Tom Shakespeare is an academic based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He is also a person of restricted growth. He was travelling on the city’s metro recently when he was verbally humiliated and intimidated by a group of schoolgirls.

Was he a victim of a disability hate crime?

BBC News Magazine

It might seem obvious that the answer is yes. It might also seem that the title of the article in question “does disability hate crime exist?” more warrants a poke in the eye for asking such a bloody stupid question than it does a serious answer.

But I’m going to try to give it a serious answer anyway.

Now I know Tom Shakespeare. He probably doesn’t remember me, but I’ve corresponded with him over email once or twice, I’ve met him a couple of times (at the PEARS sessions he used to do … public something-or-other to do with science), and I quite often read his posts on BBC Ouch.

So maybe it’s fairer to say I know of him.

Certainly, if you were to meet him, you would notice he is a person-of-restricted-growth. I don’t know the most appropriate term, but that one is a bit of a mouthful… is it okay if I say short?

According to this article, Tom thinks what happened to him was bullying, and shouldn’t be confused with more extreme offences that have been committed against the disabled. That’s a fair point. He also says that ‘for the most part, people don’t hate disabled people’. That’s also a fair point.

But it is a bit of a shame he feels the need to add “for the most part”. And this is where we come to the bit where I think he is wrong.

People bully those who they feel are inferior to them in some way. Whether it’s because they have a different colour skin, a different religion, are short, tall, have ginger hair or simply cheaper trainers, the bully looks to exploit what is seen as something inferior.

Partly it’s to do with fear of the other: look at them, they aren’t quite like us. And if they are different to us, then there is either something wrong with them, or there is something wrong with us, so we’ll make sure they are the ones seen as inferior (or ‘wrong’).

Whether it’s religion, sexuality, disability or anything else, it’s bloody stupid. And yet it’s so ingrained in us sometimes. Look at football rivalries, and the incessant “my team’s fans are better/more loyal than yours”.

People are different. People are entitled to be different. People should be different.

Tom is worried that the question of what should, and what shouldn’t be considered a hate crime could deter some people with disabilities from leading normal lives.

And that’s why I have to disagree with Tom. Because I think that while bullying/name calling is in an entirely different league to urinating on a dying disabled woman, the hate is still there. Whether it’s just name-calling or something more sinister.

I’m sure that mentally Tom is in an entirely different league to those doing the name-calling (or maybe not, after all, intelligence and tolerance are not, so far as I know, automatically linked), but it would have been just as wrong, had the boot been on the other foot, to mock them for being stupid: to point out that he’s a well-educated man with a good job and a lot of respect and they… well, weren’t.

Yes, it’s a question of degree, but once you convince the population that Jewish people should be forced to live apart from the rest of the population and forced to wear a badge of Jewishness, it’s then a smaller step to sending them to a concentration camp.

Yes, there’s a considerable degree of difference, but if you are allowed to begin that process of dehumanization, don’t be surprised where you end up.

Whether it is “bullying”, “harassment”, “intimidation” or “hate crime” depends upon your perspective.BBC News Magazine

But in each case the degree of the insult, or crime doesn’t detract from the fact that someone is being picked on simply for being different. And that is not something I believe should be tolerated. It is not something that I personally tolerate, and it’s not something that I believe we should allow our society to either.

Name calling and ‘queer bashing’ are different only in the expression of that hate. Ghettoisation and gassing is only a matter of degree. I do however separate out the misunderstandings from the stuff delivered maliciously.

…disability rights activists like Ruth Bashall who lives and works in east London. As a wheelchair user and a lesbian she has encountered hate crime first-hand. At a recent meeting of disabled people, she was shocked by how many had shared her experience.

“Out of forty people in the room, I saw probably two-thirds of them nod – even I was shocked by that…

BBC News Magazine

I don’t believe it’s always the disability here. If you pick a bunch of people at random and ask whether people have ever called them names or been mean to them, I expect (particularly if you go back to school days), you’ll find most have. Those most obviously other will find that trait (their ethnicity, disability, sexuality) most used as the defining reason for the bullying, but if the bully had found something else first — you’re poor, you’re thick, you support the wrong team — they would probably have used that too.

Besides which, if I said that I couldn’t stand a particular man in a wheelchair, that wouldn’t make me disablist. If I couldn’t stand him because of the wheelchair, it would, but if it was because he was rude, offensive, and generally unpleasant to everyone I’d have just as much right to dislike him as I would if he wasn’t in a wheelchair (I did actually meet this person once, and no, I don’t know his name).

But if that person thought I didn’t like him because he was disabled, then in his mind it’s a ‘hate’ issue. Which is probably the tricky bit Tom was thinking about…

Nonetheless, we do each have to fight against the evils within our society, within all of us. We have to recognise that none of us are perfect, that we too are capable of hating the other and then we can begin to challenge it in ourselves and in others.

That doesn’t always mean shouting down those who make an inappropriate comment: sometimes you can make a lot more progress by simply telling someone it’s inappropriate and explaining why so. But it does need to be challenged.