A Little Respect.

Tanni Grey-Thompson, the former Paralympic athlete now in the Lords, spoke to the Telegraph about a recent experience on a train, when she was forced to throw her chair to the platform and crawl off the train because there was no one to help her on the platform or train:

‘As a disabled person travelling you always have an element of fear, feeling very uncomfortable, of panic, of just wondering whether you’re going to get off. I think it is fair to say that a lot of disabled people feel like second class passengers because they don’t have the same treatment as everyone else. I don’t expect to be swept in to first class and treated better than everyone else – I expect to have the same experience, and that is often just not the case.’

Pretty fair, I’d say. What do Daily Mail commenters have to say?

I used to be very sympathetic to people like this lady, but after having numerous incidents where disabled people behaved in a most arrogant and demanding manner including queue jumping, and using their disability to get preferential holiday time I just let em get on with life. They demanded and rightly received equality in law, so I just treat them the same as everyone else now. – Parent, Co Durham AGREE 100%,. best made point of the day. These people cannot have it both ways. Very very well said.
- Jonathon, N.London, 26/3/2012 10:45

Oh.

We have been hearing for years that everyone is equal, now she wants special treatment the cry is different. I always help if I can, but more times than I care to remember, the disabled person has given me abuse for trying to help them……..you can’t have it both ways.
- James 001, West of Nowhere, 26/3/2012 10:52

Right.

The huge cost that disability has added to everyone’s burden over recent years doesn’t help public sympathy for you. Also you can afford any means of transport and help, why expect it? Your outdated romantic view of charity is your problem; and lets face it how long before it’s illegal not to help?
- Andy, Bath, 26/3/2012 10:49

Illegal not to help. Tyranny.

I find it odd that this Woman expects to be treated the same as everyone else.Yet as far as I can see she has been as no one helps able bodied people either. She’s received exactly as she asked for.What she is in fact demanding is special attention and moaning about not getting it.
- Andy, Norway, 26/3/2012 11:25

Thanks, “Andy”

If one is disabled it is important to organise ones life more prudently. Getting off a train at midnight is not the best of an idea. May I humbly suggest that too many disadvantaged people expect everything to be handed to them on a plate , and that there could be a slight degree of arrogance involved.
- Malachy, Belfast, 26/3/2012 12:17

The arrogance of crawling unassisted off a train at midnight.

she did get the same treatment as every one else. know one helps me of the train
- Sue Previsor, Doncaster CC HSE, 26/3/2012 12:17

Are you in a wheelchair, Sue? Or just allergic to logic?

It may not be PC but the railways and the underground are not a taxi service. The staff when available are always unfailingly considering of disabled people but they cannot be expected to provide a continuous butler service to everybody who travels. If we equipped all train to cope with someone with Ms G-T’s disabilities why should it end there? What about people who cannot even move at all? or speak or live without apparatus? The sad fact of life is you can only go so far to accommodate diabilities. You cannot put an escalator up Everest.
- Andy, Portsmouth, 26/3/2012 12:28

You want to live a life that doesn’t involve abject humiliation when commuting? PC gone mad.

Hang on. These people fought for equal rights. And rightly got them. They are entitled to equal pay, equal everything as far as I can see. When they have a bad experience they run to the papers. I only ever see tanni in the papers when she is rubbishing able bodied people. If i was to rubbish disabled people the way she is complaining about able-bodied people there would be holy war. Where are my equal rights??????
- Luca, France, 26/3/2012 12:35

I don’t know about you, but I get the impression Luca’s a white, straight bloke. What about his equal rights?

Dear DM. I had a bad experience at Croke Park recently. I didnt get priority booking. I didnt get priority seating. I didnt get parking at the front door. Nobody held the door open for me. Nobody carried my food and drink for me. please please will you write a story about me – you did a story about this lady so its only fair – I think they call it equality.
- Patrick, Leinster, 26/3/2012 12:38

Oh, Patrick, poor love. Buy a new dictionary.

What about able bodied men in this world. Where have our rights gone ?
- Arthur, Stoke, 26/3/2012 12:46

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh god, my soul has died.

And she is a Baroness because??? 11 gold medals does not justify a title!– Pete, Midlands, UK (not EU), 26/3/2012 12:15——————And the ironic thing is that they do not race in ‘wheelchairs’ – they are specially built very expensive machines that make it extremely easy to race. Where is the achievement in that ? I would like to see them race in actual wheelchairs.
- Sam, Manchester, 26/3/2012 13:15

Would you, Sam?

They could put a little cattle type wagon with a big ramp on the back of every train where all the wheelies can travel together so they don’t feel so different. – Bill, NY, 26/3/2012

Thanks, Bill. Nothing screams inclusivity like being hidden in a cattle wagon and called “wheelies”.

And yes, it’s easy to roll your eyes and say the bottom half of the Internet isn’t representative of public opinion. But the Daily Mail do moderate their comments, and the ones above are those that have been deemed inoffensive enough to stay up. Several comments, since taken down, suggested that wheelchair users lead a cushy life, and that they should be made to wait until no able-bodied people need serving in a supermarket or post-office because they have a “comfy chair” that able-bodied people are denied. I’ve had enough bad experiences on public transport, when I’ve had seizures and people have left me for three stops before calling for help, or the time a bus driver who refused to stop was chased by an ambulance and screamed at by a doctor on board, to know that these opinions are common. So really, it’s no wonder the government’s onslaught on disability rights is moving on apace.

Save York Gardens Library

“What is more important than anything else in a library is the fact that it exists” – Archibald Macleish

Wandsworth Council, as part of the cuts falling  from the Comprehensive Spending Review, are considering closing York Gardens Library. York Gardens Library is in the most deprived ward in Wandsworth: Latchmere. I live less than a mile away, in the least deprived ward in Wandsworth: Northcote. With this in mind, I had a look at the council’s equality impact assessment.

Battersea, Battersea Park and Northcote libraries are included since they are the three nearest libraries and the council argue that if York Gardens closes, people will simply travel to their nearest library instead. Wandsworth council’s own equality impact assessment highlights that York Gardens has three times as many black users than the borough average, and 7.5 times as many as nearby Northcote library. This is the case all the more for children and young people. The equality impact assessment states:

“Usage of the Library reflects the character of the surrounding population, where people of non British white ethnicity, mixed ethnicity, Asian and Black African and Caribbean ethnicity accounted for 51% of the population in 2001. These groups make more use of the Library than white British people. The use of the Library by Black African and Caribbean people is particularly noticeable.”

I don’t even have to make an argument here. The council’s data speaks for itself. The same applies to women, and those with disabilities (especially learning disabilities):

More women use the library than the borough average, and four times as many users have a learning disability than the borough average – eight times as many as in my ward.

Aside from demographic statistics, the most convincing, and heartbreaking argument to save York Gardens comes from the survey of why people use the library. Apologies for the deluge of bulletpoints, but this is all vital:

“York Gardens library is particularly important to children compared to other libraries. Children and Young People using this library are also appreciably older than those using other libraries – 50% are in the 11 – 15 yr age group compared to the borough figure of 19%. The comparable figure for Northcote library is 11%.

• 45% of children visiting York Gardens library came with friends or on their own compared to a borough average of 18%, reflecting the neighbourhood character of the library that it is accessible from local housing without crossing any major roads and the older age profile using this library. Using the alternative libraries would involve journeys along and across busy main roads.

• 40% of children come to use a computer compared to a borough average of 19%. [Northcote Library10%] and of those 48% use them specifically for homework compared to 22% in the borough at large. [Northcote Library 7%].

• 49% of children and young people come to do homework compared to a borough average of 17% [Northcote Library 8%]

• 35% borrow books for homework (borough average 15%) and 41% because ‘I want to get better at reading’ (borough average 30%) [Northcote Library 6% and 20%]

• 49% of those who use the library to do their homework do so because it provides somewhere quiet to work [Northcote Library 10%]. Other answers to this question reinforce the importance of the library as a resource for studying.

• 59% of children and young people considered the library had helped them to do better at school [Northcote Library 15%] – the highest response of any library in the borough.”

So to summarise, York Gardens library is used heavily by teenagers, especially black teenagers, who use it for schoolwork, to feel better about themselves by reading, and to use computers. They often go with friends, highlighting the importance of the library to the community and the nearby Kambala estate. Closing York Gardens would mean the children and young people who use it would have to travel further, across busy main roads, to areas of the borough they are unfamiliar with, instead of doing homework with their friends in the evening. Were Northcote library to close, I honestly think the impact on the children nearby would be minimal. Were Northcote chosen, however, the very vocal, savvy affluent residents would secure maximum coverage for such a closure. Northcote residents needn’t worry, though. Wandsworth Council spent £13m on building them a free school only last month.  Closing York Gardens will save the council a mere £219,000. If they do so, they will have to provide an outreach service, taking the savings down to £127,000. This would cause council tax to rise by less than a pound a year. Even that is irrelevant, however: Eric Pickles slammed Wandsworth council recently for hoarding £105m in reserves. The council are victimising the poorest in the borough, to make ideological cuts, simply because they think Latchmere residents won’t put up a fight.

The best argument not to close York Gardens however, is the residents, in their own words.

If you can, join us tomorrow(Saturday 5th February), at 1pm for a Read-in to protest against the proposed closure.

Where Are The Headlines For Those Who Don’t Come Forward?

The Telegraph reports today that a woman was sentenced to 8 months in prison for falsely retracting a rape accusation. Not falsely accusing, falsely retracting a claim. The full story can be read here, and Rape Crisis’s statement here. Briefly, the woman went to the police, and reported that her husband had raped her 6 times on 3 occasions. Several months into the trial, she contacted the police to drop the charges. When the court proceeded, and she was arrested for perverting the course of justice, she admitted that the allegations had been true but she had been emotionally blackmailed by her husband’s family to drop the charges so he would receive a lesser penalty.

This story is chilling on a number of levels: it continues a trend of women being prosecuted when rape cases they have brought fail, and on a wider scale makes women far less likely to come forward. Unless you’re raped by a complete stranger in a dark alley, you can expect clouds of doubt, questions about your behaviour, and whether you brought it upon yourself. If you know, or even worse, you’ve dated or previously consented to sleep with your rapist, you can expect the sympathy to dwindle. If you had a drink beforehand, or were wearing, well practically anything, ditto. Stranger rape accounts for a small fraction of rapes reported, and yet it’s still viewed as a yardstick by which to judge how much someone has suffered. Never mind the emotional torment bound up in being raped by someone you’ve trusted, or even loved. Whoopi Goldberg was able to claim that Roman Polanski drugging and raping a minor wasn’t “rape rape” without much backlash.

And the way society views rape by someone who is known to you, and assumes that you could have prevented it, is massively damaging. I can count, from the top of my head, 11 women I know, myself included, who’ve been raped. They all knew their rapist, two-thirds were raped by an ex-boyfriend. None of them went to the police. It all came down to one reason: they knew they wouldn’t be believed, or if it did go to court would go nowhere due to lack of evidence. What evidence can you provide? Several of them had been drinking before being raped. Some had shared a room with the perpetrator. None of us felt able to go to the police. Perhaps most worrying is that two of them were law students.

I can’t see this getting any better under the current government with their grandstanding over anonymity for defendants in rape cases, and the fact that forces are now being pulled up for handling rape cases abysmally shows how rotten the system is. But I know that everytime the tabloids report and vilify a woman who’s been prosecuted, women read the story, and a large number decide there’s no point reporting rape.

As a friend asked recently: where are the headlines for women who don’t come forward, for fear of not being believed?

Your Freedom: A Cynic’s View

The government’s  Your Freedom site has attracted a fair amount of interest since its launch yesterday, and is the second high-profile public consultation since the formation of the coalition government. It’s an interesting concept, but despite the initial public interest, I suspect it will be as low impact as the consultation on cuts. Much as the spending cuts consultation framed the debate so that cuts were portrayed as inevitable, Your Freedom posits that scrapping legislation is the only way to secure civil liberties. This is patently not true in all cases: repealing the Human Rights Act, as a case in point. But essentially, that’s besides the point. The government have decided which laws to repeal or modify: they are using this exercise as a savvy way to give the impression of public inclusion in law-making. One contributer on the site described himself as a:

Long time voter; first time legislator.

depicting the manner in which the public are intended to view their role in this exercise. But contributing doesn’t make you a legislator: you’re not in government. Most of you probably didn’t vote for them either. The site is tokenistic, poorly designed and serves only as an exercise to make the government seem liberal and concerned with civil liberties whilst they refuse to intervene in the forced eviction of Democracy Village protesters that can be seen from MPs’ windows.

As much credibility could be gained, surely from looking at laws that garnered particularly intense backlash in the media and through protests, such as the extension of detention for terror suspects, certain SOCPA powers (especially regarding photography), the Digital Economy Bill and, I don’t know, the fact that several thousand people stood outside the coalition negotiations telling Nick Clegg not to give up on the prospect of electoral reform for a little power.

The site isn’t all bad though. Two people have called for the repeal of Sod’s Law and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The government may be stronger than we suspect if they can pull that off.

Photograph by Lewishamdreamer used under Creative Commons Licence.