Understanding violence against disabled people

What do we mean by violence? What does violence mean in the lives of disabled people? In this chapter, I want to sift through some of the recent debate about violence and hate crime, and clarify ways of speaking about and responding to this most disturbing aspect of disabling social relations. As in other areas, I am keen to establish the science – what we feel most sure of – rather than get pulled into areas of theory and speculation. It is necessary to begin by defining terms, given that academic and

activist discourse has a tendency to escalate descriptions and to deploy the word ‘violence’ to describe a wider range of discriminatory or exclusionary processes experienced by disabled people, such as human rights violations in general, rather than restricting use of the word to examples of coercion or physical force. For example, poverty has sometimes been regarded as a form of violence (e.g. Chouinard, 2012). However, in this case, the word ‘violence’ seems to be used in a metaphorical sense, equated with ‘damage’ or ‘oppression’. Beyond the immediate attention-grabbing unfamiliarity of the word ‘violence’ applied to poverty, discrimination or other human rights violations (e.g. Goodley and Runswick-Cole, 2011), it does not seem to add to our understandings of those undoubtedly negative and damaging phenomena to call them violence. Violence has the important connotation that a person or group of people are very directly and intentionally exerting power over another person or group of people. Only if ‘violence’ is understood in a metaphorical way can the regimentation of pupils in a

school be understood as a form of violence (ibid.: 610). The danger of using ‘violence’ as a synonym for disciplinary processes in general is that it dilutes the concept and makes it harder to identify the extreme forms of violence that are unacceptable and damaging. In this chapter, I will draw on the public health approach to violence

developed by the WHO and the Violence Prevention Alliance. Here, violence is conceptualised in terms of five different forms:

physical sexual emotional financial neglect.