Towards Safe(r)space: Disability and everyday spaces of un/safety and hostility in Ireland

In recent years, there has been a growing international recognition of the disproportionate experience of hostility, violence and hate crime as it is experienced by people with disabilities. However, we know less about how fear and/or experience of hostility affects how people with disabilities navigate their everyday lives and places in the community, or how they engage in strategies to promote safety, and negotiate
between feelings of safety and unsafety in different spaces.
This report provides findings from a two year study (2017-2019) funded by the Irish Research Council entitled Disability and the Creation of Safer Space (or SAFE(R)SPACE), which explores how fear and/or experience of hostility impact on disabled people’s everyday lives and the spaces that they use and move through. It also explores how practitioners working in the area of community safety, planning, and disability services understand and respond to issues of hostility and community safety, and how we might promote safe(r) spaces for people with disabilities. In exploring people with disabilities’ everyday geographies of un/safety, the SAFE(R)SPACE study explores how space and place matter in making sense of people with disabilities’ perceptions and encounters with hostility and un/safety. It draws from geographical thinking that understands space and place as central in making up our identities, and to the experience of impairment. Relationships between disability, space and un/safety are complex: people with disabilities have often been marginalised from different spaces due to a range of barriers (inaccessible design, or lack of communication supports, for example), or have been told by ‘concerned others’ that they should not be in certain types of spaces. Places themselves are often constructed to be ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ in societal discourses, but these perceptions have very real consequences for how, and whether, people use these spaces. The SAFE(R)SPACE study begins from the premise that inhabiting and accessing space is a right in and of itself: all people with disabilities should have a right to access – and feel safe in – spaces and places in the same ways as everyone else.