Disability hate crime: an unrecognised reality?

Today I was collaborating with a couple of other local disability activists on writing an introductory article about disability hate crime (taking as its main reference point the recent UKDPC Briefing on Hate Crime, but simplifying and distilling it with a local focus, and also addressing the non-recognition of disability-related hate crime as such by police and other official agencies). The debate got me thinking about the reasons for this non-recognition...

Hate crime against disabled people, however defined, is a HUGE problem - in the UK, the recent murder of Brent Martin is a recent example, and there are innumerable other horrific incidents - just look at FRIDA's archives of disability news items for examples. Yet, somehow, there seems to be a reluctance, not only within the police and the political establishment, but even within “left-wing” or generally anti-oppressive discourse, to acknowledge that hate crime against disabled people even exists...

Why is this? One reason, IMO, is that the prevailing paradigm of what “hate crime” is is based on a certain template of “typical” hate crime - in the UK at least, primarily racist and, probably to a slightly lesser extent, homophobic/transphobic hate crime.

These sorts of hate crime are characterised by the “hate” element being openly stated and explicit, and by the people or groups of people involved in such crimes generally having a consciously bigoted agenda - they believe their racist or homo/transphobic actions are justified by their own prejudiced value systems, and consciously see the minorities they attack as an enemy. Often they are part of more or less organised ideological groupings, such as fascists or religious fundamentalists.

This kind of hate crime is pretty easy to recognise - graffiti using insulting terms for the minority groups using targeted, often saying things like “[group X] out” or “kill all [group X]”, attacks by groups which are generally pre-planned, involving gangs of racists/homophobes/etc getting together with the deliberate intent of attacking either a specific individual(s) or members of their target group in general (eg, by going to an area where members of that group live, or a social venue where they tend to go with the intention to vandalise or attack people).

With disability hate crime, it tends not quite to work the same way. The thugs who beat Brent Martin to death (whose sentences were just reduced by an appeal judge) were not members of a fascist group, followers of any religion that believes disability is evidence of sin, or followers of the likes of Peter Singer (who believes disabled people should be killed at birth). They had not decided that day that they were going to find and beat up a disabled person, nor, probably, did they consciously perceive disabled people as their “enemies”. They did, however, kill him because they thought that it was socially acceptable to cause pain and/or harm to a disabled person simply for amusement - in other words, they did not see Brent Martin as a fellow human being, but as an object of scorn and ridicule.

From some viewpoints, this attitude is even worse than that of conscious, explicit hatred - I would certainly rather be perceived as an enemy (with the modicum of respect that contains in being seen as at least potentially dangerous, and therefore having some agency), the target of a tribal or holy war, than as a mere object, so far from an equal that hurting or killing “it” is no more than sport . But, in the minds of many, it simply isn't seen as “hatred” - or, as sexual violence was and is, is seen as “personal” rather than “political”, evidence of individual cruelty, but not of societal prejudice or larger underlying values.

Even further from recognition as “hate crime” is the abuse of disabled people - up to and including the killing of disabled children - within the family. Of course, the existing paradigm of hate crime finds it hard to recognise in an intra-family context, as members of families are generally of the same race as each other (and, if it's a mixed-race family, they're very unlikely to be racists) - homophobic and transphobic hate crime does occur within families, but I think it has some of the same problems of recognition there as disablist hate crime does.

This is even harder to see for what it is because torturous “treatments” - which in any other context would constitute assault or worse - see for example here - are often given to disabled children (and some adults, especially if they are learning disabled) supposedly “for their own good”, and even sometimes by or at the request of medical professionals. In some of these cases, such as the torture of autistic children by “chelation”, the violence is motivated by a desire to “cure” the impairment or difference - which, while not consciously perceived as such, certainly implies a desire for a category of people not to exist, which I think “hate” is definitely a reasonable definition for...

In the most extreme cases of all - those of the killing of children by their parents or “carers”, such as the cases of Tracy Latimer or Katie McCarron - the murderers actually assert that their act of killing is motivated not by hate, but by love - in that they believe it is a “loving” and “merciful” act to kill their child rather than let them live as a disabled person. In this case, the underlying hate of disabled people is so deep that it's almost impossible to get through to people that it is hate - but what other than hate of disabled people could underlie the belief that a person's existence is, purely because of their impairment, “worse than death”, and what other than total disregard for their autonomy, and thus status as a human being, could underlie the belief that their own opinion on whether their life is worth living can be totally disregarded?

This is part of why I am wary of “one-size-fits-all” approaches to oppression - while there certainly are many ways in which disablism is analogous to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc, it isn't perfectly analogous, and shouldn't be treated as if it is. In particular, the whole “pity”, “care”, hate-masquerading-as-love paradigm is, I think, if not peculiar to disablism then certainly far more characteristic of it than of the other prejudices/oppressions it's most frequently compared to, while disablism tends to manifest itself as open enmity much less than the others do. (If anything, in terms of racism, the kind of disablist bigotry that is prevalent now is less like most contemporary racism than it is like the kind of “white man's burden”, “children of a larger growth” paternalistic racism that was the paradigmatic form in Empire times.)

Of course, I have fairly major problems with the whole concept of “hate crime” in itself - not least because I have major problems with its component concept of “crime” as a whole (which concept, IMO, brackets together at least 3 extremely different categories of acts, purely by the almost completely arbitrary fact that, in the current political system, they are codified as “illegal”... but that's a topic for another post), but also because, even when the acts described above are recognised as “hate crime”, it fails even to touch the institutionalised social oppression of disabled people - in residential homes, “special” schools, hospitals, and the “social care” system as a whole - which constitutes a “crime”, in terms of abuses of disabled people's human rights, far bigger than that of any individual (just as, for example, the institutionally racist oppression of asylum seekers in immigration detention centres (which closely resemble “care homes”, possibly even more so than they do prisons, in the way that they are run and administered) is a far greater “crime” than the actions of any small-scale gang of racist thugs).

However, the point of this post is really that I think disablism is, often if not always, more difficult to recognise for what it is than most other prejudices and oppressive systems - and not just because it has been recognised for less time, or because the disabled people's liberation movement is “behind” other liberation movements (in chronological or progressivist terms), but because the forms that it takes are actually substantially different, and, in some ways, IMO harder to recognise precisely because they are more deeply ingrained in the unconscious foundations of “Western culture” - in assumptions so deep that they aren't even consciously noticed.

What this means for the disabled people's liberation movement, I'm not quite certain (apart from that, possibly, too-direct analogies to the experiences of other oppressed peoples may, in some circumstances, be counterproductive) - but one thing that strikes me is that that implies the disabled people's liberation movement has the potential for a deeper and more radical undermining of currently-hegemonic cultural values than perhaps any other movement. That, however, is definitely a topic that needs another post...