Disability Hate Crimes

Disability hate crimes are a global problem. They are often violent and hyper-aggressive, with life-changing effects on victims, and they send consistent messages of intolerance and bigotry. This ground-breaking book shows that disability hate crimes do exist, that they have unique characteristics which distinguish them from other hate crimes, and that more effective policies and practices can and must be developed to respond and prevent them. With particular focus on the UK and USA's contrasting response to this issue, this book will help readers to define hate crimes as well as place them within their wider social context. It discusses the need for legislative recognition and essential improvements on the reporting of incidents and assistance for individual victims of these crimes, as well as the need to address the social exclusion of disabled people and the negative attitudes surrounding their condition.

This text provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of disability, hate crime and violence, exploring its emergence on the policy agenda. Engaging with debates in criminology, disability and violence studies, it looks at violences in their myriad forms as they are seen to impact upon disabled people's lives.

This book examines the experiences of disabled people on public transport to reveal the everyday abuses that many experience there, and the resilience that they need in order to conduct an ordinary life. This work represents an intertwining of personal journeys, with its author writing from first-hand experience, and now working as one of the leading researchers of disability hate crime (DHC) in the UK. DHC is an under-researched area and the findings in this book have implications beyond the public transport context. This book draws on a sample of 56 victim-participants and includes data drawn from public transport regulators, service operators and staff in the UK. Wilkin argues that established legislation needs to be recognised and implemented by regulatory and local authorities in order to reach equality objectives on public transport. Each chapter is clearly structured, accessibly written and includes key definitions which will speak to practitioners and academics with an interest in victimology, policing, social policy, gender studies, disability studies, migration studies, equality studies and religious studies. This book also examines how effectively authorities and service providers safeguard disabled people on UK public transport and reveals adaptive approaches to researching with disabled people.

This book, the first to specifically focus on disability hate speech, explains what disability hate speech is, why it is important, what laws regulate it (both online and in person) and how it is different from other forms of hate. Unfortunately, disability is often ignored or overlooked in academic, legal, political, and cultural analyses of the broader problem of hate speech. Its unique personal, ideological, economic, political and legal dimensions have not been recognized – until now. Disability hate speech is an everyday experience for many people, leaving terrible psycho-emotional scars. This book includes personal testimonies from victims discussing the personal impact of disability hate speech, explaining in detail how such hatred affects them. It also presents legal, historical, psychological, and cultural analyses, including the results of the first surveys and in-depth interviews ever conducted on this topic in some countries. This book makes a vital contribution to understanding disability hatred and prejudice, and will be of particular interest to those studying issues associated with hate speech, disability, psychology, law, and prejudice.

This book examines disability hate crime. It focusses on key questions concerning the ways in which hate is understood and experienced within the context of the everyday, in addition to the unique ways that hate can hurt and be resisted. It introduces readers to questions surrounding the conceptual framework of hate and policy context in England and Wales, and extends these discussions to center upon the experiences of disabled people. It presents a conceptual reconsideration of hate crime that connects hate, disability and everyday lives and spaces using an affective (embodied and emotional) understanding of these experiences. Drawing on empirical data, this framework helps to attend to the diverse ways that disabled people negotiate, respond to, and resist hate within the context of their everyday lives. The book argues that the affective capacity of disabled people can be enhanced through their reflections upon hateful experiences and general experiences of navigating a disabling social world. By working with the concept of ‘affective possibility’, this book offers a more affirmative approach to harnessing the everyday forms of resistance already present within disabled people’s lives. It speaks to academics, students, and practitioners interested in disability, affect studies, hate crime studies, sociology, and criminology.

Placing the experiences of victims at its heart, this book provides an authoritative overview of disability hate crime - explaining what it is, how it happens, its legal status, the impact on victims and how individuals and agencies should respond. The guide outlines innovative projects developed to address the problem, and provides tailored guidance for professionals spanning education, health and social care, and criminal justice. It also offers recommendations for effective multi-agency working. After highlighting the crimes committed against disabled people and society's failure to protect them, the book concludes with a powerful argument for cross-government action to improve professional practice and eliminate disability-motivated hate crime.

“Amid the ugly realities of contemporary America, American Hate affirms our courage and inspiration, opening a roadmap to reconciliation by means of the victims' own words.” —NPR Books “The collection offers possible solutions for how people, on their own or working with others, can confront hate.” —San Francisco Chronicle An NPR Best Book of 2018 A San Francisco Chronicle Books Pick One of Bitch Media's “13 Books Feminists Should Read in August” One of Paste Magazine's “The 10 Best Books of August 2018” A moving and timely collection of testimonials from people impacted by hate before and after the 2016 presidential election In American Hate: Survivors Speak Out, Arjun Singh Sethi, a community activist and civil rights lawyer, chronicles the stories of individuals affected by hate. In a series of powerful, unfiltered testimonials, survivors tell their stories in their own words and describe how the bigoted rhetoric and policies of the Trump administration have intensified bullying, discrimination, and even violence toward them and their communities. We hear from the family of Khalid Jabara, who was murdered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in August 2016 by a man who had previously harassed and threatened them because they were Arab American. Sethi brings us the story of Jeanette Vizguerra, an undocumented mother of four who took sanctuary in a Denver church in February 2017 because she feared deportation under Trump's cruel immigration enforcement regime. Sethi interviews Taylor Dumpson, a young black woman who was elected student body president at American University only to find nooses hanging across campus on her first day in office. We hear from many more people impacted by the Trump administration, including Native, black, Arab, Latinx, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, undocumented, refugee, transgender, queer, and people with disabilities. A necessary book for these times, American Hate explores this tragic moment in U.S. history by empowering survivors whose voices white supremacists and right-wing populist movements have tried to silence. It also provides ideas and practices for resistance that all of us can take to combat hate both now and in the future.