Anonymous: I was a victim of hate crime because of my deafness

I work for quite a large company and part of my job involves meeting members of the general public. Most of the people I work with are aware of my deafness and we manage to communicate by me either lipreading or writing things down.

An interpreter comes into my work once a week for my manager to relay important information or for him to share news with me and this worked well so far. The only downside is I can’t relay important information daily, I have to wait for an update once a week.

A few months ago however I started to feel uneasy about one customer who started coming into my workplace. I can tell a lot by someone’s facial expression or how they look at me, and this person would always scowl or look down when he was talking to me.

I told him the first time we met that I was deaf and he seemed rather unhappy about this. He mumbled a lot and I didn’t know what he was saying. I brushed it off and continued my work and thought to myself ‘he’s probably just a very unhappy person.’

A little while later, he came into my workplace again complaining about an item he had bought. I was struggling to understand him because of his fast and angry manner and he seemed to become very irritated and I lipread him saying to me ‘you lot are all the same!’ I didn’t know what he meant by this. You lot meaning people that work here, or meaning deaf people like me? Another member of staff came over and took over thankfully and sorted his complaint out and I didn’t say any more about it.

However, recently he came in to our store again this time looking even more harassed and angry than the last time. I decided to write things down on paper to see if I could solve the problem. This time he lost his temper and tapped furiously at his head whilst shouting at me ‘are you deaf and dumb!?’ I was astounded by this and didn’t know how to react. I felt so angry inside but had to stay calm and professional. I was worried he was going to hit me.

Luckily another staff member came right over and took over and told me later not worry about what had happened. I decided to talk to my manager via my interpreter and explained what happened after the event. My manager initially said that this was unacceptable and refused to serve the man again in future. However, the man later came into the shop when I wasn’t there and apologised which my manager accepted and so my workplace carried on accepting the man’s custom.

Nobody apologised to me in person, though – so I still felt really unhappy about it all.

I started to feel really uneasy and nervous at work. Was this man’s attitude all my fault? Feeling upset, I confided in my interpreter and my interpreter explained to me that actually this mans actions were what could be described as a hate crime.  Hate crime is any type of hostility or abuse that’s targeted at you because of a race or disability or something different.

This man was aggressive and hostile to me – because of my disability. I felt uneasy and nervous at work because I was worried it was going to happen again. It really caused me a lot of stress.

The worst thing for me was nobody at my workplace really stood up for me or explained to the man that his behaviour was unacceptable and that I deserved an apology. I have since learnt that I can report this to the police and I have since decided to look for another job at a place where I feel respected.

I wanted to share my story to let other deaf people know they shouldn’t tolerate abuse in the workplace because of their deafness and most importantly, their employers should support them no matter what.

I found the following link useful for me to understand what hate crime was and how to report it:

https://www.report-it.org.uk

*The above article has been transcribed from BSL into English. The writer has chosen to keep his identity anonymous.
Image from iStock photos.