‘I haven’t got anywhere safe’: disabled people’s experiences of hate and violence within the home

ABSTRACT

This paper explores disabled people’s experiences of ‘everyday’ hate within and around their home. The characteristics of the home make it a particularly interesting site of analysis, as many of the features offer protections and risks simultaneously. Moreover, the home is a particularly important space within our everyday lives, particularly for disabled people who may encounter marginalization within other social spaces. In this article, I consider how encounters within the home shape the way in which the space is made, and how disabled people are able to be within them. I explore the home as a space where persistent and repeated violence can occur, which in turn, shapes how bodies come to occupy (or not), their homes and to what meanings the home takes on. In an attempt to explore this, I offer different conceptualizations of the home as a site of refuge, control and containment, avoidance, and resistance.

Resumen

Este artículo explora las experiencias de odio ‘cotidiano’ de las personas con discapacidad dentro y alrededor de su hogar. El hogar es un sitio de análisis particularmente interesante ya que el hogar ofrece protecciones y riesgos simultáneamente. Además, el hogar es un espacio particularmente importante dentro de nuestra vida cotidiana, en particular para las personas con discapacidad que pueden encontrarse marginadas dentro de otros espacios sociales. En este artículo, considero cómo los encuentros dentro del hogar dan forma a la construcción del espacio y cómo las personas con discapacidad pueden estar dentro de ellos. Exploro el hogar como un espacio donde la violencia persistente y repetida puede ocurrir, lo que a su vez determina cómo los cuerpos llegan a ocupar (o no ocupar) sus hogares y qué significados adquiere el hogar. En un intento por explorar esto, ofrezco diferentes conceptualizaciones del hogar como un sitio de refugio, control y contención, evasión y resistencia.

Résumé

Cet article se penche sur les expériences de haine « au quotidien » que subissent les personnes en situation de handicap dans leur foyer et dans ses environs. Les caractéristiques du foyer en font un lieu d’analyse particulièrement intéressant, car beaucoup de ses constituants offrent à la fois des protections et des dangers. En outre, c’est un espace extrêmement important pour notre vie de tous les jours, surtout pour les personnes handicapées qui peuvent se trouver confrontées à la marginalisation dans leurs autres sphères sociales. Ici, j’étudie comment les rencontres dans le foyer façonnent la manière dont l’espace est organisé, et par quels moyens les personnes handicapées peuvent être en leur sein. J’explore le foyer en tant qu’espace dans lequel une violence persistante et systématique peut prendre place, qui à son tour, forme la manière dont les corps viennent occuper (ou non) leurs foyers et les significations que ceux-ci prennent. En essayant d’examiner tout cela, j’offre des conceptualisations différentes du foyer en tant que lieu de refuge et de confinement, d’évasion et de résistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability hate crime
• home
• everyday
• violence
• affect theory

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Crimen de odio a personas con discapacidad
• hogar
• cotidianidad
• violencia
• teoría de los afectos

MOTS CLEFS:

• Crimes de haine à l’égard du handicap
• foyer
• quotidien
• violence
• théorie des affects

Introduction

The tragic case of Fiona Pilkington is a notable example of the everyday and intimate nature of hate crime for many disabled people. Fiona and her two children were repeatedly targeted within their home by a local gang in Leicestershire, United Kingdom (UK). Incidents included verbal harassment, throwing stones at their windows, urinating on their front garden, jumping in the hedge, damaging their car, and shouting outside of their house during the night (Quarmy, 2011). The Independent Police Complaints Commission [IPCC] inquest revealed that Fiona Pilkington had contacted the police on 33 different occasions between 1997 and 2007, all relating to reports of anti-social behaviour or assaults (IPCC, 2009). The failure to recognize these incidents as a pattern of violence ultimately led to Fiona taking her and her daughter’s life.

Fiona’s story presents an uncomfortable reality about disability hate crime that transcends geographical borders. For many disabled people, experiences of hate are not a rare phenomenon, but part of a much broader set of exclusions that create and reinforce barriers in their everyday lives (Roulstone & Mason-Bish, 2013; Sherry, 2010). Disabled people are more likely to be repeat ‘victims’ of hate crime (Wilkin, 2020) and are at greater risk of ‘low-level’ incidents that can escalate to more serious crimes (Quarmby, 2008). Repeat offences are argued to be particularly prominent where perpetrators live in close proximity and/or are family members (Macdonald et al., 2021). Despite this prevalence, their categorization as ‘low level’ can mean that they are rarely considered as violent or discriminatory (Clayton et al., 2021), but instead as acts of anti-social behaviour. Such categorization fails to recognize how these day-to-day experiences shape disabled people’s sense of self within the ordinary spaces that they occur. This article focuses upon patterns of violence as they occur within disabled people’s home spaces.

By attending to the reality of everyday hate, it calls for an understanding of how space is both produced and produces (Tyner, 2011). This approach engages with the way in which ordinary, everyday spaces are shaped by the movement of emotions and signs between bodies and objects that surface together or away from one another (Ahmed, 2014). Previous research has identified ‘a geography of verbal abuse and harassment experienced by disabled people including “hotspots” on public transport, in local neighbourhoods and on city centre streets’ (Hall & Bates, 2019, p. 101; See also Edwards & Maxwell, 2021). Wilkin (2020) argues that disability hate crime is particularly common upon public transport in England and (Burch, 2021a) has documented experiences of disability hate crime within pubs and clubs. Beadle-Brown et al. (2014) have identified the prevalence of hostility in day care centres, schools and colleges. These findings contribute to geographies of disability hate crime, and in highlighting the specific social and public spaces that hostility is likely to occur.

Research that focuses on geographies of disability hate crime have made important contributions to disability studies and hate studies and specifically, to the way in which hate can become a routine feature of everyday life. However, there is a need to connect this work to geographies of violence and the home in a similar way to the work of feminist scholars who have researched sexual and domestic violence. In this article, I begin to make connections between disabled people’s experiences of violence within the home as relevant to discourses surrounding both hate crime (including so-called ‘low level incidents’) and domestic/sexual violence. In doing so, this article contributes to geographies of the home and violence more generally, and to the relationship between disability and the home more specifically. By focusing upon the home as a space where hostility can occur, I consider the similarities and overlaps between domestic/sexual violence, ‘low-level incidents’ and anti-social behaviour, and disability hate crime. While there are important differences in the way each of these phenomena have been conceptualized, I argue that a silo-approach does not appreciate the complexity of disabled people’s experiences of violence within and around the home. Moreover, I suggest that continuing to conceptualize (and legislate against) these experiences as ‘either’ sexual and domestic violence ‘or’ hate crime and anti-social behaviour can mean that these experiences fall through the gaps.

Geographies of disability and the home

The home is an interesting site to explore when thinking about everyday hate given its centrality in most of our lives. More than a physical environment, the home is constructed through a myriad of characteristics, relationships, and feelings. The process of homemaking constitutes a space that has multiple meanings and opportunities for being (Duffy & Waitt, 2013; Valentine, 2001). For some, the home is made into a space that offers comfort, intimacy, relaxation and security (Mallett, 2004). It can offer retreat from public view (Chapman & Hockey, 1999) as different rules of engagement and participation exist between the home and outside space (Mallett, 2004). From this perspective, the home becomes ‘our space’ where we can take comfort and refuge from the outside world (Kidd & Evans, 2011; Sa, 2017). Therefore, the home can offer a time and a place to be free from the expectations, risks, and uncertainties that come to define social spaces. For disabled people and other marginalized groups, the home can thus become a space of refuge; a space that is not governed by the strict rules and regulations of social encounters.

These conceptions of the home arise through various homemaking practices. Homemaking practices refer to the multiple ways in which we construct (physically and emotionally) our home, and the way that we live within this space. Homemaking is about how we furnish our home to meet the needs and routines of our lifestyle (Dowling & Mee, 2007). It is about who we choose to inhabit our homes with, and the ways in which we move in this space together. Homemaking assumes a state of flow and continuity (Baxter & Brickell, 2014). Yet for many, the reality is that our home spaces are much more complex and multi-layered, representing a space of possible constriction, confinement and insecurity (Lowe & DeVerteuil, 2022). These meanings and opportunities are actively shaped by personal characteristics, social context and environmental factors. Our experiences of homemaking are therefore relational; shaped by the social and structural factors that surround us (Webber, 2023). In this way, the home is a space that can be both made and unmade simultaneously.

Baxter and Brickell (2014) write about the process of ‘home-unmaking’, recognizing that our home lives are rarely fixed, but are dynamic and in some cases, restrictive. For example, Ortega-Alcázar and Wilkinson (2021) have presented shared housing as a site of insecurity and fear for the increasing number of young women impacted by cuts to housing welfare. Lowe and DeVerteuil (2022) have written about the ‘ambiguous home’ as it is experienced by people with mental health difficulties. For these individuals, the home can represent a site of negotiation and a place of struggle between security and chaos. An ageing population can also give rise to the home as a space of isolation and withdrawal, with fewer accessible housing options (Peace, 2015). Tunåker (2015) presents the home as a source of confusion, precariousness, and alienation for LGBT youth which can result in homelessness (See also Tierney & Ward, 2017). Our home space is made and unmade according to who we are and the lives that we lead. Contributing to this literary background, this paper explores the different meanings and framings of home for disabled people who experience violence within these intimate spaces. Indeed, I show how disabled people negotiate homemaking and home-unmaking in response to hostility.

Geographies of disability and the home have demonstrated multiple opportunities and risks for disabled people. Architecturally, poor housing design can mean that disabled people’s homes fail to meet their needs (Imrie, 2004). Within this context, the home can be experienced as limiting and confining as it is physically difficult to navigate. Inaccessibility is particularly pertinent given that disabled people are less likely than non-disabled people to own their own home, but significantly more likely to live in social housing (Office for National Statistics, 2019). Disabled people’s home spaces are also more likely to be defined by care and support. The entry of care within the home spaces is suggested to challenge the ‘privateness’ of the space (Dyck et al., 2005). This means that while care and support within the home offers the potential for agency and greater accessibility, it can also pose risk and vulnerability for some disabled people. While many disabled people will receive care within their personal home space, we can broaden conceptions of the home here to a range of institutions such as hospitals, residential centres and mental health facilities (Steele, 2022). Recognition of the variety of home spaces that disabled people might occupy within their lifetime helps to widen our understanding of what type of space the home is, and the multiple sites that homemaking and home-unmaking can occur.

Feminist scholars have considered the private nature of the home space which can challenge the notion of the home as a safe haven (Pain, 2000; Price, 2002). Disabled people, especially disabled women are at a greater risk of interpersonal violence than non-disabled people (Collings et al., 2020; Harpur & Douglas, 2014; Mays, 2006; Walter-Brice et al., 2012) often for a prolonged period of time (Ballan et al., 2022; Breckenridge, 2018). The nature of disabled people’s relationships with others, particularly in the context of care-giving, can mean that perpetrators of violence range from partners, paid carers, care agencies and family members (Harpur & Douglas, 2014; Thiara et al., 2011). Moreover, McCarthy (2017) argues that disabled people and in particular, women with intellectual disabilities are at risk of experiencing a complex array of violence within their homes, including hate crime, mate crime, sexual violence and domestic violence. According to Hollomotz (2013), violence towards disabled people occurs on a continuum, often interlinked and overlapping. Since the home can very often be the primary site for this to occur, there is a need for a greater focus upon the home as a space within which the boundaries between domestic violence and disability hate crime can become blurred. This article addresses this need by exploring disabled people’s experiences of violence and disability hate crime within the home.

Context and methods

This paper draws upon an Economic and Social Research Council funded project [grant number ES/J500215/1] conducted at the University of Leeds. Ethical approval was granted by The University of Leeds Research Ethics Committee (AREA 18–002). The aims of this research were to explore experiences of ‘everyday hate’ and to attend to the ways in which these experiences were understood and made sense of, in relation to the broader concept of hate crime. 71 disabled people took part in the research across three distinct stages. 37 participants identified as male, 30 as female, one as non-binary and one as transmasculine. Participants were aged between 18 and ‘56 and over’ with the largest number of participants aged between 26–35 (22). 43 participants identified as heterosexual, four as bisexual, seven as gay or lesbian, one as asexual and 14 did not disclose their sexual orientation. Data was not collected on the living circumstances of participants, or the specific impairment/disability that they identified with. However, this information often emerged through discussions where the home became a topic of importance and this context is drawn upon within the analysis.

All participants engaged with the process of informed consent throughout the project and at each stage. Stage one involved arts-based and reflective workshops with disabled people within six organizations and peer-support groups. The collaborative and participatory nature of these workshops offered an opportunity to open up new conversations about hate crime and created a space for participants to share and make sense of their own experiences of hate (Burch, 2022). Stage two involved semi-structured interviews with a smaller number of disabled people to explore individual experiences in more detail, and to attend to their positioning of ‘everyday hate’ within the context of their everyday lives. In the final stage of data collection, I held a series of workshops to invite participants to collaboratively reflect upon preliminary research findings. During this time, I posed preliminary themes and patterns emerging from my own interpretations of data, and invited participants to debate these further and identify the most central points of discussion.

My approach to coding was iterative and, in some aspects, collaborative. I transcribed all audio recordings and uploaded these to the coding software, NVivo. Next, I followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) ‘phrases of thematic analysis’ to organize and reflect upon developing themes as I continued to engage with the research process. This involved familiarizing myself with the data, generating initial codes, searching for themes and reviewing themes. The fluidity of coding categories was important, particularly as I was continuing to make sense of the data as it was generated through all stages of fieldwork. This enabled an exploratory reading of the transcripts on a case-by-case basis, rather than applying rigid labels to categories too soon (Grbich, 2013). In this way, I sought to prevent the exclusion of potentially significant themes by continuing to revise and rethink coding categories as I moved between each new transcript and the dataset as a whole. This also shaped stage three of the research, which involved collaborative analysis with participants. During this stage, preliminary themes and codes were shifted and developed through reflective discussions with participants. Following this, I began to formulate more solidified themes for the purpose of bringing the data together and presenting these. In this article I draw upon the stories shared by disabled people that situate hate as occurring within and around the home. These experiences explore the different ways that hate circulates within the home, and how these experiences came to shape and transform disabled people’s relationship within these intimate spaces. In all of these cases, the home constitutes a complex space; one that is made and unmade as a site of refuge, control and containment, avoidance, and resistance.

How hate shapes the meaning of the home

The stories that are shared in this section present different understandings of the home in response to experiences of hate. By reflecting upon these experiences, I attend to the significance of hate encounters, and their ability to make a difference to the home space (Wilson, 2017). Such encounters are understood to shape our relationship with surrounding space, our sense of belonging and our sense of self. Indeed, it is by living in and through violence that the home space changes and responds to the affective possibilities of those within (See Burch, 2021b). By attending to the home as a space that shifts according to these affects, I recognize that ‘the “doing” of hate is not simply “done” in the moment of its articulation’ (Ahmed, 2014, p. 57) but continues to shape future encounters.

The home as a space of refuge

Some participants made sense of their home space as a place of refuge hidden from public view. For example, Lynn’s conceptualization of, and relationship with her home was storied by the presence of violence within public spaces. Lynn lived in a city centre flat owned by a social housing association. While she endured various accessibility issues within this flat as a wheelchair user, everyday social spaces such as the shops and public transport were risky for Lynn, who regularly experienced verbal abuse and physical violence. The spontaneity of these incidents meant that it was ‘a lot more stressful to leave the house in many ways’ (Lynn). For Lynn, the home is made sense of as a place by a comparison of what it is not (Stehlik, 2017). That is to say, Lynn’s sense of home is constructed not simply by her encounters within the home, but those in public space. Similarly, Maisie presented her home as a safe space away from the public domain. Maisie was a young woman with learning disabilities who lived with her parents and maintained a strict weekly routine and returned home straight after working in her local disabled person’s organization (DPO) because she felt ‘unsafe’ being out. Harry, a young wheelchair-user, shared this feeling of risk and commented upon the additional labour required to go to social spaces such as pubs and clubs due to the perceived risk of hostility:

Every time we go out then it would be like we’re probably gonna have to deal with it so sometimes you don’t want to bother with it so you don’t end up going somewhere. Explicitly or implicitly, it drives you out of those spaces … you don’t have the right to go as freely as other people

For Lynn, Maisie and Harry, occupying public space requires an investment of additional labour, time, and energy. Public space becomes a ‘rugged terrain’ that requires diligent decision making and navigation to safely occupy (Porta et al., 2015, p. 2). As opposed to this rugged terrain, the home can provide a smoother surface; a site to recuperate energy, be behind closed doors, and temporarily avoid hostile encounters within public space.

We can read these ways of residing within the home as refuge as evidence of homemaking in response to experiences of hate and hostility within public spaces. These accounts illustrate the affective possibility of homemaking, as disabled people make conscious and informed decisions about how and when to occupy the home in response to their own knowledge and understanding of the social world (Bê, 2019). The making of the home as a site of refuge responds to a desire for privacy and time to be and become in ways that are not restricted by the judgements and behaviours of others. The home becomes a place to retreat to, a space that is constructed by ‘the protective pulling up of drawbridges’ (Massey, 2005). In this way, we can perceive the home as a ‘hiding space’ (Morgan, 2017) that offers a temporary release from experiences of hate and hostility within public view. It becomes a shelter that provides a material barrier from the outside world.

While the home offers solitude from the outside world and reduces the risk of hostility, it equally increases the sense of isolation and containment. Indeed, although Maisie sought refuge within her home, she equally recognized that her fear of being out in public had impacted her ability to participate in social activities. She reflected that ‘I was isolated and that over the years, I’m not getting out much and I wasn’t doing loads of stuff’. It is to this point that the blurry lines between refuge and containment are particularly relevant. Conceiving the home as a ‘hiding space’ does not translate simply to the provision of comfort and stability, but represents a space of temporary – that is, unstable, fragile, and unpredictable – safety. In the following section, the concept of containment is used to further explore the ways in which violence within and around the home can cause disabled people to become increasingly confined within their homes.

Control and containment within the home

Many participants illustrated the fragility of the home when it became the site of violence. For example, both Sinead and Taylor reported having fireworks put through their letterboxes, Tone claimed that local teenagers had been throwing eggs and stones at his house, and Robbie, Elvis, Alex and Aaron Presley had all been burgled while living in supported living accommodation. For Doria Skadinski, the fragility of safety within the home led to increasing isolation and self-confinement. Doria Skadinski identified as having physical impairments and mental health issues. She was repeatedly targeted by ‘local youths’ over a period of three years in the home that she rented from the Council with her teenage autistic son. She described:

they started vandalising things and putting things through our letterbox, leaving stuff on our doorstep, stealing our dustbin, vandalising our car on a regular basis. And then one day they took the actual, they smashed off the front of the garage, the council said they’d never seen anything like it. They took the entire door off and vandalised everything in there and stole my bike … for about a five week period, came to our home every single night and attacked our house.

Doria Skadinski’s experiences illustrate the home as a site of targeted violence. While household features such as hedges and gates create a physical boundary between the private and public (Valentine, 2001), the pattern of violence described dismantles these boundaries both physically and symbolically. Indeed, the accumulation of ‘everyday hate’ unmakes the space of the home, no longer as a site of intimacy, privacy and refuge, but one that is shaped by fear and uncertainty. There are important parallels here with the concept of entrapment that has more typically been applied to domestic violence. Put by Little (2017, p. 477) entrapment occurs where ‘violence and the threat of violence serve to physically restrict the victims of domestic violence’. Such restrictions arise from the feeling of uncertainty and fear, which can constitute physical containment within the home. These feelings of fear and uncertainty shape how we situate ourselves within our social world, as it is through these feelings that we perceive space as safe or risky (Davidson & Milligan, 2004). Evident from the stories shared above, the home is not a permanent space of refuge, but a space where we can temporarily hide from others.

The concept of containment illustrates the feeling of entrapment as a response to violence. Containment here is enacted as a form of disciplinary power that is imposed onto and impresses upon Doria Skadinski in the form of self-confinement. Indeed, containment is imposed by perpetrators through the threat of violence as a means of removing ‘havoc’ or ‘deviance’ from society (Hancock & Garner, 2011) and takes shape in Doria Skadinski’s own admissions of feeling ‘trapped’ within her home. Indeed, despite being the site where violence was most likely to occur, Doria Skadinski’s home offered some degree of structural protection. She explained keeping the curtains closed to ensure a physical barrier that separated her and her family from perpetrators. The home is therefore made into a hiding space. In turn, Doria Skadinski recognized her own containment within the home (as an act of safety) as restricting the extent to which she and her son were able to interact outside of this space. Paradoxically, the anticipation of hostility created a space that was difficult to leave, yet offered very little sense of security.

Fear operates as a mode of containment both in the present and the future (See also Little, 2020). Indeed, based on prior experience and understanding of the home, containment arises as a response to the anticipation of further incidents. Put by Ahmed (2014, p. 65), ‘fear involves an anticipation of hurt or injury … the feeling of fear presses us into that future as an intense bodily experience in the present’. The presence of fear changes the space of the home and creates a site that operates as a ‘waiting area’; a holding space that exists in anticipation of the next encounter. In this way, the home does not offer peace or stability, but produces and is produced by the fear of violence. The home is conceptualized as a site of containment and restriction, both of which had detrimental impacts upon Doria Skadinski and her son. As she described, ‘we both ended up very ill and it had to get absolutely critical before it was recognized’. These experiences left an ‘affectual imprint’ (Edwards & Maxwell, 2021) or an ‘impression’ (Ahmed, 2014) that heightened their sense of vulnerability and shaped the way in which they made use of (or not) the spaces around them (Hall & Bates, 2019). Due to this, the violence directed at their home produced a space that necessitated containment and isolation as a means of alleviating the risks attributed to their sense of vulnerability.

Restrictions on the ways in which participants were able to live within their homes were also enforced by acts of what would typically be considered as domestic violence within the home space. While the nature of violence is different (externally enacted vs internally perpetrated), both of these ultimately control the behaviour of those targeted and thereby contain them within their homes. During a focus group, Fifi and Joyce shared experiences of domestic violence within which their partners had been emotionally and physically abusive to them. Joyce disclosed controlling behaviour perpetrated by her ex-boyfriend, whom she lived alone with: ‘I had a boyfriend and he was bossy. And he liked telling me what to wear and what to do and things like that’. When Fifi’s ex-husband moved into her home he took control of the space by occupying it as his own. Fifi explained that he put his own pictures over her own and that she was not allowed to meet with her friends outside of the home space. While the practice of covering up Fifi’s pictures with his own might seem mundane, this significantly shapes the meaning of her home space. Indeed, photographs can evoke memories of relationships and experiences that make people feel a sense of closeness to their home. Photographs can be an important means through which individuals, most commonly women, make their house into a home (Rose, 2003, 2004) and decorative items and memorabilia carry important biographical meanings for the occupants (Dyck et al., 2005). By controlling the photographs that were visible, Fifi’s ex-husband prevented her from being able to make her home as a personal site that supported her emotional being.

Both Joyce and Fifi’s experiences align to traditional conceptualizations of domestic violence, which can be characterized by the exertion of power and control within the domestic setting through the use of coercion, threat and force (Little, 2020; Mays, 2006). Moreover, Fifi’s experiences resonate with further research findings that disabled women are more likely to experience multiple encounters of abuse throughout their lives (Thiara et al., 2011). During her interview, Fifi recalled being repeatedly raped by her dad within her family home between the ages of 5 and 11. As the only female and disabled child, Fifi described herself as the ‘runt of the family’ and therefore an easier target for sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Unlike her brothers, she wasn’t allowed to engage in social activities outside of school and therefore had little time to communicate with her friends. Fifi disclosed being regularly ‘shouted down’, ‘dragged to the doctors’ and ‘topped up with Valium’ by her mother. The use of medication is another example of containment within the home, whereby medication is a form of violence used to control Fifi’s behaviour. Thus, control of Fifi perpetrated within both her family and marital home, operated as a means of containing her within the confines of that space. The privacy afforded by the home space enabled this control and containment to take place without outside interference.

The private nature of the home space was a feature of Michael P’s experiences of verbal, physical and sexual violence within a residential school as a child. Abuse was perpetrated by ‘bully boys’ who were slightly older residents at the institution as well as staff, who perpetrated sexual violence and maintained strict control over daily routines. Michael P explained how staff controlled institutional routines to allow for repeated violence towards residents:

Battering was another thing. On top of that, getting sexually abused. You’re talking everyday of the week. Everyday except for Sundays, and that was only because the family’s would visit, you would be dressed nicely and then when family went away the next day it would start again

Michael P claimed that he and other residents were ‘hidden away from the outside world’. Geographically, the often remote and rural location ensured that institutional life was largely hidden from public view (Philo, 1987; Valentine, 2001). Within this rural location, and with the ability of staff members to manipulate power relations, patterns of violence were easily established. Indeed, the temporal and spatial characteristics of the institutional home space helps to ensure that secrets of abuse are contained within the physical walls (Malacrida, 2006). While Michael P reflects upon residential living as a child, abuse within such private settings remains to be a problem, with the cases of Winterbourne View and Whorlton Hall notable examples (Fryson et al., 2004; Willis, 2020). Alluding to the notion ‘out of sight, out of mind’, containment within various spaces of care can be used as a mechanism of control for those who did not conform to social norms; a practice arguably still in use today (See Care Quality Commission, 2020). This containment can have significant consequences. Indeed, findings from the recent LeDeR (2021) report argue that people with learning disabilities not living in their own homes, or who are residing in hospitals, are more likely to die prematurely. Such privacy, whether offered within institutional spaces or more traditional home spaces, affords a level of protection to those who occupy positions of power.

The frequent and prolonged nature of violence within intimate spaces align to Pain’s (2014) understanding of domestic violence as ‘everyday terrorism’. The nature of this violence has terrorizing effects which can contain bodies within or outside of particular spaces and can be long-lasting. While Michael P no longer resides at an institution, he remains deeply cautious of any entry to the home space by doctors and medical staff. This response can be read as an attempt to avoid future associations between his home space and medical professionals. In this case, the entry of professionals into the home presents a risk of ‘home un-making’. Avoidance can operate as a means of enabling or preventing ‘home unmaking’ depending upon the desired outcome and the way that it shapes the characteristics of the home space. In the following section, I consider examples of ‘home unmaking’ whereby the home space becomes a site of avoidance in response to violence and hostility.

The ‘house’ as a site of avoidance

Some participants made conscious decisions to avoid their home space as much as possible. Kezza, a woman with learning disabilities who lived in social housing, recalled persistent violent intrusions within her flat perpetrated by her neighbours.

shouting things in my garden, tried breaking into the house, erm, they nicked me underwear from the washing line, erm they put my windows through on the house and every time I was coming from work they were all watching for me erm when they saw me they shouted abuse

While there are clear similarities in the nature of violence described by Doria Skadinski and Kezza, their relation to and understanding of their homes differed. Doria Skadinski sought refuge within her ‘home’ while Kezza avoided and referred to this space as a ‘house’. Although Kezza did not elaborate on this choice of terminology, this discursive shift is interesting to consider. A ‘house’ refers to a building of residence; a space that we physically live in. While physically, a house and a home may refer to the same building, the choice of language implies a different connection and relationship; a lack of homemaking practices. Kezza’s choice of language could therefore suggest that she lacks any real connection to the home space. Kezza’s ‘house’ represents a home ‘unmade’. These meanings signify the way in which the spaces around us shape, and are shaped by, our relations and interactions within them. Indeed, ‘it is through the intensification of feeling that bodies and worlds materialize and take shape, that the effect of boundary, fixity and surface is produced’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 29). From this understanding, although Kezza’s house might architecturally share the same features of the home, its boundaries are insecure and unfixed.

This language choice becomes more pertinent when considering how Kezza occupied her house in comparison to Doria Skadinski. Indeed, while Doria Skadinski became contained within her home as a means of protection, Kezza’s house was used as a mere physical dwelling that she occupied as little as possible. She busied herself elsewhere during the day, and often stayed at her partner’s house overnight to avoid any potential hateful interactions. Similar to Kezza, Fifi largely avoided her home before being able to re-make and reclaim her home space. In addition to the violence that she had endured by her ex-husband, Fifi explained that her neighbour often played loud music during the day.

I go out, I’d say about half nine until half past six. That middle bit I don’t like, because if she’s in and has her music on loud erm, my anxiety goes up. It could be raining, whatever, or I could be ill, but I won’t go back until a certain time of night

These different strategies demonstrate how uniquely we craft narratives to make sense of how to live and survive despite the perils that are faced (Rosen, 2017). Aligning to what Cheshire et al. (2021) term ‘unneighbourliness’, Fifi and Kezza’s accounts shows how the behaviours of close neighbours can disrupt the home as a place of privacy, safety and solitude. In response to this, Fifi recounted a busy schedule of activities that she engaged with on a daily basis that ensured that she was not in her home during the day.

As a strategy, avoidance enabled Kezza and Fifi to occupy alternative spaces that are less limiting than their homes. Opposed to a symbolic stronghold (Reinders & Van Der Land, 2008), their homes offered a temporally specific residence. Both utilized these spaces as a place to sleep at night rather than a space to live freely and relax. While, in the following section, I explore Fifi’s journey to re-making the home space to one that does offer her comfort, Kezza sought complete avoidance from her flat by relocating. However, the very nature of social housing, such as lack of choice and flexibility, caused complications. Kezza explained ‘I told them I wanted to be out, but it’s whatever you get from the council you can’t say no’. As a result, Kezza was offered alternating housing just two streets away from the perpetrators. While she accepted this new flat, the close proximity meant that she still saw her perpetrators on a regular basis. Fortunately for Kezza, she met her current partner shortly after moving and now lives with her. Avoidance can therefore symbolize the process of ‘home unmaking’. In the final section, I explore how the home can become a site of resistance through various homemaking and home-unmaking practices.

The home as a site of resistance

Space is not static, but has the potential to be made and re-made. Indeed, while the home has, to this point, been understood as a space of refuge, control and containment, and avoidance, it is equally important to consider how moments of resistance shape the way in which the home is produced as a space that offers possibility. These moments are joyous, and illustrate a refusal to be contained or disciplined into place (Silva, 2022). As described above, Kezza now lives with her partner and their cats in a more comfortable home space. This very act of moving can rupture violent narratives and allow them to restore a narrative and sense of safety (Rosen, 2017). Indeed, she described being much happier within this new space, where she was able to find comfort and security within new homemaking practices. Similarly, Doria Skadinski shared the recovery journey she and her son had been on to re-make their home space. Doria Skadisnki described ‘learning how to live again’ with the help of Victim Support Services:

We had to change bedrooms, we had to get security, think about how we were going to sleep on a night again, how we were going to leave the house again. It was months and months of work

While this process of ‘homemaking’ involves additional labour, energy and time, it equally presents the possibility of the home space to be re-made in more affirmative ways. The possibility of re-making a space illustrates the potential to respond affectively at a particular moment in time. In doing so, ‘fear itself can be a means to contest violence and seek security’ (Pain, 2014, p. 540). Thus, it is through the endurance of these encounters that resistance becomes possible.

Fifi reflected upon a specific moment of resistance where she reclaimed and remade her home space:

I want to get my own life back. I don’t want someone telling me I can’t do it. I’m 65. I looked in the mirror and thought, you’re gonna have to do something. It’s about time I did something, start sticking up for myself

We can read this moment as a snap (See Ahmed, 2017) and a refusal to be contained and discontent any longer (Silva, 2022). No longer able to endure her ex-husband’s behaviour, this moment of reflection signifies a moment of resistance where Fifi sought to reclaim her home by changing the locks and kicking her ex-husband out. Fifi was then able to remake her home space. For example, while Fifi previously refused to cook in the home as her husband had controlled the kitchen, she had begun to use this space again to cook evening meals. She also said that she had worked towards a more settled bedtime routine and uninterrupted sleep. While her ex-husband had previously limited the extent to which she engaged with activities outside of the home, Fifi had established an active schedule of activities, including peer support groups and lunches with friends. These changes have allowed Fifi to create new affective possibilities; her home was no longer subject to the temporal rhythms of others, but to her own needs. In doing so, this snap is a moment of refusal against a long history of being controlled by toxic male figures within her life. As Ahmed (2017, p. 190) describes, ‘a snap might seem sudden but the suddenness is only apparent; a snap is one moment of a longer history of being affected by what you come up against’. Resistance can thus be considered as a process that is continually engaged with and navigated on a daily basis as we encounter others and respond to them.

Conclusion

The article has explored the home as a significant space within the lives of disabled people that shapes, and is shaped by, violence. That is, there is a reciprocal relationship between disability, identity, and space, meaning that the way we come to think about ourselves and others is shaped by the spaces that we are situated within (Burch, 2021a; Imrie & Edwards, 2007). For many disabled people, the dwelling of the home can represent a space of security, predictability and control, as social life becomes more unstable and unreliable (Cheshire et al., 2021). That is, the home can offer an important site of refuge for disabled people who experience social and physical barriers within their everyday lives. However, the different experiences that have been shared throughout this article demonstrate the home as a site which can shape disabled people’s movements in a number of different and often limiting ways. In all cases, patterns of violence constituted fragile relationships with the home and had impacts on both the mental and physical health of participants (Macdonald et al., 2021). The ‘choice’ to occupy everyday spaces is not neutral, but part of a complex process of navigation and organization that some bodies must manage more regularly than others’ (Burch, 2021b). Rather, it is the persistent and repeated nature of violence that shapes how bodies come to occupy (or not), their homes and to what meanings the home takes on. Similar to ways in which domestic violence can shape how the home is occupied and experienced, these findings suggest that the home can become a space of risk, entrapment and containment. The significance of these nuances is not to neatly categorize the home and what it offers, but to highlight the centrality and fluidity of this space within everyday life. Indeed, this article has sought to illustrate the affective potential of space by asking questions about how experiences of violence shape the way in which the home is perceived as being safe or not (Pain, 1997) and in turn, the way that people choose to occupy the home space.

While this article has explored conceptualizations of the home in more limiting ways of refuge, control, containment and avoidance, I have also considered the ways that disabled people come to remake their home space. Indeed, by considering the affective possibilities of hate, ‘we can draw attention towards the range of ways that such experiences are accompanied by moments of negotiation and resistance’ (Burch, 2021b, p. 90). Both our bodies and the spaces around us are always in the process of becoming and are never static. Space, according to Massey (2005, p. 9) is ‘a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed’. We should, therefore, ‘imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005, p. 9). Space, bodies and identity do not begin and end as singular entities, but are continually negotiated and navigated in relation to one another. By paying greater attention to the mundane spaces of our everyday lives, both those located in public and private spheres, it is possible to understand the affects of hate crime, and the way in which these encounters shape, and are shaped by, those spaces.

Making space to explore the affective possibilities of hate can help to better understand the mundane ways that people can remake their home spaces following patterns of violence. In addition to this, there is scope to improve the policy landscape aimed at tackling different types of violence that can occur within the home. Notably, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 introduced a range of statutory duties on local authorities to better meet the needs of victims/survivors. Similarly, the Ministry of Justice (2022) has recently published their Draft Victims Bill aiming to improve the end-to-end support for victims of sexual and domestic violence. While issues remain, the policy landscape for sexual and domestic violence has the potential to respond to the intimacies of violence within the home – thus taking account of the ways in which these experiences shape the home space. Despite this progress, disabled people’s experiences of violence and hostility within the home continue to be excluded from this remit of protection, and instead characterized as acts of anti-social behaviour. While it may not be appropriate to consider disabled people’s experiences of violence within and around the home solely as a policy matter relating to sexual and domestic violence, it would be beneficial to consider where the overlaps lie between hate crime and sexual and domestic violence. Continuing to consider these experiences of violence within and around the home as ‘either’ hate crime/anti-social behaviour ‘or’ sexual/domestic violence means that they often fall between policy guidance. I argue then, that to appreciate the complexity of violence within and around the home, more work is needed to explore where these experiences fit within the broader parameters of sexual violence, domestic violence, hate crime and anti-social behaviour. In doing so, disabled people will be afforded equal opportunity to pursue a criminal justice response that could help to re-make the home in more affirmative ways.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to all of the participants who contributed to this research by sharing their experiences of hate crime with me. I am truly grateful for your honesty and trust and am in awe of your resilience. I am also grateful to the many organisations who supported the research by providing a safe space for interviews and workshops to take place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/J500215/1].