Published on 12, July, 2020
After several years of repeated harrassment from chavs including three physical assaults that the police have refused to properly investigate to imprison the perpetrators, I am at my wits end in finding a solution. How do we get police to properly treat the crimes the chavs commit against disabled people as actual crimes worth investigations that see through to the end and imprison or otherwise punish chavs to create a effective deterrent to further crimes?
Sadly it seems that after Owen Jones published his ablest scrawl "Chavs", no one dares to make chavs account for their crimes.
(For those not in the know: Chavs are uncouth, low-class-acting people, the worse of which are responsible for the deaths and murders of Fiona Pilkington, Sophie Lancaster, Christine Lakinski, Gemma Hayter, Steven Simpson and many, many other disabled/minority people. They usually hang around in large gangs, on the look out for opportunistic crimes to commit, wearing tracksuits no matter the weather or what activity they're doing. They are often drunk and use illegal drugs.)
Location is certainly a factor. Deprived areas are often where the housing is available for the disabled who need social housing provision. They are also the more likely areas for such abuse to occur. I don't think it is universally true - you do come across harrassment of the disabled in "better" neighbourhoods as well.
There is a tendancy with some local authorities to put all the special needs people in one block of apartments or one group of maisonettes or whatever is available. Quite why they think this either practical or morally defensible I do not fathom. It makes the disabled collectively a target.
The other factor though lies in estate design, the award winning layouts of social housing schemes in circles and cul-de-sacs, with maybe only one central row of shops and one or two main entrance routes. It means those who are more vulnerable in society have to access services by walking along the routes where they are most likely to be attacked.
However I don't subscribe to this idea of some master plan to control the populace. It usually evolves from poor administration, short-sighted planning and inadequacy of social services. It just sort of gets that way through general indifference and incompetence.
Where people try to create a safer community and get backing, things often improve. But in the current recession the opportunities for this are fewer.
I am in no doubt though that there is a high incidence of harassment and abuse of disabled people generally, but especially if they look or act differently, into which context many people on the autistic spectrum are likely to find themselves.
I've been on many committees looking into these things and it is invariably because those with special needs end up in bad housing areas where such abuses go on, the the police seem tardy in doing anytrhing about it. But I look on it as a matter of gross neglect by those paid to govern us safely, rather than some high level grand plan to control us. Few grand plans go to plan....
I certainly don't condone this idea of "maybe you should buy a knife" being likely to do any good. If you are a target for abuse for being different, you aren't going to be better off trying to use weapons.