Policy Futurities of Disability Hate and Hostility: Reflections from Two Jurisdictions

This chapter explores the limits and potentialities of future hate crime policy in addressing disablist hate and hostility in two jurisdictions, England and Wales, and Ireland. Despite having radically different policy trajectories, I explore how both jurisdictions grapple with ongoing legislative dilemmas about the positioning of disabled people as a protected group in hate crime policy, and understandings of hate in the context of disability. The chapter asks what the role of hate crime legislation should be in policy futures where disabled people continue to experience stigmatising attitudes and exclusions from within the criminal justice system itself, and indeed wider society. Drawing on critical discussions of hate crime which recognise it as situated and relational, the chapter calls for an acknowledgement of the wider socio-political relations within which hate crime policy is produced and enacted, and the ongoing structural inequalities which contribute to experiences of hostility in disabled people's lives.