• 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 / News Archive / Labour conference: Shadow minister calls for action on harassment

Labour conference: Shadow minister calls for action on harassment

By guest on 2nd September 2011 Category: News Archive

Listen

A shadow minister has backed calls by disabled activists for new measures to tackle the harassment of disabled people.

Fiona Mactaggart, Labour’s shadow equalities minister, spoke out following the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) major report into disability-related harassment.

She told Disability News Service that addressing the problem of “bullying and harassment” had to be a key priority for her party, so that disabled people could “feel on equal terms in society”.

She said: “It is so unacceptable and we need to find ways of more effectively punishing perpetrators.

“If you are scared of being a victim it stops you playing an equal part in society. Fear limits your capacity to do things, or your willingness to attempt to do things.”

Mactaggart said she believed that the report showed there was probably a need for a new offence of incitement to commit a crime on the basis of disability-related hostility, as there is for incitement on the basis of racial or religious hatred.

The shadow minister said she believed that trying to change society – as campaigners did to tackle sexism – would not be enough.

She said: “We have got to have something stronger. You can’t just do it through social action.”

She said many police forces did not appear to have a strategy for effectively prosecuting the perpetrators of disability-related harassment.

She added: “At the moment, the police strategy [in some forces] is ‘cross your fingers and hope it will go away’.”

Mactaggart said there was a need for a new specialist unit within police forces that would focus on disability-related harassment and disability hate crime, which would liaise with disabled people’s groups, educate frontline police officers and have a “strategic attitude” to prosecuting such offences.

She added: “The EHRC report really does show that where there is some of this expertise and working in partnership, these issues are much more effectively dealt with than in places where there is not.”

28 September 2011

Share this post:

TwitterFacebookWhatsAppReddit

Related

‘Muddled’ blue badge reforms ‘are to blame for renewal delays’
6th February 2015
UN debate will be reminder of true inclusive education
6th February 2015
IDS breaks pledge on PIP waiting-times, as tens of thousands still queue for months
30th January 2015

Primary Sidebar

Access

Latest Stories

Disabled high-rise leaseholders are living in post-Grenfell fear of fire and financial ruin

Disabled people highlight scores of lockdown concerns

Regulator investigates DWP over universal credit ‘cover-up’

Tomlinson held just a handful of external meetings every month early in pandemic

US retail giant faces legal action over new face covering rule

Minister allows transport industry its fourth exemption from access laws

Government’s pandemic failings caused us ‘horrendous’ challenges, say DPOs

Watchdog has approved care settings for COVID patients in only three-fifths of areas

High court is asked to order fresh inquest into death of Jodey Whiting

MPs call for inquiry into government’s role in COVID deaths of disabled people

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