‘I Wouldn’t Be a Victim When It Comes to Being Heard’: Citizen Journalism and Civic Inclusion

For disabled people, the UK political landscape has in recent years provided a particularly harsh backdrop of austerity and ongoing cuts to welfare and disability benefits. In November 2014, for example, a 39-year-old woman who was unable to work due to chronic pain following two road traffic accidents took her own life. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) had sent several letters threatening to cut off her disability benefits and also demanding that she pay back £4,000 she had already received. During the inquest into her death in March 2015, the county coroner, Anne Pember, noted that she believed the ‘upset caused by the potential withdrawal of her benefits had been the trigger for her to end her life’ (cited in Jones, 2015). According to freedom of information requests by the Disability News Network, the DWP had investigated some 49 cases where benefit claimants had died from February 2012 to February 2015 — 40 of these followed suicide or apparent suicide by the claimant, and 33 contained recommendations for improvements (Pring, 2015).