Rosie Jones: Am I a Ret*rd, reviewed

This documentary by the comedian Rosie Jones, about the online abuse and trolling she received a lot of on account of her disability, has been the subject of a lot of debate in the disability community over the last few weeks on account of the R-word (retard, for the sake of anyone listening to this on a screen reader) in the title, which led to at least three contributors pulling out. I had the impression that the programme was going to be about ableism more generally, but it is much more about online abuse directed at people who are in the public eye and focusses on the disablist abuse rather than, say, racist or misogynist abuse. I heard Jones interviewed on Woman’s Hour a couple of weeks ago where she explained that she had been on the receiving end of such abuse any time she appeared anywhere, with people calling her ugly, painful to listen to, and retarded all the time.

Listening to that interview, I had a certain amount of sympathy. Jones doesn’t have a learning disability, but her particular presentation of cerebral palsy is commonly used as a basis for disablist insults: when people contort their face and say “duh” in response to something they think is stupid. In fact, growing up I hardly ever heard the “R word” used as an insult; the major disability-related insult was spastic and, later on, flid (a derivative of ‘thalidomide’); my impression is that this is something that came from the US (I recall an episode of Quantum Leap in which the central character inhabited the body of a man with a learning disability who was struggling to keep a job, was called names based on the R-word by workmates, and blamed for whatever went wrong). In the 80s, the name ‘Joey’ was used for the same purpose, in reference to Joey Deakin who appeared on the children’s TV show Blue Peter and had CP. Whether someone has a learning disability or not, if someone is on the receiving end of it a lot, I think their opinion on the word is as valid as that of a parent of someone with a learning disability, or someone with a physical disability who is not targeted with that word, as with at least one of the people who withdrew from this. It’s possible that she thought that pretending that the R-word does not exist does not make it go away or is not offended by the mere use of the word but by the ceaseless harassment, but a lot of disabled people do not agree; the word has a recent history of being used both by professionals and by abusers, both casual and institutional.

The programme does not really justify the prominent use of the word in the title, in my opinion. If you’re going to use an inflammatory word in a title, you’d better have the material to back it up and it isn’t here. Only one other disabled person is featured, a TV journalist called Nikki Fox who uses a scooter-type wheelchair to get around; she also interviews the parents of a young girl who had a congenital condition which required treatment in the USA for which they had to raise money online, and who received abuse as a result (people expressing disgust about her appearance and telling them they should let her die, for example); nobody alive with a learning disability, or their parent or carer (disabled or otherwise), is featured, though they may have been among those who withdrew. She interviews someone from the company she hires to filter abuse out of her social media feeds and decides she just has to interview a troll, to find out why people say such things to people they don’t know, but the one she interviews is not one who abused disabled people but was sent to prison for sending threatening messages to a famous person. The former troll (whose face and voice are disguised) tells us he did it because he had a “pack mentality”, though I do not suppose that is true of everyone who participates in online abuse against disabled people or anyone else. She ends with a fairly standard appeal to “stop ableism” and to tell people who abuse disabled people to stop, as if it were that simple, and proclaims “I’m not a ret*rd; I am Rosie F***ing Jones”.

In my opinion this was more of an hour-long advertisement for Rosie Jones than an effective awareness-raising programme about anything. The issue of online abuse and the harm it causes has been done before, better, without the need for headline-grabbing language that is hurtful to the people it is ostensibly trying to help. The insight it gave into what motivates trolls, that they are sad and lonely individuals that do it to feel powerful by being part of a ‘pack’, is hardly new. While it did start off on the subject of in-person disablist abuse, it quickly diverged into discussing solely the online version and did not look into ‘ableism’ (a term most disability activists in the UK do not use, incidentally) beyond her own experience and beyond how it affects disabled celebrities. There is so much to the issue of disablism in general; she could have looked at public attitudes towards disability, or discrimination against disabled people, or hate crime, or the history of institutions and segregated education, or any number of other things, but she just chose to look into the one facet of it that affects her. The title gave off more heat than the light shed by the whole programme.

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