Hate Crimes vs. Regular Crimes and Issues of Reporting

by Dora Raymaker · 2009-07-08 16:00:00 UTC
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From BBC News, a charity in Wales has been investigating hate crimes against disabled people. The conclusion: more hate crimes happen than are reported, hate crimes are less often recognized for what they really are, and people who have committed hate crimes are getting lighter sentences than they deserve. Sound like some common themes from this post, and this post, and this post, and this post?

From the story it sounds like Wales (and if anyone more local to Wales is reading this please correct me if I'm wrong) has a much better anti-hate crimes policy than the U.S. (hopefully we'll have better soon). And yet, this has done little good when violence or abuse are not being reported as hate crimes, even when they are being reported at all. Hate crimes as in the abuse was done specifically because the person has a disability.

Some reasons for this cited in the article are the difficulty in recognizing that abuse was done because the person is disabled, lack of the victim being able to report the abuse as a hate crime, and lack of hate crimes education on the part of law enforcement.

Of course it would be best if the reasons for hate crimes would go away and there would be a greater acceptance of diversity in the world. However, until then, in addition to solid anti-hate crimes legislation, we need solid education for both potential victims and law enforcement of what hate crimes against people with disabilities look like.

Dora Raymaker
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