• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About DNS
  • Subscribe to DNS
  • Advertise with DNS
  • Support DNS
  • Contact DNS

Disability News Service

the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues

  • Home
  • Independent Living
    • Arts, Culture and Sport
    • Crime
    • Education
    • Employment
    • Housing
    • Transport
  • Activism & Campaigning
  • Benefits & Poverty
  • Politics
  • Human Rights
You are here: Home / Crime / Actor’s horror as disability hate crime ‘comes knocking on the door’
Cherylee Houston head and shoulders as character Izzy Armstrong

Actor’s horror as disability hate crime ‘comes knocking on the door’

By John Pring on 13th November 2015 Category: Crime

Listen

A leading disability hate crime campaigner has blamed the government’s anti-benefits rhetoric for a verbal attack on the partner of a wheelchair-using Coronation Street actor.

Cherylee Houston, who plays Izzy Armstrong in the soap, revealed on Twitter this week that a stranger had knocked on her door while she was out and told her partner that she was a “benefits cheat”.

She tweeted: “Wow disability hate crime knocked on our front door today literally. Scary as shows how much our country’s instinct is to hate not think.”

The man had apparently seen Houston, who has a fluctuating condition, walk a few steps to her wheelchair.

He told her partner that he had taken a photograph of her and was going to report her because she was “on the fiddle”.

Houston tweeted: “He was very rude to Toby and obviously disgusted that I wasn’t paralysed. Said it wasn’t right and he was going to papers. Vile. Ignorant.”

Following support from other Twitter-users, she said she was “a little shaken” after being told by her partner what had happened.

Anne Novis, a coordinator of the Disability Hate Crime Network, and the independent chair of the Metropolitan police’s disability hate crime working group, said: “It is evidence of what we have been saying for the last 10 years.

“Although we had some of this [type of hate crime] at lower levels previously, we have seen a lot more since the coalition’s welfare reforms, using the language of government ministers and the cuts to attack disabled people.

“The scapegoating mentality we get from ministers and some media articles seems to give permission to the general public to say the same things.”

She said that if ministers, who were supposed to be “role models”, were describing disabled people as “unsustainable”, that kind of language was “going to be used against us”.

Novis said it was common for people to think that wheelchair-users cannot walk at all, even though most – like Houston – can walk at least a few steps.

Share this post:

Share on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on WhatsAppShare on Reddit

Tags: Anne Novis Cherylee Houston Coronation Street Disability hate crime Disability Hate Crime Network Izzy Armstrong

Related

Documentary exposes hostility… and a need for widespread change in attitudes
21st January 2021
Silence from police chiefs over ‘very worrying’ hate crime failure
22nd October 2020
Disability hate crime prosecutions plummet, while Home Office stays silent
15th October 2020

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

ONS suggests NHS disability discrimination may have increased risk of COVID deaths

DWP records ‘show Tomlinson is either a liar or a fantasist’ over engagement claims

Audio recording option set to be introduced for all PIP assessments, says DWP

Tomlinson faces third angry letter from DPOs over ‘shambolic’ national disability survey

Guarded response to health and social care white paper

Campaigners seek urgent support for amendments to domestic abuse bill

Government’s pandemic failings have led to ‘bleak picture of marginalisation’

Secret report casts doubt on DWP’s ‘no duty of care’ claim

Disability Unit accused of ‘shameful manipulation’ over disability strategy note

Autistic activist tells MPs of ‘brutal… aggressive… sink or swim’ support system

Advice and Information

DWP: The case for the prosecution

Readspeaker

Footer

The International Standard Serial Number for Disability News Service is: ISSN 2398-8924

  • Accessibility Statement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site map
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2021 Disability News Service

Site development by A Bright Clear Web