Defying the Label

Episode Synopsis

Adam Pearson is on a mission to explore disability hate crime - to find out why it is under-reported, under-recorded and under the radar. Adam challenges people to question their own attitudes towards disability and disfigurement, to try and uncover the roots of the issue. He has neurofibromatosis type 1, a condition that causes benign tumours to grow on nerve endings - in Adam's case, on his face. He is disfigured and disabled and has experienced disability hate crime first-hand, like a number of his friends, some of whom he meets with in the film. Their stories differ, but their disability as the motivating factor is constant, and just days into his investigation, Adam becomes the target of some grossly offensive online hate speech. For the first time Adam decides to take action, reporting it to the police – with some unexpected outcomes. Undeterred, he looks to understand the laws specific to disability hate crime, and finds that a mixture of ignorance and inequalities mean that these crimes often don’t make it to our courts, or are sentenced less severely than other hate crimes when they do. Adam looks to uncover what attitudes and influences may cause people to commit disability hate crimes in the first place, questioning whether the portrayal of disfigurement and disability in the media, for example, could be leading us to associate disabled people with being ‘the bad guys’. With help from Miles Hewstone, Professor of Social Psychology, University of Oxford, Adam conducts an experiment measuring people's innate prejudice towards disfigurement, which gives some shocking results, and leads him to question if he alone can hope to affect a change – and if so, how?