Spat at every day
A major report, Hidden in Plain Sight, has just been published which has highlighted the daily hell which many people endure by being disabled in Britain today.
The report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), is the most detailed study yet into abuse faced by disabled people. The Report interviewed over 350 individuals and dozens of police and local authority officers.
It found that while some particularly serious offences attracted national attention, these are “the tip of the iceberg”, and that for many, low-level abuse or worse are so endemic that many consider them inevitable.
I remember well the words of one forty year old man who had Downs Syndrome. “Every day someone spits at me or shouts at me when I am out. Why?”
It has become part and parcel of my work on disability and learning disability in particular to hear such accounts. We are as a society woefully intolerant of difference but all the more so when an individuals physicality or mental difference challenges what we consider ‘normal’.
The Report examined and mentioned ten horrific cases only a handful of which led to criminal cases and action being taken by the authorities. On the whole the Report summarises what it describes as a “collective denial” among police, government and other public bodies.
This in action, the tendency to encourage the disabled to accept low level criminality came to a head in 2009. In that year, Fiona Pilkington killed herself and her severely disabled teenage daughter in a burning car after enduring years of abuse verbal and physical assaults and torment from youths at their home in Leicestershire.
The Introduction of the Report summarises the insidious nature of harassment against the disabled in Britain today:
“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.”
Somewhere in your community today someone is getting dressed to go out with friends, go to the sport centre or shopping. Somewhere someone because they have a difference if disability us dressing themselves to be prepared for the shouts and laughter, the bullying and harrassment, the spitting and demeaning. And what of you and I, what of the police and authorities ? Well the Report makes several recommendations which I hope will be implemented but for society we have a huge amount of work to do before we can deserve to be called inclusive, accepting and humane.
Dr Donald Macaskill
