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(2014) Law, culture and visual studies, Dordrecht, Springer.
Justice for the disabled
crime films on punishment and the human rights of people with learning disabilities
Majid Yar , Nicole Rafter
pp. 791-804
Research evidence shows considerable inequities in the administration of criminal justice and punishment when dealing with persons with learning disabilities. The difficulties encountered by such individuals when negotiating the criminal justice system are exacerbated by wider cultural framings and understandings of intellectual disability and criminality. This chapter seeks to uncover such cultural constructions through a qualitative analysis of the representation of persons with learning disabilities in popular crime films. Through this reading, we conclude that popular representations largely oscillate between those that attribute to the disabled innate criminal tendencies and those that unrealistically attribute to them qualities of childlike innocence. Neither, we suggest, are helpful in fostering appropriate and sensitive understanding of such disability or in promoting the rights of the intellectually disabled in their encounters with the criminal justice and penal systems. However, we also discern a more recent trend in which sentimentalised and stigmatising stereotypes are giving way to a more balanced and sophisticated representation of the intellectually disabled, thereby promoting a more realistic understanding of this group's rights and needs within the domain of criminal justice process.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_35
Full citation:
Yar, M. , Rafter, N. (2014)., Justice for the disabled: crime films on punishment and the human rights of people with learning disabilities, in A. Wagner & R. K. Sherwin (eds.), Law, culture and visual studies, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 791-804.
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