Tackling disability hate crime

Helping people with disabilities challenge hate crime

When Jane Dellow, an independent learning disabilities consultant, started looking in 1997 at how to support people with learning disabilities who experience hate crime, few recognised it as a problem.

“People with learning disabilities accepted crime or harassment; they thought it was part of their lot,” she says.

She began work on the issue after a colleague with learning disabilities was attacked and hospitalised and she discovered verbal and physical abuse was also going on locally.

Through People in Partnership (PIP), a partnership of local statutory and voluntary organisations including Hertfordshire Police, Hertfordshire Council and local
people with learning disabilities, Dellow helped devise a series of workshops to inform and share good practice about how people with learning disabilities can respond to verbal abuse, bullying and harassment.

In 2003, a £30,000 grant from the police and council enabled PIP to develop its work into a pack for use across the county. The pack was designed with and for people with learning disabilities. It uses easy words, pictures and a CD to explain their rights and the laws on disabilities and offers personal safety tools and information to help crime reporting. It also contains a disability hate crime reporting form.

It has become increasingly common for victims of disability hate crime to be able to report what has happened to them at places other than police stations, such as housing associations.

But Lewis Turner, hate crimes officer at Wyre Council in Lancashire, says: “The original idea that people would come flooding in hasn’t happened.”

Turner has broadened the number of sites in the borough where people can report hate crime. He has also trained people most in contact with disabled people, such as benefits advisers and those working in housing standards, to spot the signs of a hate crime.

“If disabled people are already going to an agency then they could report it there, and we’ve now trained the people in those agencies to be pro-active.”

There was a rise in the reported level of disability hate crime in the borough of 57% in the first year of the project.

There is often a gap between the agencies that work with disabled people and those responsible for local policing, so a group of organisations has devised a training pack and good practice guide to help agencies work together.

Samantha Clark, director of Inclusion North, which supports learning disability partnership boards (LDPBs) and helped to create the Learning Together pack, says: “One of the themes is do this with someone. The good practice guide is full of advice, such as on how to create more accessible reporting with easier forms, staff training, and examples of good victim support.”

The project was given about £27,000 from the Home Office’s Victim’s Fund, and a copy of the training pack was sent to every LDPB and crime and disorder reduction partnership in the country, as well as every advocacy group they could find.

This article appeared in the 26th February issue under the headline “Alert to the danger signs”