Adam Pearson - who has neurofibromatosis type 1 - is on a mission to explore disability hate crime: to find out why it g | dG1fNFFROThHZjNhLWs
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 How you doing, man? Good to see you.
00:02 You too.
00:03 My friend Lucas has sprontal nasal cranial spatial dysplasia,
00:06 which means he has a spatial disfigurement.
00:08 He too does not have the fondest memories of his school days.
00:13 What's your first memory of someone saying something to you
00:16 about how you look?
00:18 It was...
00:19 My very first memory was my first day at primary school.
00:23 This girl came up to me and she asked me...
00:27 She went to me, she went, "What's wrong with you?"
00:29 "What's wrong with your face?"
00:31 And I didn't have an answer for that.
00:33 How bad did things get for you at school?
00:36 The worst incident that I had was where one boy had me
00:41 pinned to the ground with his foot up on my head.
00:43 I've also been kicked and punched and spat on,
00:48 even, during my primary school.
00:50 And how did that make you feel as a kid?
00:53 As a kid, it was... It was frightening.
00:56 I felt like I was incredibly unlucky
00:58 that it was me that had ended up with this
01:01 and that why is it that nobody else had got this
01:05 and why just me, that sort of thing?
01:08 Were the teachers in any way helpful?
01:10 I know, for me, that they weren't.
01:13 I remember one time I kind of put on the hunchback of Notre Dame
01:17 in one of my lessons and one of the kids said very loudly,
01:20 "Oh, we're watching Adam."
01:22 And the teacher clearly heard it cos he reacted to it
01:24 but didn't do anything.
01:26 Were your teachers any more sympathetic to your cause?
01:29 The teachers didn't follow up on any negative behaviour
01:34 that was occurring, so it got a lot worse.
01:37 It became that bad that my parents decided
01:39 they were going to take me out of primary school and homeschool me.
01:42 I'm assuming you weren't bullied at homeschool?
01:45 No. OK, just a second.
01:48 (STATIC)
01:51 (STATIC)
01:54 (static)
01:56 (static)