A woman of short stature has told an inquiry she is abused and harassed by strangers once a month on average, with people calling her names, laughing at her, taking videos without consent and even sexually assaulting her.
The disability royal commission is sitting in Brisbane for a five-day hearing examining the experiences of people with disability who have faced violence or abuse in public places.
The commission heard most states and territories did not have laws prohibiting the vilification of people based on their disability, with data collection on the issue also limited.
Artist, academic and psychologist Dr Debra Keenahan told the commission she believed the behaviour of strangers towards her was motivated by a range of emotions including hatred, fear and curiosity.
Keenahan said she was frequently targeted by people in a range of settings and the last time she was hassled was as recently as last week.
She was asked by the senior counsel assisting the commission, Elizabeth Bennett, to describe how it felt when she was abused or harassed in the street for being of short stature.
“You tense up, more often than not it happens from a car rushing by you,” she said. They yell at you, or it’s from a distance in a crowd. It’s always yelled. There is this … attack. That’s what it feels like.
“You brace – ‘Is it coming again? Are they coming at me? Do I keep walking?’ That goes through one’s mind very quickly. You assess all the things rather quickly.”
Keenahan said people would often use the derogatory word “midget” which was “deeply offensive” to the short-statured community.
“Part of the reason for that word being offensive is because it actually stems from the meaning for an insect,” she said.
Keenahan is married to an able-bodied man and the couple have a daughter who also lives with dwarfism.
In one incident about two years ago, Keenahan’s daughter was forced to confront a man at a local park who had been photographing the family without their consent.
It left her daughter in tears. “She said ‘I just want to go home. I don’t want to be here any more. I just want to go home,’” Keenahan said.
In another incident in 2017, Keenahan was harassed and mocked by a group of about 10 school students in their mid-teens while at the Powerhouse Museum to discuss her artwork.
Keenahan separately described being pushed, groped and receiving sexualised comments from men she did not know that made reference to her condition.
She said a friend of hers who also lives with dwarfism had discovered a photograph taken without their consent had become a meme.
The harassment was so constant that Keenahan was always vigilant about whether people were filming her. Some tried to hide it, while others did so openly and even refused to stop when confronted.
“What you start doing is dodging,” Keenahan said. “You know, weaving in and out of cars.”
Keenahan does not walk past skateparks and was reluctant to walk past schools at lunchtime, though the abuse and harassment was also perpetrated by adults, she said.
Some people assumed that because the harassment and abuse were so common she was used to it. “Nobody gets used to being abused,” she said. “You may come to expect it, you learn to manage it, you never, never get used to it.”
Keenahan said media and cultural industries needed to improve their representations of people with disability so they were included where the “storyline isn’t necessarily focused around their difference”.
Bennett said many witnesses would this week speak “in terms of the world outside their front door being a battle”.
She said only Tasmania and the ACT had laws prohibiting the vilification of people based on their disability.
“One question that arises from this hearing is whether such a prohibition in public places is appropriate,” Bennett said. The inquiry continues.
