In the Guardian, 7. November 2013, there was an article pointing to this problem:

There is a long history of false accusations of paedophilia being levelled against disabled people



The article goes through a number of such cases: When I first started investigating murders and killings of disabled people in Britain, back in 2007, I found case after case where disabled men were accused of sexual crimes – always, I stress, wrongly – and then subjected to the violence of the lynch mob.

There have been many more killings, over the years. In just over one year, in fact, I found five such killings related to false sexual offence charges, including paedophilia. These included that of Sean Miles, who was stripped, stabbed and drowned after being accused of being a paedophile. Steven Hoskin was similarly accused, tortured, targeted and murdered by so-called friends, who dragged him around on a dog leash before pulling him to a railway viaduct and pushing him off. Now Bijan Ebrahimi takes his place on that sad list of murders – a grim pattern of disabled men falsely accused of sexual crimes they didn't commit, and then killed with overwhelming cruelty by a lynch mob.

The catalogue of murders that I and others uncovered, and growing pressure to do something about disability hate crime from disabled peoples' organisations, led to an inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission,

Its report, Hidden in Plain Sight, declared that the false allegation of paedophilia against a disabled person was a clear and present danger to their lives.

I found that many disabled people were attacked or murdered by so-called friends – what is colloquially known (somewhat controversially) as "mate crime" – rather than strangers or acquaintances, as is the case with many other forms of hate crime. I also found that, unlike other forms of hate crime, women seemed to be disproportionately involved and to motivate and instigate many attacks. Many offenders were young, poor and unemployed.

Disability hatred has motivated witch-hunts for centuries. The longest witch-hunt in British history, in East Anglia, started with the arrest and eventual hanging of a one-legged woman, Elizabeth Clarke, in the 1644. That, too, started with neighbours turning on disabled neighbours. One sympathetic witness said that the witches were "decrepit and diseased". Things don't seem to have changed much.

I would be interested in hearing if hatred against disabled people also exists where you live, and if you have any idea why.

I also wonder if people think that accusations of paedophilia justifies such or other murders.