My first experience of disability hate beyond playground insults was whilst I was on a night out with a friend of mine, who has cerebral palsy and is a wheelchair user, in Birmingham four years ago.
We had been for a meal and we were heading towards the clubs and bars of Hurst Street when we came to a set of traffic lights at a busy intersection. We started to cross the road and walking in the opposite direction were two male/female couples. My friend's condition means she can suffer from small spasms when she is moving and as soon as the two men walking towards us noticed this they launched into a mocking tirade, mixed with derogatory disability related words and their attempts to do impressions of my friend having a spasm. Their antics, for want of a better word, went un-reprimanded by their partners, on the contrary they seemed rather amused and after they passed us I could hear one of them congratulating her love on a joke well made and what a laugh that moment had been.
My friend was a little bit upset but passed it off as idiots trying to impress their girlfriends and explained that she had been subject to such abuse before so it didn't bother her as much. I, on the other hand, was fuming - so much so I wanted to call the police. Although the abuse was not targeted at me, as a disabled person I was still extremely offended and I wanted to challenge that discrimination straight away. Alas there was no police about to report this too and as it was my friend's birthday we just got on and celebrated the occasion.
When I told people a few days later about what had happened, they were horrified and said I was right to want to get the police involved, although many admitted that the police may not have taken such a complaint seriously. But to test attitudes towards disability hate crime now, I talked about the incident to people at university and to other acquaintance's of mine and although many of them still thought it horrible, some people, after saying what a terrible thing it was, then said they could understand the attitudes behind it. Not that they would do it themselves they said, but such behaviour could be blamed on the 'fact' that people are tired of disabled people having it easy on benefits and are tired of having to pay to facilitate other people's lifestyles. I could not believe what I was hearing.
But it seems that view may have more traction than I originally feared. According to a poll carried out by SCOPE, 66% of disabled people questioned said they had experienced aggression or overt hostility from other members of the public. The same poll carried out in May gave a figure of 41%. That is a 25% rise in just four months. Why is this? Are we to take from this that the new favourite British summer pastime is abusing and harassing disabled people?
The government's anti-disabled mantra has got to take the vast majority of the blame for such a rise in hostility towards disabled people, there is no other explanation for it. When people with cancer are carted off benefits and are told that they must work and when the tories along with their snarling right-wing propaganda hounds paint all benefit claimants as scroungers and set up telephone hotlines for people to tell on their neighbours, what sort of message does that send out to society?
Another friend of mine with a physical impairment told me of how they were being investigated by the Department for Work & Pensions for benefit fraud and had even had their payments stopped for a month because someone had apparently rang up and named them as a fraudster. My friend asked to know who had made the complaint so that they might try to understand why someone would have said that about them, but were denied that request on the basis of confidentiality. So it is hardly surprising that there has been such a notable rise in physical and verbal abuse of disabled people by members of the public when the government and certain sections of the media encourage people to treat disabled people with suspicion and contempt. So what is society, as a whole and it's various factions, doing to combat disability hate crime?
It is not as the issue has not been highlighted or that it is a recent issue that has developed only over the past couple of months. Michael Gilbert, who for those who don't remember was abused over ten years and then killed by sadistic members of his community, died in 2009 and the case of Fiona Pilkington and her disabled daughter Francesca Hardwick was back in 2007. This has being going on for a long time and still society seems reluctant to grab the issue by the horns and put a stop to the targeting of some of society's most vulnerable people. The behaviour of some people which we rightly yet righteously condemn when we see it happen in other countries and cultures we utterly fail to deal with in our own backyard.
I think it is fair to say that a fair amount of the onus to combat these attitudes towards disabled people lie with disabled people themselves by constantly providing a positive representation of disabled people. But I believe passionately in the idea that a society can be quantified in terms of how civilised and progressive it is by looking at how it treats it's most vulnerable members and at this rate, Britain seems to be heading for the dark ages.