Bullying and Disability and Me

coffeeem suggested people talk about their experience of bullying as part of the It Gets Better Project's Spirit Day. I'm a day late with that, but bullying is something I've faced all too often.

I used to think that I got through junior school without facing any bullying, but realised a few years ago that in fact it was quite extensive and quite insidious, because it came not from the pupils, but from teachers acting out of ignorance. I was the clumsy kid always picked last for sports, nowadays we have a label for that, dyspraxia, but the teachers weren't aware of that, all they could see was someone whose handwriting was barely legible, no matter he was probably the smartest kid in school. And so they set out to force me to write neatly. I'm sorry, but for someone with dyspraxia asking them to write neatly is equivalent to asking someone with a mobility impairment to run 100m in 10s without their mobility aids; it's just not going to happen and you may make the situation worse. Which is precisely what happened, put a kid with dyspraxia under pressure to demonstrate the fine muscle control their nervous system isn't wired for and all they can do is grip the pen harder and harder until their muscles spasm. To this day, over 35 years later, I can't pick up a pen without my hand cramping around it within a sentence. Without that pressure I might have managed more, without that pressure I might have managed even better than I did in O-levels, A-levels and degree, because no matter how well I did I was always struggling to get my thoughts down on paper, because that ill-advised, bullying attempt by my teachers to force me to write 'neatly' means I can barely write at all.

Senior school was where I faced classic bullying, a handful of trainee thugs decided the physically and socially awkward kid was a suitable target, particularly once they found out that I had a berserker temper and could be provoked into a complete loss of control, which for a certain class of social inadequate is apparently funny. The teachers knew who they were and what was going on, but they were completely ineffective at controlling it or protecting me. When I was driven into losing my temper I was the one who ended up being punished. In the end it was my temper that saved me. When I matured physically enough to do serious damage it became a losing proposition to attack me. Walking around school with a black-eye for a week because the geeky kid decked you with one punch has exactly the wrong kind of social cachet for trainee thugs.

University passed without a problem and I might have hoped that work would be the same, but that was not to be. As my disability became more apparent I noticed that my salary was falling behind that of my peers, even ones with less experience and ability doing the same job. Looking around at the people who did well I realised they were the ones who were popular and sporty, those of us who were less popular and not sporty just didn't seem to do as well come pay review time. And then one of my bosses decided to insist that every engineer guarantee at the start of that day what he would have achieved by the end. As my disability makes my productivity completely unpredictable I pointed this out to him, and asked to be excused from that requirement as a reasonable adjustment, as provided for by the Disability Discrimination Act. His reaction was to accuse me of having 'a negative attitude', and then to write a career-destroying annual appraisal saying exactly the same. When I asked for that to be set aside my uber-boss appeared at my desk and informed me 'If I can't put you under pressure then you're no use to me', and promptly transferred me into a more junior post, refused to put me into any posts at my own grade and followed that by posting me to scut-work job after scut-work job, all the while giving me zero-percent annual pay awards on the grounds that I was too senior for the posts he had put me in. When I turned one of the scut-work jobs into a success he claimed that was irrelevant and refused me a permanent transfer into the position, even though the managers there were crying out for me. I filed a formal grievance, but management just closed ranks. Ultimately we had another round of redundancies and they were able to carry through their plan to get rid of me, and then seemed surprised when I took them to court for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination. Even the legal process saw bullying, their lawyers attempted to claim that I wasn't disabled, even though the company had been treating me as disabled for the previous 20 years.

As a straight white male I'm supposed to be one of the people least likely to run into random discrimination or bullying on the streets, but add disability to the mix and that ceases to be true. About once every year or so I'll have complete strangers (not just kids, the last batch were in their 50s) haranguing me on the street as a 'benefit fraud', no matter the fact I've never actually been claiming benefits when it happens. Then there was the thug who decided it would be funny to throw the guy on crutches to the ground. When he grabbed my shoulder he realised 1) visibly whispering his plan into his mate's ear as they walked towards me might not have been such a good idea, and 2) just how good a melee weapon a crutch is....

The most insidious form of bullying of all is when a government and the media conspire together to scapegoat a minority group. That's been happening in the UK for a while now, with misleading statements from the highest level of government (even the Chancellor in his budget speech) and a campaign in the yellow press to portray disability benefit recipients as idle, faking scroungers (even though disability benefits have the lowest level of fraud of any benefit). The last time a government launched this concerted a campaign to demonise disabled people it was the Nazis in the early to mid-1930s, and that campaign culminated in the obscenity of Aktion T4. We are a long way from that yet (I hope), but every time I have been verbally abused it has been about benefit fraud and the government and media are throwing petrol on a bonfire of jealousy and hate. Disabled people are genuinely scared of what is happening, and is anything more shameful than that a minority group be scared of their own government?

Bullying, sadly there is a lot of it out there...