by Mike Smith, Lead Commissioner for the Inquiry, Equality and Human Rights Commission
Having grown up as a disabled person myself, I am used to my fair share of discriminatory behaviour: people treating you as though you are stupid; talking to the person with you instead of to you; overtly treating you less favourably. All of this can be unpleasant, but is it harassment? Probably not, but there have been other times in my life when I most definitely have been subject to harassment.
The most serious case was a period over about three months in the 1990s, when I lived alone in a block of flats on a smart, tree-lined avenue. I regularly had ‘NF’, ‘cripple’ and swastikas painted on my front door. I had wooden stakes pushed under my front door at night, and the ramp for my wheelchair moved. I had offensive graffiti painted on my bedroom window while I slept.
I called the police several times, and each time they just told me to ignore it and paint my front door again. It was only after about the fourth or fifth time that I was lucky enough to get someone who took the situation seriously. For the next two nights officers sat in my hallway, waiting to catch the perpetrator. They installed security TV and panic alarms. When he finally struck again, including torching the garages, half a dozen officers surrounded the place and caught him.
I didn't acknowledge that I had been targeted because of my disability until several years later. And despite the perpetrator being caught red-handed by police, the case never went to court.
Despite all of my personal and national experience of disability issues, nothing could have prepared me for the journey that we have travelled during the 18 months of this inquiry, and the horrendous things some disabled people have experienced. In the worst cases, people were tortured. And apparently just for fun. It's as though the perpetrators didn't think of their victims as human beings. It's hard to see the difference between what they did, and baiting dogs.
The really serious cases catch the headlines. But what about the constant drip, drip, nag, nag of the so-called ‘low-level’ harassment that many disabled people face on a daily basis. It ruins their lives. They don't have the confidence to go out. It undermines their ability to be part of society. It makes them behave differently.
For me, two things come out of this inquiry that are far more shocking than the 10 cases that we cover in more detail, awful as they are. The first is just how much harassment seems to be going on. It's not just some extreme things happening to a handful of people: it's an awful lot of unpleasant things happening to a great many people, almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands each year.
The second is that no one knows about it. Schools don’t know how many disabled pupils are bullied; local authorities and registered social landlords don’t know how many antisocial behaviour victims are disabled; health services don’t know how many assault victims are disabled; police don’t know how many victims of crime are disabled; the courts don’t know how many disabled victims have access to special measures, what proportion of offences against disabled victims result in conviction or how many of these offences result in a sentence uplift; and the prisons don’t know how many offenders are serving sentences for crimes motivated by hostility to disabled people.
And why? How can we have created a society where no one appears to be seeing what's happening. As one of my colleagues on the inquiry said, when we were young we were told not to stare at the disabled person. So no one is.
OK, that's not strictly fair. Over the last couple of years the number of people being convicted of ‘disability hate crime’ offences has gone up. Some parts of the system are making a real effort. But last year the police only recorded 1,567 cases of disability hate crime. It's probably a drop in the ocean, compared with the high proportion of disabled people reporting experiencing disability-related harassment. We need a step change in reporting and recognition.
Over the last 30 years disability activists have developed the social model of disability. It says, put simply, the thing that's ‘wrong with you’ should be referred to as your impairment. This might be a physical condition, a sensory one, a mental health issue, etc. But it is not your impairment, in itself, that disables you. Instead it is society's response to you and your impairment: the way we build the environment; the way we construct our attitudes to what is ‘normal’; the way we think people should behave.
A wider understanding of this model will, I believe, help us understand why some of this harassment happens in the first place, and why we also don't deal with it well.
As human beings, we are not very good at dealing with difference. We’re also pretty concerned about good health. Most people, if they are honest with themselves, are pretty uncomfortable about disability. Every day, people say things like ‘I hear you are having a baby, do you want a boy or girl?’, the response being, ‘I don't mind, as long as it's healthy’. Or if some accident or health misfortune happens to someone, others indicate they would rather be dead than have that happen to them.
On top of that, there are societal attitudes and laws that tell people to treat disabled people differently: you can be excluded from being a company director, you can be prevented from doing jury service; you can be aborted much later – in 2010 the total number of abortions due to suspected disability was up 10 per cent on the previous year; you're not allowed to sit on certain seats in aeroplanes, or go to certain public places, because you will be a health and safety risk to others. People with mental health issues can be forced to take medication to keep everyone else ‘safe’, or if they refuse, be locked up. As disabled people, we even have different toilets. Something as fundamental as going to the loo, and we are separated rather than make regular toilets accessible.
Some people say they don't know how to act because they've never come across a disabled person. How can that be, when 21 per cent of the population are disabled in some way, according to government figures? Well, they probably will have done. But many of the people they know who are disabled will not choose to identify as such, or even if they do, keep it to themselves.
As a society we exclude disabled people from the mainstream – making them live in special homes, educating them in special schools, shut away from the rest of us. It's done under the pretext of ‘we think it's best for them’. But is it really? If you educate disabled children in separate settings, how are they to know how to integrate into society properly when they reach adulthood? And if non-disabled children grow up alongside disabled children, surely they're going to perceive them as different. If you have never come across someone with autism, how are you expected to know how they communicate or how you communicate with them? It seems to me that educating disabled children separately just stores up problems for the future for all of us.
So we don't really feel comfortable about disability, we are taught to think of disabled people as different, and are told to feel sorry for them. I personally think this is a significant part of the reason why, as a society, we have failed to recognise the nature and scale of the problem of disability-related harassment. Throughout the inquiry there seemed to be a collective denial that this sort of thing could be happening. It's as though people are thinking ‘we are supposed to feel sorry for these people, so why would anyone be deliberately horrible to them?’ Maybe it just makes us too uncomfortable, thinking that might be the society in which we live.
Despite the above, I did not think it is all doom and gloom. We came across some great examples of good practice. Throughout the report we highlight many of them. Appendix 17 includes many examples of areas where good practice has been developed where previously things have gone wrong. It is often said that disabled people know best what works for them. Good public authorities know this is true, and work effectively with disabled people and their organisations to achieve better outcomes.
This inquiry has already started the process of change. In many evidence sessions, I asked what we could say that would help drive the process of change. Many said they didn't need to wait for our recommendations, and just talking to us had already motivated them to take action. Others have promised new or revised guidance once this report is published.
The sheer depth and breadth of evidence that we've taken has given us a unique perspective. It was only by taking such a broad view that we were able to see the full extent of the issue and come to our conclusions.
It enabled us to see how the impact of decisions in one policy area affect another. Social services often award care and support based on quite limited criteria around an individual's ‘vulnerability’, and whether or not someone needs physical assistance to bathe or get dressed. Many local authorities allow support for ‘one significant social encounter a week’. They say they can't afford more, but think how socially isolated that will leave many people – a common thread of our inquiry was that people were socially excluded. The design of transport and housing often prevents some disabled people from getting out and about, including getting to a place of employment. So then the disabled person has no choice but to live on benefits, and is then labelled a scrounger and a burden on the rest of society. People think of choice of school as parental choice, but it is only when you step back that you can consider the wider impact on our society of segregated education. There are many, overlapping, vicious circles.
We also found that some of the measures that are meant to help might inadvertently be making things worse. The ‘No Secrets’ guidance has resulted in criminal offences such as theft or fraud not being dealt with as crimes, and professionals focusing on vulnerability and protecting the disabled person (perhaps by moving them), rather than dealing with the perpetrators. It didn't occur to them that this would infringe the disabled person's human rights.
Equally the language of ‘hate crime’ has been useful up until now, to get the issues on the radar, but it probably now acts as a barrier to effective reporting and recognition. Many people think they have just been taken advantage of, rather than hated. Who wants to think of themselves as hated? This terminology also probably contributes to the culture of disbelief. Language may not be the most important thing in the world – action counts for more – but it's probably time to use a new terminology.
Dealing with disability-related harassment is not going to be solved just by better policing. It's going to take concerted, joined up effort by a significant number of public authorities, with proper leadership, and joint working at all levels.
It won't just be public authorities that have to act differently. It's all of us. In the way that we think of and treat disabled people. I want the person at the bus stop who sees something happening, or the plumber repairing a tap who comes across something untoward, to know that they too should take action. I don't want everyone to think that all disabled people are vulnerable and need protecting – far from it – but some people do need help and support.
Ultimately, it will only be when disabled people are supported to be and recognised as equal members of our society, and we accept disability as normal and part of the natural variation in the human condition, that we will feel comfortable in recognising and addressing the shame on our society that is disability-related harassment.
There are many people who I would like to thank for helping make this inquiry so successful. First of all, the brilliant staff within the Equality and Human Rights Commission for your many hours of hard work, dedication and commitment to this project. It's been a joy to work with you. Also, the members of our external reference group and the Disability Committee: collectively you have provided many excellent insights and guiding words along this journey and have helped us make sure that all critical stones have been upturned. I would like to thank the many people who gave us evidence in the call for evidence, in key-informant interviews, in focus groups, and in formal evidence sessions. Together you have given us tens of thousands of pages of evidence, which has significantly influenced the course of this inquiry and will give us a valuable information resource going forward.
But finally, I would like to thank all the disabled people who have told us their story: of the things that happened to you; of how you were supported, or not; of how you coped afterwards, or didn't. Without your voices, this report would not have the impact I believe it will. Please, continue using those voices, all across our nations, and make change.
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