By Joanna Perry, Strategic Development Manager at Victim Support, Values Into Action Board member, and ally of the disability civil rights movement.
The access to criminal justice debate has been a long time coming to the disability rights movement. Violence against disabled people both indoors and out is widespread and often serious yet, apart from a few important pieces of campaigning linking people’s experience of violence to actual criminal acts, activists, researchers and governments alike haven’t taken the necessary steps to assess the violence disabled people experience and redress the unequal access to justice and protection they face.
But the tide is changing, and these are exciting times for people who are passionate about achieving equal access to justice and protection for all. The recommendations set out in the DRC’s Building Safer, Stronger Communities paper signal the wave of opinion that violence against disabled people needs to be researched and the barriers to justice caused or exacerbated by policy and practice removed. Section 146 Criminal Justice Act 2003 provides for tougher punishments where it is proven that a criminal act was motivated by hostility towards a person’s (perceived) disability. The Crown Prosecution Service launched its disability hate crime policy earlier this year and the Home Office has been investigating the extent and nature of violence experienced by disabled people as part of its Race for Justice work. Also Ivan Lewis, Minister for Care Services, has announced that No Secrets, the key policy governing the protection of so called vulnerable people - and ultimately their access to justice - is to be reviewed.
But of course we know that reviewing a few policies and passing a few laws won’t eliminate pervasive violence and provide a bridge to justice that has been denied for so long. If the recommendations set out by the DRC are to be achieved, this will need a truly cross government approach, and the disability rights movement must be at the center of this work. The wider causes of violence against disabled people need to be examined and the wealth of good practice that is around to tackle it as well as support people in its aftermath must be brought together. How disabled people’s experience of violence fits with existing policies and programmes designed to tackle sexual violence, domestic violence, anti social behaviour, street crime, hate crime (I could go on!) must be explored. For example, is the violence experienced by people in registered care settings (a registered care setting is still someone’s home) a type of domestic violence? Or should this violence be viewed as a care standards issue, primarily a matter of staff conduct? Or does there need to be another approach altogether? I truly subscribe to the DRC’s position that no person is inherently vulnerable (as disabled people are often described) but that it is situations such as where someone lives or the relationships she or he has that make him or her so. Perhaps we should be asking what work needs to be done to prevent the creation of such situations and settings?
The new Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR) could be particularly influential in posing and answering such questions. Indeed the End Violence Against Women Coalition has pointed out that violence across the equality strands is the ‘exemplar of poor relations’ and therefore a necessary priority for the CEHR. The coalition compellingly argues that the Commission should consider how it will address violence, safety and security from a cross equality perspective that is embedded in human rights values. I agree and believe that this work must ensure that government policies and programmes as well as services on the ground do not exacerbate vulnerability but instead enable people to do what they want with their lives without fear of harassment and crime across the equality strands, while recognizing that people’s backgrounds and lives are complex and multifaceted. This is work that is important to all of us.