The Ugly Face of Disability Hate Crime

This programme contains some strong language.

I'm Adam Pearson and people hate me because I'm disabled.

I've been called "Quasimodo", "Elephant Man"...

'Because my face looks different...'

.."hideous creature"... "Disfigured".

Try to rip my face off.

And it's not just me under attack.

Kicked and punched and spat on.

I randomly got hit. I realised my nose was constantly bleeding.

In 2013, there were an estimated 62,000 disability hate crimes

in England and Wales.

"Scary","demon-looking"..."freak"...

But only a handful of them were prosecuted.

The system's just screwed.

These crimes are going under-reported, under-recorded

and under the radar and I want to find out why.

I'm almost looking for a fight.

-Do you know what disablism is?

-No, I don't.

Do you think I'm a bad guy? How bad could I be?

Why is there prejudice against disabled people?

You do have to put the barriers up.

I have to say, I thought he was wearing a mask.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Why is it not being taken as seriously as other hate crimes?

YouTube don't seem to see the bloody problem either.

Police should have taken that seriously.

If this had been about race, they would have been taken straight down.

And what can I do to change things?

This is a whole room full of people judging me.

Intelligent and charming can only take me so far,

but intelligent, charming and funny - that's a winner.

I'm Adam Pearson. You might recognise me from the telly.

I've got one of those faces.

I live at home in Croydon with my parents

and my twin brother, Neil.

I'm an actor and recently worked with Scarlett Johannson. Jealous?

You should be.

-What's your best feature?

-I like my hands.

I have a condition called Neurofibromatosis type 1,

which, for me, means noncancerous tumours

grow on nerve endings on my face.

I'm physically disabled and disfigured,

but I make most of myself.

I think you need to work with what you've got

and I'd be an idiot not to.

I get manicured, I'm partial to the odd facial...

And ultimately, it's all leading to getting my boobs done.

I can laugh. I've lived with this for a long time.

There you are in the garden.

My condition was first diagnosed when I was five years old.

There you go.

You didn't even have the bump on your head in that one,

so you must have been I don't know...

Less than a year, I would say.

I am quite big for less than a year.

We just thought he had a bump on his head,

and then, when the bump kept getting bigger, they diagnosed NF.

My identical twin Neil has the same condition

but only my tumours grow on my face.

There's Christmas again.

-Karaoke.

-Boom!

Born for stardom.

We went back to see this plastic surgeon.

He said, "He will grow, the lumps won't,

"and when he's 17, he'll look like everybody else."

Oh... I don't know how I didn't head-butt him.

One, because he was so patronising and two,

because he couldn't have been more wrong, could he?

-Is that the day you started school, secondary school?

-Yeah.

Yup. Day one of the longest 1,800... and however many days of my life.

I used to live my life by terms,

because somehow it didn't sound quite so bad then.

-As opposed to five years.

-Yeah!

-15 terms!

-Yeah.

You sort of said, you know, instead of saying

two and a half years, you sort of said seven terms.

It didn't sound quite so long.

Quite so traumatic.

How old were you there?

Definitely at the sixth form because that's

-when I started having to buy ties.

-Yeah.

Also, I didn't really have anything to celebrate at secondary school.

-Yeah.

-Apart from the day I left.

I was badly bullied at school and it was miserable for me.

As I developed, so did my disfigurement.

And along with that came other people's problems with it.

These days, I try to ignore people's stares.

When we're out and about do you ever notice people giving me kind of...

the eyes or...laughing at me?

All the time. The thing that irritates me the most is

if people aren't content with just looking,

they have to tap all their friends,

then everybody's got to turn round and have a look.

And that's when I actually turn round and say something.

-Yeah. So, it does kind of piss you off?

-Yes, I'm sorry, but it does.

I understand that people have natural curiosity,

but it isn't always easy to live with people's stares.

And watch what happens when I sit on a busy bus.

Notice how nobody sits anywhere near me, not even on the seats behind.

Avoiding me is one thing,

but overcompensating can sometimes be worse.

On a night out in Croydon, I wore a wire to capture what happened.

Evening. You all right?

Not a lot, as it goes. A few people recognise me from my movie...

..but watch out for this drunk dude.

You see, being disabled makes me public property.

Some strangers hugged me and patronise me.

And elsewhere, other disabled people face this ignorance, too.

How are you?

'Dan, an ex-soldier who uses a wheelchair,

'knows just how it feels.'

-It's more curiosity I get than anything.

-Yeah.

I've been called meals-on-wheels, big-legs McGee.

You know, and I'll laugh at it, you know.

But the one word I do hate and it makes my skin crawl...

..is the word "cripple".

'And before we know it, ignorance is right in our faces.'

WOMAN:

No, thank you.

-I'm sorry.

-Give us a wheelie!

Yeah, I have prosthetic legs, but imagine how hard it is

to walk when you're drunk normally.

Try doing that in legs you can't control.

Oh, yeah.

I haven't got my legs with me this evening.

I'm sorry.

HE MOUTHS

Awkward!

-I was going to do exactly the same thing!

-Yeah, yeah.

I get it a lot, just random people always come up to me.

There's quite a thin line between inquisitive, patronising,

and then being a dick.

Whereabouts does, "Do you want a wheelie?" sit on that line for you?

My coping mechanism with my injury is,

like you said, to take the piss out of it. To take the mick.

A lot of disabled people learn from a young age to use

humour as a defence mechanism. I know I did.

Really good to meet you, man.

But some things just aren't funny.

Hate crimes and hate incidents I've experienced.

Classics are "spastic", "Elephant Man", "Aw, look at his face."

"Does he know it isn't Halloween?"

"What time's the freak show?"

I had a guy in a club in Brighton once think

I was wearing a mask and come up and try and rip my face off.

"What kind of person gives birth to someone like this?"

"Yes, he is an inspiration...

"for horror films!"

"Adam Pearson in entertainment, that's a joke,

"unless you're playing the Hunchback Of Notre Dame."

"Hideous creature."

I've faced this kind of prejudice all my life, starting at school.

-How you doing, man? Good to see you.

-You, too.

My friend Lucas has frontonasal craniofacial dysplasia,

which means he has a facial disfigurement.

He, too, does not have the fondest memories of his school days.

What's your first memory of someone saying something to you

-about how you look?

-It was...

My very first memory was my first day at primary school.

This girl came up to me and asked me, she went,

"What's wrong with your face?"

And I didn't have an answer for that.

How bad did things get for you at school?

The worst incident that I had was where one boy had me

pinned to the ground with his foot upon my head.

I've also been kicked and punched and spat on, even,

during my primary school.

And how did that make you feel, as a kid?

As a kid, it was frightening.

I felt like I was incredibly unlucky that it was me

that had ended up with this and why is it that nobody else

had got this and why just me, that sort of thing.

Were the teachers in any way helpful?

I know for me, that they weren't.

I remember one time they put on The Hunchback Of Notre Dame

in one of my lessons and one of the kids said very loudly,

"Oh, we're watching Adam,"

and the teacher clearly heard it because he reacted to it,

but didn't do anything.

Were your teachers any more sympathetic to your cause?

The teachers didn't follow up

on any negative behaviour that was occurring,

so it got a lot worse.

It became that bad that my parents decided they were going to take me

out of primary school and home-school me.

-I'm assuming you weren't bullied at home-school?

-No.

OK, just checking and exploring all avenues.

Is this where the negative attitudes

toward disfigurement starts?

I believe that the negative attitudes

are passed on through the generations.

I know that often the attitudes

of the parents directly affect

the attitudes of the children because I've had lots of instances

where I've been called names and things have been said to me

that children wouldn't come up with their own.

For instance, I've been called "Elephant Man"

and things like that, and I know that six-year-old children

don't know of that, let alone four-year-olds and three-year-olds.

-It wasn't on my Christmas list when I was six, that film.

-No, no.

I think that it is criminal activity that's just,

you know, starting at a younger age.

Talking to Lucas has made me realise that

if this kind of negative behaviour towards disability

goes unchecked in schools,

it will continue to be ignored in the real world.

Prejudice against disabled people is called "disablism".

Whilst everyone knows the words racism and homophobia,

I'm beginning to wonder whether disablism

is an issue people are even aware of.

I grabbed some unsuspecting

people on the streets of London to find out.

Do you know what disablism is?

No, I don't.

No.

Not really. Not really, no.

No. No.

No, I don't.

People who are disabled or they're...

the way that they are.

Sorry, no.

Next.

Do you what disablism is?

No, I've never heard of it.

-Do you know what racism is?

-Yes.

OK, same thing.

OK, yeah, I understand.

30 minutes in, and not a single person has nailed it.

Then a glimmer of hope.

Do you know what disablism is?

Disablism?

Is it people that are...

against people that are disabled?

Up here. Finally, bring it in.

No-one's known. Awesome.

What do you think disablism is?

Discrimination against disabled people.

-High five.

-That good?

-Yeah.

-Disablism?

-Yes.

-Is it discrimination against being disabled?

There we go.

Up here. Yes, get in.

Well, the results of this survey are in

and it's not very good.

Out of everyone we spoke to,

only three people knew what disablism was,

and everyone else either didn't know or just told me

what disability was, and I...I kind of know that already.

London, you've let me down.

For only three people out of 18 to have known what it is,

it's clear that the concept of disablism

just isn't in the public consciousness.

Is it just not deemed as important as other forms of prejudice?

It's so under the radar that only a handful of disability hate crimes

have hit the headlines in the past 10 years.

Chantelle Richardson - facial disfigurement -

punched on a night out.

Craig Robins - partially paralysed - attacked by a gang.

Raymond Atherton - severe learning disabilities - beaten to death.

Sickening, isn't it?

These are horrifying disability hate crimes

and I wonder how many more have taken place

that didn't make the news.

Right in the middle of looking into all this, I turn on my computer

to find out I've been the target of a disablist hate incident myself.

And it pissed me off a little bit!

I put an interview about a film I was in up on my YouTube page.

You mentioned before ignorance, and

I'm sure the movie Under The Skin

is something that will change those common perceptions.

At the end of the film, the female lead,

the alien character, gets set on fire and burnt to death,

and someone has posted this charming comment about me.

"What happened to the alien at the end of the film should have happened to him at birth. Lol."

So, he finds the idea of me being burnt to death at birth hysterical.

"I'll put "Lol" at the end so people know it's a joke."

And that is essentially genocide.

Something very similar happened to this in Germany in the '40s

and I hear it ended badly, and I hear it's somewhat

looked down upon now, with the benefit of retrospect.

This pissed me off.

I instantly thought, "You bastard."

I'm not going to let this slide on my own page.

I e-mail YouTube and they reply.

Subject - "action taken".

So I thought, "Ah, amazing!"

And the e-mail says "We are

"unable to identify a violation of our community guidelines

"within your recent report to our safety and abuse tool."

Nothing bad happened.

Deny all knowledge.

YouTube's guidelines are as follows...

The fact that YouTube have done bugger all stuns me.

This isn't, kind of, a small company that don't know what

they're doing and don't understand the law -

this is a massive international company.

This makes me think the problem is a lot more higher up

than I thought it was.

This is going from me thinking,

"Well, aren't people silly, don't they need educating, ha-ha-ha-ha."

"I will be the guy that does it!"

To thinking the system's just screwed.

In danger of smashing the screen,

I step away from the computer

and head out with my twin brother, Neil.

You liking my manly cupcake, Neil?

Yes. A lovely shade of pink.

Do you think the kind of comment I got,

do you think that violates YouTube's policies?

This isn't a quiz.

I'd say it would violate their policies,

but it's hard to tell what website's policies are.

What we might see as something that's serious,

a site like YouTube might not see it with the same level of severity.

Cos the actual policy is anything that could be

deemed as offence or harassment aimed at an individual

on the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation,

disability or gender identity shouldn't be done.

And so I did report it to YouTube

and they said there was nothing wrong with it.

Then surely, if somebody makes an offensive comment that's aimed at you

and is purely on grounds of disability, how much more proof

do you clearly need to demonstrate to YouTube to prove

that it's a disability hate crime

and not just somebody making a random comment for a laugh?

'Neil's right, and I'm not going to let it lie.'

Are you going to eat that cake or date it?

That makes no sense. I've literally just picked it up.

I've been fobbed off by e-mail,

but I'm going to old school and telephone Google, who own YouTube.

Call me David, as I'm about to take on Goliath!

I'm almost looking for a fight cos if this had been about race

or had the N-word in it or what have you,

it would have been taken straight down.

So, I'm very much in a kind of...

"What the fuck?" kind of mood.

'Thank you for calling Google.

'If you know the extension

'of the person you would like to speak with, press 1.

'If you would like to contact reception,

'please dial 0.'

-LINE GOES DEAD

-Oh!

So, it doesn't go through. That's weird.

So, I want to contact reception, so I'll dial zero.

Zero.

And it cuts off.

And again. Just cuts off.

HE LAUGHS

That's absolutely bonkers. That's...

How do Google not have a receptionist? I mean...

And this is a company that prides itself intently on goodliness

and are forward-thinking, all-embracing,

revolutionary...

And they can't pick up a telephone.

That's...insane.

If only there was some way they could look that up.

Online maybe.

HE SIGHS

Would it be different if the abusive comment was about my ethnicity?

Over 42,000 people have viewed my YouTube page,

but as far as I know, I'm the only one seeing the problem.

But when Liam Stacey tweeted racist comments

about footballer Fabrice Muamba,

Twitter users across Britain reported it to the police,

leading to Liam's arrest.

The public recognised this as a hate crime and were rightly outraged.

There were 44,480 hate crimes

recorded in England and Wales between 2013 and 2014.

Yet only 4% of these were recorded as disability hate crimes.

Is this because they weren't happening?

Or were there many more going unrecorded?

According to the Home Office's official crime survey

for England and Wales,

there were actually an estimated

62,000 disability hate crimes

in a similar period.

Hang on!

Why, then, were there only 1,985 hate crimes

against disabled people recorded?

I need to understand why the vast majority

of disability hate crimes are going unrecognised.

My mate, Hayden, has twice been the victim of disability hate crime,

but he wasn't recorded as an official statistic.

Hayden.

-Hey, Adam.

-How's it going, man? Good to see you.

'Hayden has Crouzon syndrome.

'Like me, he's blind in one eye, partially deaf

'and facially disfigured.'

Loving the hair, as well.

'He wears his hair over his eye to try and hide his disfigurement.

'In a club in Milton Keynes one night,

'he was pushed over. He believes it's because he looks different.'

Erm, I randomly got hit and I didn't know... It all happened too fast.

I blanked out for, like, one second

and I just looked up and I didn't know what happened.

Then I realised my nose was constantly bleeding.

'Hayden reported this incident to the police.'

-How did the police handle that?

-They saw the CCTV.

They saw some guy, but didn't really do much about it.

They didn't ask if you were disabled

or anything that involved the word "disability"?

They didn't really ask about any disabilities I have.

'Hayden didn't know that he could report this assault

'as a disability hate crime.

'I wonder how many other incidents like this have gone unnoticed.

'Just last week, Hayden was assaulted again in this nightclub.'

I asked him what he was doing, and he said something about

why is my hair like this? So, basically, I just said, "Well..."

He pushed me after that and I felt the force.

He'd pushed me quite hard.

And I said, "What are you doing?"

And his friends just pulled him back.

-And that was really the last time I saw him.

-Have you reported it?

No, I just let it go, really.

I just didn't really bother.

I didn't think it was that worth it.

'I suspect many more disabled people like Hayden

'are just absorbing this abusive behaviour as a fact of life,

'rather than taking action.'

And do you think it's cos of your condition and how you look

that people...tend to give you more aggro

-than they otherwise possibly would?

-Yeah, I think it is.

That's why I've had a lot of surgery changes in my life

because I keep trying to make myself NOT look disabled.

Do you know much about the law surrounding hate crime -

disability, race, religion, et cetera?

Erm, I've never been aware of the disability hate crime situation.

I've always been aware of, like, hate crimes,

racism and things like that, but not about disabled people.

'Disability hate crime

'and the laws around it are just not on people's radar.

'Not even people who are disabled.'

And unbelievably, the law itself treats crime towards disabled people

as less important than other forms of hate crime.

Let me explain - if someone hits me because of my disability,

then they could get up to six months in prison.

But if someone hits me because I'm a different race or religion,

they can get a longer sentence of up to two years.

This is because a disability hate crime

is only considered a basic offence,

whereas race and religious hate crimes

are considered aggravated offences.

Sound fair? I think not.

The more I look into all this,

the more determined I am to make a difference.

I've been on the receiving end of a hate incident.

I'm going to report it to the police

and I want them to take it seriously.

I don't know how seriously the police are

or aren't going to take this.

In a perfect world,

they'd deal with it like they would any other form of hate crime.

Though, my big concern is that I'm not quite sure

they know what they're dealing with.

And that disability hate crime IS a thing and IS a problem.

And that's...what I'm going to try and find out this time.

And it's a really disappointing result.

He said that because they're not actively saying

"I'm going to come to your house and burn you alive,"

that there's nothing they can do.

But he then helpfully talked me through

how to block people on YouTube, got out his phone

and showed me how to do it and advised that I contact YouTube.

I've already contacted YouTube. That was my Point A.

YouTube don't seem to see the bloody problem either.

I feel fobbed off. I don't feel it's been taken seriously.

And I'm slightly confused as to where I stand.

I've spent years trying to normalise and brush off the issue

because it's easier to ignore it.

But now, I'm facing it head on,

I realise how prevalent the prejudice really is.

Having a disfigurement, you lose this anonymity.

And become public property.

On those bad days, you do have to put the barriers up,

and for the purposes of this journey,

I let them down a bit and I've had to think about stuff...

..I wouldn't normally and had to be a bit more vulnerable

than I otherwise would be and it's the strangest feeling ever.

And I've had to think about disability hate crime,

how people react to me... I've been noticing it a lot more.

And when you notice it a lot more,

you have to process it a lot more and it chips away at you...

quicker.

I think there's times when I'm there doing the...

Adam Pearson thing.

And I really don't want to be doing it.

I'm not the only one with a disability

who's not being listened to.

There are some shocking incidents of disability hate crime

that weren't taken seriously.

Take the tragic case of Fiona Pilkington, whose daughter,

Francesca Hardwick, was disabled.

Across ten years, she made 33 complaints to Leicestershire Police

about hate crime incidents and no action was taken.

Fiona ended up taking her own life along with Francesca's.

23-year-old Brent Martin, who had learning disabilities,

died in hospital after three trained boxers attacked him

over a £5 bet to see who could knock him out first.

Brent's murder wasn't recognised in court as being aggravated

by their hatred of his disability and, alarmingly,

all their sentences were reduced on appeal.

Enough is enough.

I have to pick myself up and keep going. I can't let ignorance win.

'I need to find out where I stand on the abusive comment I received,

'so I travel to Brighton to meet Dr Mark Walters...'

-Mark? Adam.

-Adam, nice to meet you. How are you?

-I'm good, thank you.

'..a specialist in hate crime laws from Sussex University.'

The comment is, "What happened to the alien at the end of the film

"should have happened to him at birth. Lol."

Oh, crikey. That's horrible.

I showed this to the police, I reported it.

And they said, legally, there's nothing they can do.

But is that a hate crime?

-That, to me, is clearly an example of hate speech.

-Mm-hm.

So, there are various different pieces of legislation

that this could be pursued under,

and I think that the police were incorrect to just say to you,

"There's nothing we can do about this."

-They should have at least investigated this properly.

-Yeah.

Because not only is this a case of, erm...

..stating that you should have been killed at birth,

but it's aggravated by the fact that they're referring to your disability.

-Yeah.

-I'm pretty alarmed by this.

I'm assuming that you were probably quite distressed by it.

-I was not best pleased.

-Erm, and...

..it could be interpreted as being abusive.

So, there are three pieces of legislation

that are relevant to that message.

And the police should have taken that seriously.

Hate crime laws protect five different minority groups

on the grounds of race, religion, sexual orientation,

transgender and disability.

But, unfairly, there are different laws that cover these groups,

and disability is excluded from certain hate crimes laws.

If you're going to prescribe and legislate against hate crime,

and you've identified five different groups

that are deserving of protection,

where there is clearly an issue of targeted violence, targeted abuse,

you need to treat all of those equally in law.

Cos if you don't, it sends out the unintended message that those groups

-are less worthy of protection than other groups.

-Yeah.

And I just think that's not acceptable.

Do you think they should - all five characteristic groups -

should be included just under one piece of legislation,

under one banner?

Yes.

If disability hate crime is not treated equally in law,

how can we expect the rest of society to take it seriously?

As I'm pondering how you go about changing the law,

a strange thing happens.

After a week of the abusive comment being on my YouTube page,

it mysteriously vanishes.

I wonder if it's because I mentioned it to my friend

who works at Google.

No, no-one contacted me at all to say the comments...were coming down.

They just came down.

It must have all happened... It probably all happened internally.

Between... With the e-mail my friend sent

and whoever he sent it to.

I have no idea what happened behind the scenes.

It would be really good to find out.

Once upon a time, I'd have just let this lie, but now I want to know

why they didn't react to the disablist hate speech right away.

PHONE RINGS

Hello, Adam Pearson.

'After an e-mail to their press office,

'I finally get to speak to someone.'

Yeah, no, now's a completely good time to talk, yeah.

Yes, that's... And I did do that.

'What they're telling me is that I can moderate my own page

'and restrict comments I don't like.'

Bye.

It does sound a bit like they're passing the buck back to the user

and saying, "Well, you can just delete it yourself"

or you can moderate all things yourself.

They also told me it's often up to their moderators to interpret

what is hate speak and what is not.

I wonder what part of "should have been burnt to death at birth"

is open to interpretation.

I thought anything deemed to be offensive

and relating to a person's disability

is considered hate speech.

The policy seemed really firm,

and she seemed really firm.

But their actions that led to this...didn't.

I'm not satisfied, and have asked to meet someone in person.

I want acknowledgement that they fucked up, cos they did.

Otherwise the comment wouldn't have mysteriously disappeared.

And I want to know that there's solid processes in place

for people who don't have a friend that works at Google.

I have to wait to hear if someone is willing to meet me.

From Google to the police not taking this incident seriously,

I'm starting to wonder

if there's a bigger problem at the top that has filtered down.

From 2013 to 2014,

there were 10,532 racially and religiously motivated hate crimes

convicted in England and Wales

and only 470 disability hate crimes convicted.

Whilst there were more racially

and religiously motivated hate crimes overall,

the difference between these numbers is so huge

that as well as these crimes going under the radar,

it could also suggest that there's something worrying going on

in the way these crimes are being prosecuted.

In 2013,

Michael Fuller, Chief Inspector of the Crown Prosecution Service,

published a report revealing that disability hate crime

specifically was being overlooked in the way it was prosecuted.

-Hi, Michael.

-Hello, Adam.

Pleased to meet you.

Is it lack of awareness, or is it cos the police, juries,

et cetera, don't understand the issue?

What the inspection found is the police officers,

they often feel very awkward

about asking people about their disability.

So, they feel uncomfortable about that and, as a result,

offences they may come across or be called to

aren't always recorded in the way that they should be.

So, issue number one - the police are too embarrassed

to ask about disabilities,

so aren't recording incidents as disability hate crimes.

Why do you think, when it does make it to court,

it seems to be taken less seriously than other forms of hate crime?

There is quite a serious problem there,

in that there's a duty on the prosecutor to highlight to the court

that a particular offence is a disability hate crime.

And there is a legal provision that enables them to do that.

Issue number two - prosecutors aren't stating to the courts

that these offences are disability hate crimes,

so they're not being convicted as such.

And what we've found is that legal provision,

the sentence uplift, was not being used enough

and, as a result, the sentences weren't reflecting the seriousness

of the disability hate crimes.

Issue number three -

if they were highlighted as disability hate crimes,

then judges would have to hand out longer sentences,

though still not as long as for other hate crimes.

So, the system is failing disabled people?

I don't know about failing, it's that the...

the legal provisions that are already there

are not being used in the way that they should be.

It was really refreshing to talk to someone

who was so open and honest about the issue.

Michael Fuller seems to think that the laws for disability hate crime

are fine, they're just not being used properly,

and, to a degree, I get his point.

But if judges aren't aware of the uplift for disability hate crime

and how to use it and how to apply it,

then it just simply won't be used.

So raising awareness is really, really important.

It's no wonder that disablism and disability hate crime

don't register as an issue with ordinary people.

If the police have been failing, and so have the courts,

then the whole system has gone wrong from the top down.

It'll take a lot more than just me

getting on my soapbox to change the justice system.

My only hope is that since Michael's report,

the Crown Prosecution Service have drawn up an action plan.

And I'm told their response is improving, as is that of the police.

But let's face it,

this kind of thing could take years to come through.

I want to understand more

about what leads people to carry out disability hate crimes.

What causes this prejudice?

Take the movies - baddies always seem to have...

scars,

burns,

hooks,

or even sometimes just a big nose.

What does a villain look like?

They have to be kind of...different from everyone else.

They all have something scary about them, like, physically.

The Joker, Two-Face, a lot of the Bond bad guys have disfigurements.

Why do you think they do?

-Ooh.

-That's a tough question.

I haven't really...thought of that.

Society, like, makes them seem like they're scary.

Because they're different from people or they look different.

I think it goes back to old prejudices

about the way that people look.

And do you think that's a fair portrayal of disfigurement?

-It's biased.

-The way that somebody looks has absolutely no bearing

on the way that they are.

And so do you think I'm a bad guy? How bad could I be?

SHE LAUGHS You seem nice enough.

So, the industry's being lazy,

using disfigurement as a shorthand for evil.

And people don't even seem to question it.

But is it just negative stereotypes that cause prejudice

against disabled people, or does it run deeper than that?

Why do people hate me when they don't know me?

What is it that's going on in their heads?

-Hi, Miles. Good to meet you.

-Hi, Adam. Very good to meet you.

'I'm hoping Professor Miles Hewstone,

'who specialises in prejudice work

'at Oxford University's psychology department can help me with this.'

So, why do you think people are prejudiced

to particularly people with disabilities and disfigurements?

I think in the case of a group such as people with facial disfigurements,

we'd be looking much more at the kind of emotions that people were feeling.

The pronounced feeling people would have is one of anxiety

and I think a great deal of this

is that they have never met somebody like you before.

As well as prejudice,

what else going on when someone commits a hate crime?

The kind of people who are engaged in hate crime

against somebody like yourself

are people feeling those very strong emotions like disgust or contempt,

which I think is due to their inability

to deal with their own feelings

and then it makes them behave in extreme ways.

They, if you like, are the problem, not you.

I was starting to worry, "Maybe I'm just an arsehole?"

But, no, it's good to know that I'm...

-Well, you might be.

-Whoa, whoa, whoa!

But that's different! THEY LAUGH

Do you think prejudice is in-built or hard-wired into people?

I don't believe that it comes hard-wired.

The most important thing is it doesn't come

in some kind of form that is not changeable.

We have plenty of evidence that it can be changed.

I hope Miles is right, that people's prejudice can be changed,

and he's agreed to help me test this.

If I spend some time with people

who feel prejudiced towards facial disfigurement,

will meeting me in person have any effect on their prejudice levels?

A group of ten randomly selected people

agreed to take part in this experiment,

most of whom have never spent time with a disfigured person.

What we'd like to ask you to do first

is to sit at one of these computers here...

They haven't met me yet, and don't know what we're testing.

From now on, please just follow the instructions

that are all presented on the screen.

First, we need to we need to measure their base prejudice levels.

To do this, we'll use an established test

which works out their subconscious bias against disfigured faces.

The test measures people's automatic, uncontrollable responses

to images of disfigured and non-disfigured faces

so they are unable to give answers they may consciously want to give.

These are tests that you can't control,

and that we are, in a sense, all victims of our experiences.

A score of 100%

shows the highest level of subconscious prejudice,

and 0% shows the least.

When you get to the final screen,

write it down on a piece of paper in front of you. Thank you.

The score showed high levels of innate bias.

Katie scored 100%.

Do you think anything could be done to change the way you respond?

Um...

I don't know.

It's obviously showing something that I'm automatically doing

in my brain that I wasn't at all aware of,

and certainly not consciously aware of.

Ameer also scored 100%.

-Are you surprised?

-Oh, I'm definitely surprised, yeah.

Yeah.

Kelvin scored 71%.

It shocked me - I would have thought I was at least average,

if not better than that.

I feel that I'm sympathetic, empathetic,

and obviously the implicit results showed otherwise.

Most of the group have little experience with disfigured people,

but then Iwan scores a low 6%.

Where's that come from?

I've had some experience, like, with people with facial disfigurement,

-but not in recent times.

-Uh-huh. How was that?

How did you come to have that experience?

-I've done care work previously.

-Uh-huh.

-And I guess you spend more time than, probably, usual...

-Right.

Apart from Iwan's, these are high levels of innate prejudice,

so I had my work cut out,

because what happens next is the real test.

I'm now going to take you downstairs,

and guess what - I'm going to introduce you to somebody

whose face you've just seen.

This second part of the experiment has never been tested before.

If this group spend time getting to know me,

will their prejudice levels reduce?

Miles has told them to ask me questions,

to help them start to develop a relationship with me.

Then, they'll be tested again.

I have one hour, and a game of giant Jenga, to help me break the ice.

LAUGHTER AND GROANS

That's ridiculous!

I am much cooler than that in real life.

'They start with some basic questions...'

-Where do you live?

-Croydon.

So, how old are you?

I'm 29. Nearly 30.

'..but for this to really work, they need to get more personal.'

-Somebody asked me upstairs - I think it was you...

-Yeah.

..who asked me about whether you could ask anything you wanted.

With your...

..with your facial disfigurement, is your twin...

..an identical twin?

Yes, he is. Though the condition affects him differently.

-And are you close?

-Um... We don't have any of that kind of...

People are like, "Do you have those, like, twin moments?"

And... Well, one time someone hit him in the head

and my fist really hurt, but apart from that,

we've had none of those kind of psychic moments.

How, um...is your eyesight at all affected?

Yes - I'm blind in this eye.

I lost this eye when I was about ten,

and I've been partially sighted in this one since about the same age.

I was worried when I saw Adam downstairs

after we'd finished playing the Jenga game -

he was talking, and there was quite a large physical distance

between him and everybody else.

I worried that maybe the reason people were pulling back

like that was because of this anxiety,

and that they would just feel they didn't want to get too close to him.

The group will now take the test again,

to see if getting to know me has had any effect.

Please just do the test exactly as you did before, OK?

Just because they've now met me,

they still can't affect the results of the test.

It measures the brain's automatic responses to the images they see.

And, as before, please leave the score up at the end.

Will their prejudice scores come down,

or are people's biases unchangeable?

This is only a one-off experience,

but we are asking that an hour or so today can undo the events

and experiences of a lifetime - so, maybe that's very optimistic.

The results are coming in.

Kelvin's first score was 71%,

and it's now dropped to 50%.

Katie's score was 100%,

then fell to 42%.

Ameer, how did your second test go, compared with your first test?

It was really different.

Ameer's first score was 100%.

Amazingly,

this has fallen to just 12%.

Why do you think your score has changed so much?

Just meeting him -

when we first went in, the way I looked at him was very different.

-Yeah.

-I looked at his face, and focused, really, on his face...

-Yes.

..and then, towards the end of it, I realised

I had actually started processing a different mental image of him.

-Yeah.

-It absolutely had an effect.

So, what were the overall results for the group?

The scores have become much less prejudiced, taking the test again.

Nine out of ten people considerably reduced their prejudice score.

Getting this group of people together to meet someone like Adam

has shown me the power of face-to-face interaction

with somebody from a group that you have no contact with.

Looking at the test, I'm even more positive about that,

because in nine out of ten people - so, overall, a clear tendency

for prejudicial reactions to be reduced as a result of meeting Adam.

Actually meeting a person

who actually has facial disfigurement

has really sort of helped me personally to understand what

it's like to live with that kind of disability.

I think I felt nervous initially,

because I didn't know how he was going to react to us.

Once he started speaking, that broke down the barriers, and certainly,

now we're all relaxed with him. We see beyond his disfigurement.

I was ridiculously encouraged

to find out what happened after the group had met me.

I expected a few people's results to be better the second time round

than the first time,

but nine out of ten is an astonishingly good number.

This is a massive breakthrough.

I've discovered that I can effect a change in people's prejudice

towards disfigurement

just by spending time with them.

If people getting to know me can lower their prejudice and fear,

then maybe reaching people on a larger scale

can help reduce hate crime.

But how?

One of the ways I put people at ease during the experiment

was by making them laugh.

I've been using humour in this way all my life.

At secondary school, when you kind of...get bullied a lot,

and just go through, kind of, a crap time,

you become the funny guy. Everyone likes the funny guy.

I was always naturally quite witty and funny,

I just didn't know how to use it properly.

And so, when I kind of grew up and matured a bit,

and kind of became more, I guess, self-secure and self-aware,

you can start using it appropriately and properly,

and realise that you don't need to use it as a defence mechanism,

you can use it just to make what could be an awkward situation

for someone else a little less awkward for them.

Hello!

Hello, everyone. Do come and make yourselves at home.

I've always wanted to try stand-up comedy.

Perhaps this is a way for me to reach out to a wider audience -

but I need some lessons if I'm going to get this right.

I'm a bit nervous about this,

because a lot hangs on me being funny.

I think intelligent and charming can only take me so far -

but intelligent, charming and funny - that's a winner.

I also want to test out in the real world, will these people feel

more comfortable around me if I can make them laugh?

I'd like you to stand up, and, to the group, say who you are,

and why you're here.

I'm Suzie - Suzie Steed,

which apparently is a really good name for comedy.

LAUGHTER

I'm Jim Hooper, and...

Yeah, I should really be doing work at the moment.

LAUGHTER

Hi, I'm Adam Pearson.

I'm here because my girlfriend has confiscated my PlayStation 4,

and so I have absolutely nothing else to do.

LAUGHTER

Did anyone stand out to you when you first arrived?

Yes. Adam did.

When I first glanced at him, I thought, "Is that..."

You know, "Is that really his face?"

I actually, honestly, I have to say, I thought he was wearing a mask.

Of course it was a shock to them when they first saw me -

but if the experiment has proved anything, they should feel

more comfortable with me the more time they spend with me.

One of you is going to choose to be high status,

and one of you to be low status.

We're paired off to work on improvised sketches.

-You've not just let me down...

-HE SNIFFS

-VOICE BREAKS:

-You've let yourself down.

LAUGHTER

You know - very funny, I thought.

I was surprised that that was, like,

his first time doing those activities,

and I was saying, you know,

"You're really naturally a funny bloke."

So, I want you to stand here for one minute as an expert

on one subject that I'm going to give you. All right?

That's all you have to do.

And your time starts now.

'I may have a good sense of humour,

'but can I make people laugh for a whole minute?'

That's a minute, that's a minute - brilliant!

What a brilliant joke at the end - in my opinion.

And I'm last up.

Good ways and bad ways of letting somebody down gently -

and your time starts now.

OK, so, we have to let people down, that's a fact.

And there are ways of doing it well, with decorum,

that means that you can still talk to your ex,

and they don't take out a restraining order against you,

and there are bad ways to do it.

For example, don't do this - I learned it the hard way.

"Hey, babe, how are you?

"Kiss - yeah - kiss - I'm fine.

"Everyone that has a boyfriend, take one step forward.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa."

LAUGHTER

Don't sit them down and go, "It's not you, it's me.

"I'm the one that's been...fucking your sister."

LAUGHTER

That's a minute - that's a minute, that's all you get.

We don't get to the end of the anecdote.

He was much more confident than I thought he would be.

It just changes - you think...

I mean, I'll be saying to people,

"God, I met this guy who was disfigured,

"and he was really funny."

He participated exactly the same as anyone else,

and was incredibly funny,

which meant, then, the outstanding thing was,

we were all shocked that he'd never done it before.

Did you find Adam's disfigurement stopped standing out

-the more time you spent with him?

-Absolutely.

You completely stopped noticing it.

You know, you were just talking to Adam.

So, it seems I can use humour to reduce fears and put people at ease.

And now I want to get out there and make people laugh.

I'm really buzzing right now.

Aah!

This was crazy. This, to me, was the acid test

to - am I as funny as I think I am?

And I'm...

And to be in a room full of nine other people

that have done this before, and me kind of having my first lesson,

trying to pretend I'd done this before was really nerve-racking.

I've definitely got a bit of a taste for it now.

But before I embark on my life of fame, riches and world domination...

Time to see what my mum thinks.

We did this stand-up comedy class.

But then they're all on your side,

they would have probably felt sorry for you

and they thought, "Oh, we'll laugh." SHE LAUGHS

-Well, that's a bit...

-Mean!

-That's a bit mean!

I'm not entirely sure that's not a hate crime. Bloody hell, this...

This went south really quickly!

'Could my own mother be a disablist?!'

Out of curiosity, do you know what disablism is?

-Not really, no, but I can imagine what it is.

-What do you think it is?

Give me an educated guess as to what disablism is?

-Prejudice against people with disabilities?

-Exactly.

'Good old Mum! I was starting to worry.

'Google, who I'm in no way at all calling disablist,

'refused to meet with me about the hate speech I received.

'However, they've sent me the following statement in an e-mail.'

'Yeah. I was pretty disappointed with that, too.

'With Google's support, or without, I've got my own ideas as to

'how I'm going to start educating

'and engaging with people on the issue.

'I've been booked on my first ever comedy gig -

'and I'm bricking it.'

I have no idea how this is going to go.

This is a whole room full of people...judging me.

I think I'm hilarious, but other people might incorrectly disagree.

What I've learned through this whole journey is that

if people are kind of exposed to disability

and disfigurement in a positive way, through comedy,

then they kind of become less hostile towards it,

which then in turn breaks down prejudice,

which breaks down hate crime.

# She's been waiting around

# Saving for her time... #

A-agh! You know, I'm building this up too much in my head.

I'm doing the kind of worst-case scenario that someone's going

to heckle me and I'm going to get into an argument with a random guy.

I'm on in about...

..10 minutes, Jesus!

OK, 10 minutes. There's nowhere to hide.

It's you, a mic and a mic stand.

Phew! Bloody hell.

Why am I going to do this?!

OK, breathe...!

Good, OK, let's do this!

It's my pleasure to introduce a stand-up comedian,

his name is Adam Pearson.

This is going to be his stand-up comedy debut,

so give it up for Adam!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Some of you might recognise me from the telly.

Um, I've got one of those faces.

And so...

So, yeah, being disabled's weird cos people ask you,

like, ridiculous questions.

Like, I used to live in Brighton when I studied, and we had the gas

man come round one day, and I was the only person in, so I let him in.

And he was being a bit funny with me the whole time, and then as he left

he just turned to me and went,

"My friend Bill's got a disfigurement. Do you know him?"

"Well, my friend Rob is a bit of a twat.

"Do you know him?"

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

And then, to make it more awkward,

it turns out I did, in fact, know Bill.

LAUGHTER

We, in fact, dated the same girl for a while.

LAUGHTER

'I've had to stare into the ugly face of disability hate crime,

'and I've learned that I've got to stand up and be counted.

'I'm going to continue getting in people's faces and sorting

'out their attitudes, but I can't effect the change all on my own.

'The police, the justice system, the media, society in general,

'it's your responsibility, too.

'And for all those that still have a problem with it - get over it,

'cos I now know you can.'

APPLAUSE AND WHISTLING