“It was more than words to us,” she said. “We all felt like you cannot separate what you call people from how you treat people. Attitudes have been changing and everybody felt that with a new term, it was a new beginning.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/rosas-law-asks-senate-kill-slur-mentally-retarded/story?id=9109319
Oregon:
No more ‘R’ word at FGHS: Students form group to integrate disabled kids at Forest Grove High
http://www.forestgrovenewstimes.com/news/story.php?story_id=125745200471913200
Nevada:
Students Want To Eliminate ‘R’ Word: Volunteers Pledge To Stop Using Word ‘Retarded’
http://www.fox5vegas.com/news/21458892/detail.html
Texas:
Lake Waco Montessori students campaign to eliminate ‘R word’
http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2009/11/02/11022009wactheRword.html?imw=Y
“That word is hurtful to some people,” Inglis said. “This is the population we serve, and we need to be sensitive.”
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/10/11/1011name.html
House Adds Hate Crimes Protections for People with Disabilities http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2009/10/09/house-votes-hate-crimes/5734/
Background information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard_Act
Other hate crime legislation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime_laws_in_the_United_States
Contact your U.S. Senator and urge passage of this legislation:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Study: Disabled more likely to be victims of violent crime
By Terry Frieden
CNN Justice Producer
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/02/crimes.disabled/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) — People with disabilities are 50 percent more likely to be victims of violent crimes than are people without disabilities, according to a government study released Thursday.
The first national study of its kind found that a wide range of disabled people — including blind, deaf, developmentally disabled, and others with physical and mental limitations — were victims of assaults, rapes and robberies in 716,000 cases in 2007.
The study by the U.S. Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics said instances of violence against disabled people occurred overall 1½ times the rate of those without disabilities, but the numbers varied by age group.
The most vulnerable groups were disabled people ages 12 to 19 and 35 to 49, for whom victimization occurred at nearly twice the rate of non-disabled persons.
Michael Rand, chief of victimization research for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, did not speculate on the reasons for the findings.
“It’s hard to say,” Rand said. “We didn’t try to get at motivations.”
Rand, a co-author of the study, said many of the crimes were committed by people who did not know their victims. Forty percent of the crimes against disabled male victims were committed by strangers versus 45 percent against those without disabilities.
The difference for females was greater: 34 percent of disabled females were victimized by strangers versus 24 percent for women without disabilities.
The study found that people with cognitive disabilities such as mental retardation, developmental disabilities and cerebral palsy represented the largest group of victims.
Simple assaults accounted for about two-thirds of the crimes against disabled people in the study, which tallied 476,000 simple assaults, 114,000 aggravated assaults, 79,000 robberies, and 47,000 rapes or sexual assaults.
Online hate speech: Difficult to police … and define
by Theresa Howard, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2009-09-30-hate-speech_N.htm
NEW YORK — As the real world grows more tolerant of differences, the virtual world grows with hatred.
Complaints against groups on social networking sites that call for threats, violence and hatred toward people who are Jewish, black, gay or have disabilities are on the rise as Americans celebrate the 19th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the country rallies around its first black president, and gay marriage is legalized in some states.
An application on Facebook asks people to answer a quiz so they can see what “famous retard” they are most like. A Maryland police officer hosts a site with more than 100,000 members that tells people to “Stop breaking the law, retard.” In July, a YouTube video hosted by “ExecutetheGays1″ provided graphic suggestions about how to kill homosexuals. The site was taken down after five days.
The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate speech on the Web, says complaints are up this year more than 200% through July, to 1,512 complaints.”This whole era of cyberhate is one of the biggest challenges we face,” says Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the league. “We’ve gotten to a place where we made it unacceptable for haters to hate in the public space.” So they turn to the Web, where they can be anonymous.
An offensive word all over the web
Hannah Jacobs, 53, a New York mother of two, didn’t know there was so much hatred on the Web about children with disabilities until a recent dinner, when a man sitting next to her used the word “retard.”
“I felt like I was kicked in the stomach,” says Jacobs, a former vice president for Christie’s auction house. She quit her job 10 years ago when she and her husband confirmed that their daughter, Molly, 12, was cognitively impaired. “I went home and Googled the word.”
She found hundreds of user groups with the word in it, especially on Facebook. So she started her own group challenging Facebook to “stop mocking people with disabilities.” It now has 28,000 members.
Jacobs spends about 20 hours a week combing the Web for such sites. When she finds them, she tries to contact the organizers to ask them to take the site down or change the name. Her group members write letters to government officials and to media companies that operate the sites.
“It takes a lot of work,” Jacobs says. “The goal is that once these groups are reported that Facebook take them down. I try to make the world a better place for Molly.”
But making the virtual world better is a challenge. Facebook takes a long time to respond, and hundreds of groups with the word “retard” remain, she says.
But is it ‘hate speech’?
Facebook sees it differently. Spokesman Simon Axter says complaints about nudity, pornography and harassing personal messages are responded to in 24 hours, but other sites require more scrutiny, and use of the word “retard” isn’t considered hate speech. “Our team has had a lot of discussion about … what is hate speech and where Facebook should be drawing the line,” he says. “The mere use of the word ‘retard’ is not a violation of terms of use.”
And it’s not a violation for YouTube or Google. But YouTube has created an online safety center in conjunction with the Anti-Defamation League; it explains the effect of hate speech and lets people flag offending sites and videos.
“We don’t permit hate speech,” says Scott Rubin, head of global communications and public affairs for Google and YouTube. “What we mean by hate speech is that it attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status and sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Though sites may include offensive words, content is considered hate speech only if comments or videos target a person simply because of his or her membership in a certain group. “There are 20 hours of video uploaded to our site every minute. We don’t prescreen,” Rubin says. “Instead, we count on our community to know the guidelines and to flag videos that they believe violate guidelines.”
In the end, positive speech is the best way to drown out hate speech, says free-speech expert Adam Thierer.
“When advocacy groups work together and use the new technology at their disposal, they have a way of signaling out bad speech and bad ideas,” says Thierer, a senior fellow with the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “The Internet is a cultural bazaar. It’s the place to find the best and worst of all human elements on display.”
Hannah Jacobs’ group on Facebook may be found here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=63516216741 or on Twitter: http://twitter.com/missionmom1
Once a regularly dished insult, efforts to brand the word “retarded” as unacceptable are starting to see success.
“I’m going to make an effort to stop using these words even though I seldom do. Just as a matter of respect.”
http://community.thenest.com/cs/ks/forums/thread/20660150.aspx
NPR story revisits the issue of the r-word and respect.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112479383
LANGUAGE: Respect is the new r-word
August 25, 2009, by JOEL T. HELFRICH, ROCHESTER
The Black Eyed Peas riffed “Let’s get retarded” in what is possibly their most famous song. By using the r-word, Black Eyes Peas suggest that “retarded” means stupid. In fact, people have used the r-word for years to mean something that is backwards or people who act stupidly or crazily.
With the recent death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics, as well as the use of the r-word by a Monroe County legislator, it is time to look again at this word and its possible retirement.
Continue reading:
http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/news/letters/2009/08/LANGUAGE-Respect-is-the-new-r-word