Scapegoat

Scapegoat: How we are failing disabled people is the first British book about disability hate crime in the UK . It examines the roots of our uncomfortable and often hostile attitudes towards disabled people and argues for the official recognition of crimes against disabled people as a hate crime.

Book Author

Katharine Quarmby is a writer, journalist and film-maker specialising in social affairs with an investigative edge. She has spent most of her working life as a journalist and has made many films for the BBC, as well as working as a correspondent for the Economist, contributing to British broadsheets, including the Guardian, Sunday Times and the Telegraph. She is now an associate editor at Prospect magazine, but also freelances regularly for other papers, including a stint providing roving political analysis for the Economist during the 2010 general election. Katharine read Modern Languages...
more about Katharine Quarmby...

Book Reviews

• Scotsman
  "She brings to this book a detailed knowledge of numerous horrifying cases of neglect and brutality towards disabled people, based both on her own research and face-to-face interviews with relatives, officials, academics and campaigners. Although her personal visits to the murder locations might seem somewhat frivolous, her book remains genuinely authoritative."
• Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times
  "...this is a stomach-turning book – but it must be read."
• Evening Standard
  "  ... this powerful, compelling and important book… The journalist Katharine Quarmby deserves credit for her campaign to get this country to wake up to the horrors inflicted on people with disabilities in our midst ."
• Herald
  "...an excoriating indictment of society…A shocking, challenging call to action."
• Tom Shakespeare
  "I cannot imagine reading a more important book this year. "
• Scotland on Sunday
  "Genuinely authoritative… Quarmby’s sobering conclusion is that there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way that disabled people are viewed by society as a whole "