they are also presumably examples of targeting disabled people – I don’t know if you could call that ‘disabilist’. Your not targeting them because you hate disabled people; your targeting them because they might be an easy touch.
Thirdly you have the low-level bullying and harassment…and we know from all our work on disability that disabled people are bullied, stared at, called names, laughed at and all the rest of it. So this goes on all the time. I would call it bullying, I think it is totally unacceptable, I think its getting worse, I think it’s a major problem – I wouldn’t call it hate crime.
If somebody is robbed for example and it happens to be because they have learning difficulties or dementia we need to argue is that worse then if they get robbed and it happens to be just because they’re Joe Bloggs, living in a particular street. I mean crime is crime and its awful to experience it and I think if there is a real problem with widespread hate crime then yes it needs to be addresses but I don’t think there is a widespread problem.
What we need to find a way of doing is to solve the issue of low-level bullying and abuse and Im not sure whether the answer to that is to criminalise it or whether it is to educate the people that are doing it and to have opportunities for them to meet disabled people and have their prejudices challenged.”
