1.1 The Motivation
I recall with warmth the July of 1969. My parents allowed me to stay up late to watch the Moon landings on TV. I had already posted my schoolboy-handwritten application to become an astronaut to NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the US). Although I did not get a response, I was a happy eight-year-old with aspirations to explore the stars and shake hands with alien life forms. My life had changed by 1973; however, I was sitting in a corner of an upstairs room at home looking down out of a window upon society below and hoping that nobody could see me. My hands shook uncontrollably and I had already attempted suicide for the first time. Any friends seemed as far away as the Moon, and I very much wanted to die.
In the late 1960s, I had been diagnosed as autistic. Although this meant little to me, I began to notice that I looked different from others. It hardly made any difference to my life until I started at a school which I travelled to by bus and train. During those tortuous journeys, I was ridiculed, spat at and beaten up. My head had been used as a football in the playground, and a cricket bat swung at it in an experiment to see how much damage could be done to it. I was paying the price of being different. My parents were loving but poor. Although frequently washed, my school blazer always showed faint traces of the chalked branding applied to it by bullies and evidence of the rivers of spit which had run down it. I never had the courage to explain why I frequently came home in this condition or how I felt. I never could explain why I found excluding myself from society, missing years of schooling through truanting and even trying to kill myself, was preferable to facing any more of this torment. Although I didnāt know it at the time, I was the victim of acts which latterly became broadly recognised as hate crimes.
Aside from being an astronaut, my other dream was to be a train driver. Then, the standard required to complete the application form was low, low enough for me to be accepted. I later became a train driver/instructorāthe dream job. I had a long career in public transport at all levels, and I had seen the public at its best and its drunken worst. I had been instrumental in the deaths of two people who used my train as a tool for suicide. I had also been an incident manager where I witnessed many incidents including those of hate crimes against disabled peopleāsome with horrific outcomes. Other roles included designing and delivering equality and inclusion training. Following retirement, I became a criminologist and was later appointed as a Lead Coordinator of the Disability Hate Crime Network in the UK. These life-events had ignited a passion to research the topic of disability hate crime (DHC). Through this book, I hope to take you on a journey from a rudimentary understanding of hate crime and the concept of disability to finding out how this research was undertaken. In doing so, I will share my findings to reveal the horror of everyday abuse on UK public transport. I will also disclose that those who are charged with safeguarding disabled people using public transport in the UK have mainly been failing to do so, a factor which has led to some people choosing to exclude themselves from society rather than face the wrath of this everyday abuse. Having been a victim, it would be a reasonable aspiration to want to research the entire geography of where hostility towards disabled people occurs. However, this would have been inconceivable for a solo, self-funded researcher. Instead, the social microcosm of public transport not only provided a familiar environment for me to study but also one which could be representative of other public theatres where abuse takes place.
1.2 The Research
Aside from the personal motivation for this research, there is a wider need. Academics have focused relatively little on disability hate crime and have not concerned themselves with hate crime on public transport (Chakraborti 2015). This is despite these spaces being recognised as risk-laden environments for those who are perceived to be different (Equality and Human Rights Commission [EHRC] 2011; Home Office 2016). The research that I undertook was through a PhD project in 2017ā19 which aimed to develop a nuanced understanding of how disability hate crime (DHC) is experienced on public transport. I thought I knew what it was to be a victim, but this research journey was to unveil so much else.
The research objectives were:
- To consider the dynamics between victims, perpetrators and bystanders on public transport.
- To assess which public transport modes pose a greater risk for victims of DHC.
- To explore the impacts of DHC on public transport.
- To examine the ways in which public transport providers and front-line staff respond to DHC on public transport.
- To use research evidence to develop a series of recommendations for policy and practice to improve responses to DHC on public transport.
1.3 What Is Hate Crime?
Often discussed and derided but little understood there is a need to understand what hate crime is. One academic definition of hate crime is:
Or we could use the UK police definition hate incident, a hate crime being one which additionally incurs a criminal offence having been conducted:Acts of violence, hostility and intimidation directed towards people because of their identity or perceived ādifferenceā . (Chakraborti et al. 2014)
At the time that this book is being written in 2019, in the UK, a nation where hate crime is beginning to be understood and accepted, there are five recognised and monitored strands of hate crime (CoP 2014). These are sexual orientation hate crime, transgender hate crime, racial hate crime, religious hate crime and disability or disablist hate crime.1 Each of these strands continues to be susceptible to hostility, and therefore, they deserve additional protection from society. These strands are categorisations which apply and provide consistency across the UK police and criminal justice agencies (Home Office 2016). Such typification should ensure that hate offences are flagged, that is distinguished, from the moment of reporting to the police, through the charging process, to the courtroom. Police guidance in the UK advises police officers to record the incident as a hate crime if so demanded by the complainant (CoP 2014). This flagging is designed to raise awareness of the higher personal impact which potentially befalls the victim and to signal, later in the process, the higher sentencing provisions which are available to the judiciary. There has been much progress concerning legislation in the UK including the availability of sentencing uplifts in court if disability hate motivation is proven. There is also realisation that this legislation does not go far enough and this has led to a review of that law by the UK-based professional body of legal professionals The Law Commission, which commenced in 2019.Any incident, which may or may not constitute a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by hostility or prejudice. (College of Policing [CoP] 2014:3ā4)
Despite such progress, not all offences are recorded as hate offences. The term hate crime is not always a readily accepted one. In the 1990s, when hate crime was developing as a concept in the US, Jacobs and Potter (1997) were presenting an antithesis to any particular recognition of hate crime. They argued that hate crimes would be difficult to distinguish, to prosecute, and that hate motivations would be problematic to ascertain. Indeed, to prove that a hate offence has been enacted in the UK needs more than merely a suspicion. Instead, a definite indication in the actions or language of the offender is needed to illustrate hate motivation. Indeed, the word hate itself may be problematic. The words bias or prejudice may inform this area of offending more. Nonetheless, in the UK, the notification of a hate incident or crime is one initiated by the victim or witness, and the police are obliged to record it as such.
But to focus entirely on purely formal definitions would be to limit our understanding of hate crime to prescribed proclamations. To do so would be to obscure the emotion, the anger and the fear that hate crimes produce. As I know to my cost, to be a victim of a hate attack is to have your very identity challenged and ridiculed. Everything that you are, or have striven to achieve, becomes the target of someone elseās mission to humiliate, frighten and destabilise you. It feels like your abusers are destroying any value which you have to societyāto satisfy their gratification. The result of this is that it wears you down. You start to believe what they say that you have no value, no use and no purpose. There ultimately becomes no point in you continuing to live. These attacks could happen to anyone who is perceived as being different; that difference is the spur to acts of personal and caustic condemnation.
So why do hate crimes deserve a specific focus? Hate crimes are personal; they are a direct attack on a personās identity. Whilst the theft of a car or stealing money might produce material benefits for the thief, a hate attack is a direct attempt to assault a personās identity and devalue them and their humanity. As well as the attack on an individualās characteristics, evidence shows that hate crimes are often everyday occurrences. Not necessarily spawned from hatred, but instead they can be the...