ABSTRACT

Compared with racist and religiously-motivated hate crime, hate crime against disabled people has attracted significantly less attention in policy, practice and academic research internationally. There is still a severe paucity of robust evidence in this area, and significant gaps that limit the extent to which meaningful comparisons may be made internationally. Petersilia’s observation in 2001 that much of the evidence “is not scientifically rigorous literature, consisting mostly of anecdotal evidence, data from convenience samples and non-random samples, and non-random programme evaluations” is still, unfortunately, valid (Petersilia, 2001: 658). Methods are not always reported in sufficient detail, or at all, to enable assessment of robustness and rigour. In addition, there is a paucity of material adopting comparative approaches (e.g. comparing different sub-groups of disabled people; comparing disabled and non-disabled people; comparing across different countries). This limits the extent to which we can assess the significance or generalisability of reported findings.