People with disabilities are routinely being denied access to justice by police and other agencies, a Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission (EOHRC) report has found.
The commission estimated 20 per cent of Australians had a disability, and while they were more likely to experience violent and sexual crime they were less likely to report it.
The report was based on more than 20 case studies and found “urgent” work was needed to bring down barriers across the criminal justice system.
Victoria’s Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commissioner Kate Jenkins described the majority of the case studies as “pretty shocking”.
“A blind quadriplegic being assaulted three times and pulled from her wheelchair, and when she called to report to police she was told to not bother calling if she couldn’t visually describe her attacker,” Commissioner Jenkins said.
“There was other examples of a deaf assault victim, who was asked to use her husband as an Auslan interpreter when he was in fact the alleged perpetrator.”
The commissioner said while some people interviewed had good experiences with police officers, most did not.
“The majority of case studies we got, the system was either very difficult to take a report or the report taken really wasn’t enough to prosecute,” she said.
“Many people did say that after a bad experience with police that they would subsequently not report a further crime.”
The commission also found that if a person with a disability got their case to court they faced more problems.
“There’s challenges all the way through the justice system, and at court we found that people even had trouble getting into court with physical accessibility, and then once in court real challenges on how to give evidence,” Commissioner Jenkins said.
“There’s a whole lot of things where people with disabilities are blamed for what’s happened to them, are not given a proper hearing, are not believed.”
Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Ken Lay said he was shocked by some of the revelations in the report.
“It was quite a confronting report for Victoria Police, there were some quite shocking stories there about how we’ve let a number of people down but as an organisation, we’re committed to get this right,” Chief Commissioner Lay said.
“I didn’t understand the depths of the problem until the commission’s report was put out.
“It’s been enormously challenging for me and quite confronting how some of the quite vulnerable members of the community have been let down.”
Victoria Police, the departments of justice, human services and health, as well as Court Services Victoria and the Victorian Government were all targeted in the report’s recommendations.
The 16 recommendations included developing a code of practice for responding to victims and witnesses with disabilities, introducing a network of disability advisors, improving training and ensure public communication materials taking the needs of people with a disability into account.
As the frontline responder, Victoria Police came in for particularly heavy criticism and was issued eight recommendations for improvement.
Chief Commissioner Lay said police would implement all of them.
“Clearly there is an expectation from me and the community that our police members are responsive, they hear an issue, they address it, they own the problem,” he said.
“I’m pleased to say too that the commission has undertaken to work these through with us to help us understand the breadth of the issues and to make sure that we actually do implement these recommendations make some very vulnerable people in our community much safer.”
Read the full story... (off-site)Also reported on The World Today (off-site)- Topics:
- Discrimination
- Author:
- ABC News
- Date published:
- Mon 21st Jul, 2014