The Role of Public Places in Disability Hate Crimes (DHC)

Disability hate crimes (DHCs) is an under-reported phenomenon concerning any criminal offense considered to be motivated by hostility/prejudice against a person’s actual or perceived disability. In this chapter, we identify potential relationships that may exist between DHCs and public places in the extant literature in order to shed light on their role in facilitating or hindering the occurrence of DHCs. To this end, Scopus, PubMed, and Scholar databases were used to perform a scoping literature review by searching for keywords related to ‘disability hate crime’, which covered about 80 documents. Our findings highlight a relationship between DHCs and public places—in particular, virtual spaces, public institutions, areas of poverty and deprivation—as well as how these places can facilitate or limit the aforementioned form of violence against a person’s actual or perceived disability in various contexts.