Member

After she had gone, suddenly everyone wanted to help me. They called the British Transport Police, which took it very seriously. The police understood the rapid escalation and took a number of witness statements from staff and passengers. They spent a lot of time looking at CCTV. If she had hit me and not the chair, it would have been assault, but she did not. It was still deeply upsetting to have abusive and insulting behaviour targeted at me for probably 10 minutes because of my disability and because I could not respond. The police talked to me that day about the boundaries of hate crime and non-crime hate incidents and said that this sort of behaviour is very rarely a one-off and often escalates.