Don't Ask, Tell or Respond: Silent Acceptance of Disability Hate Crimes

Abstract

My plan for this talk is to clarify our understandings of hate crimes as a concept, to outline the FBI data on disability hate crimes, and then to develop various explanations of this data. But before I do this I want to set the scene. When I think of disability hate crimes I am reminded of the song “Mister Cellophane” from the musical Chicago. Disability hate crimes could be regarded as ‘cellophane crimes’: people walk right through them, look right through them, and never know they are there. In Somerville, Massachusetts on October 24th, 2 deaf girls were raped by gang members. One of these girls had cerebral palsy. A few weeks later then on Saturday 9th of November, another deaf girl was raped, again by gang members. Again, this week, another deaf woman was raped in the Boston area. While I don’t wish to examine any of these cases in particular, I want to raise the question: when the circumstances indicate that such crimes may be neither random nor circumstantial, why has no one suggested these may be hate crimes? I suspect it has something to do with the absence of disability awareness in critical approaches to society. In the words of Lennard Davis (1995:1) disability is “the missing term in the race, class gender triad”. As a result of this absence, disability was not a category which has been automatically included in discussions of hate crime. Even today, many discussions of hate crime completely ignore the issue of disability. For instance, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law by Frederick Lawrence (1999), acknowledges that bias crimes occur on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sexual orientation and gender but notably omits disability. Before I pursue this argument, however, I want to clarify what I mean by “hate crime”.

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