Violence, Bias and People with Disabilities: An Introduction to Disablist Hate Crime Research

Abstract

Violence against disabled people has recently been recognised as an important, albeit neglected research topic. Drawing attention to violence motivated by anti-disability bias, this article offers an introduction to research on disablist hate crime. First, it presents a conceptualisation of hate crime and explains such concepts as disablism and ableism. Second, it discusses the concept of disability/disablist hate crime and analyses four areas that reflect the multifaceted nature of disability hate crime research and the social applications of the concept, ranging from conceptual issues to empirical findings, to political implications. These issues are:(1) vulnerability (a strongly criticised belief that people with disabilities are susceptible to victimisation because of 'their' disabilities); ( 2) invisibility (the under-representation of disablist violence in police statistics); (3) risk (individual and social factors that produce situational vulnerabilities to disablist hate crime); and (4) intervention (measures suggested to prevent disablist hate crime, including the hate crime legislation). Possible future directions of research are outlined in the conclusion.