Today's guest blog is by Eva Dolan who is an Essex based copywriter and an intermittently successful poke player. Her third novel is After You Die.
On 23rd October 2007 police discovered the bodies
of Fiona Pilkington and her severely disabled teenaged daughter Francecca
Hardwick in the burnt out shell of the family's Austin Maestro, parked up in a
lay-by on the side of the A47 in Leicestershire. Fiona had doused the back seat
of the car with petrol and then set it alight, killing them both.
The women died barely five minutes away from their
home in the village of Barwell, a home that had become a prison for them. Local
youths, their neighbours, had mounted a fifteen year campaign of violence and
harassment, ranging from property damage and verbal abuse, up to outright assault
when Fiona's son was threatened with a knife and beaten with an iron bar. Calls
to police across a decade and a half resulted in exclusion zones, which went
un-respected and unenforced, and the promise of a beat officer who would
monitor the street. With only three PCSOs to serve a village of almost 9000
people, one with more than its fair share of anti-social behaviour, the result
was predictable; nothing changed, Fiona and Francecca were no safer, and the
harassment continued.
It's easy to look at a murder/suicide such as this
and think 'how could she? How could any mother do that to her child?' But even
the briefest details of the torment this vulnerable family were subjected to
give us a glimpse into the hopeless situation many disabled people and their
carers suffer when they become the target of thugs, and Fiona's decision,
however shocking, begins to seem depressingly inevitable.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission's
final report into the handling of the case lays out, in dry, emotionless language,
the sheer scale of the harassment suffered. 182 pages of broken windows and
taunting, threats to kill and counter-accusations by their attackers. It also
lays bare the police force's inability to deal with the problem.
Ironically Hate Crimes policy came into force for
Leicestershire Constabulary in the month that Fiona and Francecca died, but
officers had been in place, and presumably correctly trained, to deal with hate
crimes for three years at that point. And yet, as the IPCC report concluded,
those officers failed to appreciate that they were dealing with a hate crime
and, in fact, 'seemed confused by the inclusion of disability as a hate crime.'
Is it that difficult to understand? Did the
responding officers really not comprehend that prejudice against the disabled
is no different from racism or homophobia?
Steve Ashley, programme director to HM Inspectorate
Constabulary suggested this particular form of hate crime is "...not as easy as identifying a
religiously-motivated attack or a racially-motivated attack. Police officers
don't like to say to people 'Are you disabled?'"
Are we to believe frontline police officers are so
bashful?
In the aftermath of the report much was made of the
'embarrassment factor' but I think the problem is the hierarchy of victims.
Some victims are easier to ignore than others and vulnerable disabled people,
already ground down by years of illness or infirmity as well as abuse, simply
don't have the energy left to demand better from the disinterested or
'embarrassed' officers who respond to their calls for help.
And so, after fifteen years of suffering and no
improvement in sight, Fiona Pilkington drove her daughter six miles away from
their home and sat with her in a burning car until they were both dead.
I'll admit that this case passed me by back in
2007. Some tragic deaths get blanket coverage, others don't, and it was only
when the report was published in 2013 that I started to look into disability
related hate crimes.
The figures are striking. According to disability
charity Mencap 90% of people with a learning disability have been victims of a
hate crime. The Disability Hate Crime Network report twelve murders in 2013/14
and eighty-five attacks and acts of torture, not including those suffered in
care homes or inflicted by carers. All hate crimes are reprehensible but
targeting the most vulnerable in society, knowing they are less capable of
fighting back, is even more sickening.
In some small, maybe naive way, I wanted to try and
bring this terrible state of affairs to the fore. I wanted my police officers
to be better. Zigic and Ferreira wouldn't ignore a cry for help would they?
They've both known prejudice, they've both seen suffering minimised and
marginalised because of the nationality of the victims or the colour of their
skin.
But, when it came down to writing After You Die, I couldn't bring myself
to twist so far away from reality. So Ferreira has missed the signs, she's opened
a report into the harassment of Dawn and Holly Prentice but not pursued it and
now they're both dead and a share of the guilt falls on her shoulders, because
even she failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
After You Die is a book about what it means to be under constant
attack because you are disabled. Holly Prentice, paralysed at fourteen in a
rock climbing accident, is a vocal right to die campaigner, stubborn,
intelligent and eloquent enough to attract enemies on both sides of the debate.
A campaign of cyber bullying is waged against her and when it crosses into the
physical world Holly and her mother find themselves under siege.
I wanted to explore what that does to a family, how
they cope, what they can be driven to, and hopefully, along the way, to expose
an under reported and under prosecuted crime which no civilised society should
be content to tolerate to the point where a dedicated mother sees no solution
other than murder and suicide.
AFTER
YOU DIE by Eva Dolan is out now
Eva Dolan is speaking at Essex Book Festival on
Monday 23rd March at 7.30pm
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