Sometimes, a news story leaves you feeling sick to the pit ofyour stomach; the murder of Gemma Hayter is one such instance. The27-year-old was beaten, tortured and humiliated before being leftto die. The case has caused outrage nationwide – rightly so – andit again shows how devastating disability hate crime can be. GemmaHayter is not the first person to die as a result of disabilityhate crime. In recent years, there have been several high profilecases involving people with learning disabilities; Fiona Pilkingtonand her daughter Francecca Hardwick, David Askew and Steven Hoskinto name but four. While they are extreme examples of hate crime,they all escalated from lower-level abuse, such as name-calling andbullying, that wasn’t dealt with effectively. It is this sort ofabuse that blights the lives of many people with learningdisabilities on a daily basis. On the same day as Gemma Hayter’smurderers were convicted, the Equality and Human Rights Commission(EHRC) released a report stating that people with learningdisabilities see harassment and abuse as an inevitable part of life. Worryingly, itseems to be on the rise; new figures show that disability hatecrimes rose by more than a fifth in 2010. Across England, Wales andNorthern Ireland, police recorded 1,569 incidents in which thevictim thought the alleged crime was motivated by their disability,compared with just 1,294 in 2009. However, many hate crimes stillgo unrecorded, either because they aren’t reported to the police,or are classified as something else, such as anti-social behaviour.So the real figure could be a lot higher. But there are initiativesout there to try and address this. For example, numerous localauthorities have recently launched schemes that give people withlearning disabilities cards which have contact numbers where theycan report hate crime. Elsewhere, Mencap’shigh-profile ‘Stand by me’ campaign has also engaged many policeforces across the country, with the aim of improving the police’sawareness of, and response to, disability hate crime. Engagingwith, and changing the attitudes of, policemen and women is crucial- the EHRC report says that all too often those who commit hatecrimes against people with disabilities get away with it. If peopleknew there were effective punishments, it would deter them fromdoing it. But perhaps more than anything we require a societalchange to tackle disability hate crime, and the casual harassmentand abuse that underpins it. We need to be ready to challengepeople who act in this way and give a strong message that it isunacceptable in any form. Prejudice of all sorts towards disabledpeople should be as socially unacceptable as homophobia, racism andsexism. And hate crime needs to be seen as a crime just like – andin some senses more serious – than any other. There also needs tobe a change in the public’s perception of people with learningdisabilities; the EHRC report says a more positive attitude towardsdisabled people needs to be engendered right across society. Weneed to flag up the positive contribution that people withdisabilities make to society, and get away from the talk of’burden’ – on benefits or families – which implies that they areworth less than other people. They aren’t and this needs to be putacross in the mainstream media. It will require a lot of time andwork, but this needs to be taken on, if cases like Gemma Hayter’sare to be prevented in the future.
