User:Serenafangary/sandbox

In 1994, disability was added to the list of protected categories when Congress reauthorized the Hate Crimes Statistics Act. This sparked the FBI in beginning to keep data that relates to all crimes based against persons, property, or society that entails someone with a disability. Once these crimes are recorded, they are then divided up into subcategories; therefore, disability status was measured out through either one’s physical disability or their mental disability. The FBI did this in order to determine if the frequency of the crimes differed depending on one’s disabled status (whether it was physical or mental).

The date they received indicated that the risk of a disabled individual being the victim of a hate crime was somewhat rare, but the risk of them being assault was far higher than any other marginalized group. However, there seemed to be a minute difference in terms of frequency between those who were physically disabled and those who were mentally disabled.

Regardless, there is a widely known assumption that the incidence of reporting crimes by someone with a disability is much less than that of another minority group. Some suggest that this is the case because of the lack of access to the criminal justice system as well as possible retribution from caretakers or others. With that, individuals with disabilities may actually experience more hate crimes than those of which have been already reported.

According to newly-released data, disability hate crime incidents are currently on the rise in the United States. There were over 150 recently reported hate crime offenses that stemmed from bias of those with disability just in the 2018 year. From the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, there were much less similar offenses in the year prior, demonstrating a stark increase as time has progressed. In total, the FBI reported over 7,000 hate crime incidents in general which makes about 2.1 percent of the victims from those crimes were specifically targeted because of their disability.

Out of the disability hate crimes that were logged and recorded, 110 of those were against people with mental disabilities while the other 67 were those with physical disabilities. Studies have also shown that the chance of being physically or sexually assaulted when someone is disabled can be up to ten times greater than those who are able-bodied.