Facial disfigurement: 'Restaurant asked me to leave over condition'

Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 556 points – Facial disfigurement: 'Restaurant asked me to leave over condition'
bbc.com

A man with a facial disfigurement says he was asked to leave a restaurant in south London because staff said he was "scaring the customers". 

Oliver Bromley has Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on his nerves.

Speaking to the BBC, he said when he had gone to place an order at a restaurant in Camberwell, staff told him there had been complaints about him.

"It's a horrible thing to happen. I took it very personally on the day," he said.

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He said they had told him that although it was a hate crime, it was "unlikely" officers could pursue it further.

That's messed up.

Welcome to British policing.

"We have determined that this was indeed a hate crime, and therefore we'll be doing nothing. But if it happens two more times we'll congratulate them on the hat trick and offer to enroll them in the police academy."

America learned everything we know from England.

Living in Europe I have to constantly remind ppl that American racism is just European racism with better access to guns

I mean, the sad part is that Britain policing started out with some really good ideas. It's actually worth reading Robert Peel's principles of policing by consent sometime. They are an incredible blueprint for how to create a police force that serves the people.

Like taxation without representation

"But that's just an exaggeration taken out of context!!!"

...And it's also literally the slogan on the license plates in our nations capital.

The paragraph after is golden:

The Met confirmed to the BBC that officers had visited Mr Bromley about the incident and that although no arrests had been made, the force took "reports of hate crime seriously".

For it to be a hate crime, the act of kicking someone out of your restaurant needs to be illegal. Since it isn't illegal, it becomes a human rights violation. These cops are idiots.

I’ll take a restaurant full of disfigured people over 1 misbehaving toddler.

As a parent of younger kids, we're sorry. We come armed with as many activities as possible and will take our kids outside if they're too excited until food gets to the table. That will help them focus on eating.

We very rarely went out to eat when they were toddlers due to fear of our kids bothering others and understand that our desire to experience some level of normalcy shouldn't come at the expense of others.

All that said, if the parents are trying to keep their kids occupied, please extend some grace. Being a parent can be extremely isolating and we're simply trying to pretend like we still get to do normal things once in a while.

This is fine, and we thank you for your efforts.

What were talking about here is a rogue crotch spawn running around or under tables, occupied or not, and generally acting like they're in their own living room rather than a shared community space.

Honestly IMO if you can keep them at the table, I can put up with the noise. Sure, it's annoying, but so are kids. It's a package deal. And everyone was a kid at one point in time and therefore has no excuse to complain too loudly. That's reserved for when I have to drag a screeching rug rodent out from under my chair and haul it back to the absentee sperm and egg donors.

Haha, our kids do go under our table at times but they know not to go under other people's tables.

I don't have much tolerance for absentee parenting either, especially if the kids wind up seeking attention from others, by say going under someone else's table, because they're not getting enough attention from their own parents.

If you’re trying, the ire isn’t for you. It’s for the shitty parents that feel entitled to not teach their children to behave, don’t feel it’s their job to or act like they are a victim of a life choice and take it out on the child or others. There are plenty of those type out there and I’m sure you don’t want to be lumped in with those ones, you also don’t have to defend them.

As someone who formerly worked at a restaurant, I agree.

We were located in a fenced off area owned by the same company that had a string of bars/clubs, so after 8pm only 21+ were allowed in, but on Saturday afternoons the stroller crowd would roll through and let their kids run around making a mess of all the tables.

I'm not against parents bringing their kids out for a meal, but if they're just sitting there pounding beer after beer and ignoring their chaotic unleashed children then it gets really old really fast.

Then don't look at him? The man was just trying to eat. Poor guy.

I feel so bad for this guy. Imagine the shit he has to put up with all the time. I used to work with a lady who had a big tumor on her face. She was so sweet, but I'm sure she had to put up with all kinds of horrible shit. I honestly really liked her. I would have asked her out if I hadn't been in a relationship because we got along really well. I don't care if you have a big tumor on your face. I'll get used to it after I've seen you for more than a minute or two.

Its that simple. I dont have a hard time ignoring other tables at a restaurant unless they are obnoxiously noisy. How about ya cunts just carry on with your lives and be happy that you dont have to live with that.

It isn't that simple. A worldwide measles outbreak is in the news, as is the fact UK is dealing with a surge in far-right BS. As a layman all I know about measles is it has spots as a glaring symptom and is dangerous for children.

This dude would have made me worried about a measles exposure, but a simple query assuring the proprietors it was not contagious would have resolved my concern. This dude has my sympathy because this is not the only hassle he has been forced to endure, as if the condition wasn't enough suffering.

This looks nothing at all like measles, to even bother the person enough to ask such a ridiculous question is revolting.

Yes, yes we all know everything you wouldn't do is repugnant. Must be nice. I am not a doctor, and 99% of the population isn't either. This could also be that new pox variant gathering steam. Point is, you see something like this reminiscent of a serious and contagious illness, in an eatery, and there are reasonable concerns for the public beyond politeness.

Like, someone walking in to a restaurant coughing like crazy with hollow eyes and pale skin wouldn't trigger any alarms? Be realistic.

and there are reasonable concerns for the public beyond politeness.

No, there are not.

This is a seriously fucked annd irrational attitude to hold.

This is a seriously fucked annd irrational attitude to hold.

No, it isn't. RL life isn't Lemmy dude.

This is real life, right now. Lemmy doesn’t exist in a different reality, everyone you are talking to here is a real person in real life.

And it is very fucked up. It’s the sort of hateful shit one would expect from a right winger.

everyone you are talking to here is a real person in real life

How delightfully naive.

Nothing f'd up about at all. Very left wing to put the well being of many over those of the few or one. Seriously, maybe come down from that pedestal and actually learn a thing or 2 about what you discuss before assuming your self-righteousness.

Your irrational hatred and fear of people who have facial disfigurements does not protect people.

There is zero others wellbeing defended by your response because no one is at risk from this, you are only hurting another human by excluding them from society.

This isn't about the disfigurements. It's about having prominent symptoms of a possible contagion. Honestly getting annoyed at the prevalence of illiteracy in a primarily text medium. I have no hatred and have expressed concern for the poor man in the first comment or have you forgotten already, or skipped it in your eagerness at the opportunity to white knight a straw man?

If someone entered the eatery you were at coughing so badly they could barely speak you wouldn't be the least bit concerned? ''just put an earplug in'! lol

Not the person you were talking too, but I think where you're losing people is that no one else is looking at his face and thinking "measles"...there is a picture in the article and that's not what measles looks like...at all. In any way. Your continued insistence that it "might be contagious" when no reasonable person would come to that conclusion really makes it look like your trying to use an excuse to be uncomfortable with the guy for daring to be in public.

Also stop trying to equate this with coughing. No one whose made it to adulthood thinks this guy has any sort of contagious pox, that not what they look like and it doesn't take a doctor to know that.

That's fine. It doesn't have to be measles. Monkeypox is also doing rounds in the news and there are plenty of other serious diseases that have bumps, blisters, spots and the like to be concerned about. Also consider that the restaurant likely did not have similarly bright lighting to reveal the details of a disease in a photograph, nor would most concerned have gotten as close as the camera did. The point is there is no reason to consider a condition not contagious until informed otherwise and people are forgetting to set aside the omniscience a news article provides. Equating this with coughing helps convey this overwhelmingly complex concept to the many many people that apparently need the simplification.

Ya'll want to take this clearcut case of simpleminded revulsion and apply it universally to everyone involved without proof. One of the patrons could very well have simply asked 'is he contagious?' and the waiter, like many out there apparently (even, say, a journalist trying to sensationalize the article), simplified the ask to a lowest common denominator. Even if the article does show clearcut revulsion from all the patrons involved, you cannot generalize that behaviour to everyone, and even the poor victim gets this which is why he, at least, is so understanding.

That's not an excuse. No questions were asked, nor were there any follow-ups to clarify what was happening to him. People just didn't want that sight while eating.

LOL this is a pretty common condition. You're projecting your ignorance without taking a moment to look up the wikipedia article on this disease.

Sorry, I'm in the middle of dinner at a nice restaurant. I'm not going to try looking up every known contagion with spots or bumps as a symptom when the person could just do a public courtesy and alleviate everyone's concerns by just stating "I'm not contagious".

Edit: better yet, it'd nicer if the world wasn't full of selfish assholes willing to spread their suffering to others intentionally so we wouldn't even be worried in the first place.

I wouldn’t want to look at that while I was eating… SO I WOULD AVOID STARING AT HIM. Complaining about the guy is not the answer. Self control and respect are.

The article says he thinks there wasn’t enough time for someone to complain, the restaurant staff was using it as an excuse.

“He said: "After entering I noticed a cash-only sign, so went straight back outside to withdraw my money.

"I went back into the restaurant to place an order, and they told me to 'please leave', because in their words I was 'scaring the customers', and there had been complaints about me."

He added: "There had not been enough time between the time I had been there first, and the time I went back, for anyone to have made a complaint about me so obviously the restaurant staff were not happy with the way I looked." “

Yeah, I read the article. I was just imagining a hypothetical situation where he and I were eating in the same restaurant.

"at that"... If you don't want to eat around other people that exist then just don't go to restaurants.

Woosh

It's pretty clear that they are saying your phrasing was pretty dehumanizing. They didn't get wooshed, they were pointing out your well-intended micro aggression.

It looks dehumanizing because they cherry-picked my reply. I referred to him as a person in the very same sentence. When I said “that”, I was referring to the skin grafts and scabs. Those are things. They are not him.

The accusation was not made in good faith, and/or was made by someone with poor reading comprehension. They definitely got wooshed, and it’s pretty clear that you did, too.

Okay bud. This means way too much to you. I think maybe you should take a step back and take a deep breath, because holy fuck.

Yes absolutely, the polite thing to do would be to stare at the man's disfigurement for the entire meal...

I know judging people on their appearances isn't right, and he shouldn't have been kicked out regardless of what he looked like.

... but it doesn't even look that bad? Like, "I've got one eye and a skin condition", is that really what the restaurant is willing to kick people out for?

Hope he gets some sort of justice out of this.

Whats the UKs disability rights laws look like? Hope he takes em to task for their discrimination.

On paper, the Equality Act 2010 is great in a bunch of ways. In practice, it's exceedingly difficult for the average person to pursue justice through it. I imagine the barrier is similar to how it works in the US, except the UK has way less of a litigation culture.

The Americans with Disabilities Act is in a similar spot then. Its a good law, but we've been to court multiple times to force them to actually use it. Including going all the way up to the supreme court in the Obergefell decision, and more recently seeking conscent decrees because many states still don't follow many parts of the ADA, a 30 year old law, but continue to not suffer any punitive actions.

Oh, you can sue for anything in the US and settle out of court. Coffee too hot? Sue. Coffee too cold? Believe it of not, sue.

You need to look up the McDonald's coffee case. The woman got third degree burns and needed skin grafts. She only sued to have her medical bills covered. The judge raised the amount because McDonald's had been warned about their coffee temperature several times.

Thank you for jumping on this with the truth. The coffee was so hot it fused her labia together! That smear campaign against her is such an atrociosity.

Mcdonald's was making their coffee so hot frodo could've destroyed the one ring in it.

Hey do you know what enforcement is written into the ADA? We'll, I'll just tell you. There isn't any. It's up to the individual who is denied access to sue the establishment to get them to comply with a law that's now 30+ years old.

They don't want to look at that guy's ugly face? I bet it looks nicer than their ugly minds.

Probably looks better than their ugly faces too.

See, Britain just needs Ugly Laws, like what America had up until 1974! Then they could just have the guy arrested!

In all seriousness what the fuck. What goes through a person’s head that they think treating someone that way is even remotely okay?

It seems that some British hate handicapped/disfigured people. Just read this article about a kid in a wheelchair being excluded from the school photo. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/29/aberdeenshire-pupils-with-complex-needs-erased-from-school-photo

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/04/school-photos-disabled-children

or people complaining about seeing a tv host with a missing arm. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/feb/21/tv-presenter-cerrie-burnell

It's just good old British Classism that never went away.

Don't all countries have this problem?

To some degree. Never heard of handicapped kids being excluded from school photos in my country though.

And if you were asked to leave in the US because of a facial disfigurement you could fully expect to have a business closing lawsuit won against you in no time at all. Wa are as litigious AF for better or worse, usually worse.

Never heard of it. It's difficult to know how much of the difference is the actual occurrence and how much is the reporting of it.

Maybe it's just where I was raised, but I don't see this at all in my day to day life in the US. Things have come a very long way.

I'm sure there are still things that are shitty that I probably wouldn't notice as I'm not in that position... But in general, most people here don't seem to give a shit these days.

To be clear, I'm not referring to classism. That still exists to a degree, though it's mostly been supplanted by racism.

We have out problems, but were actually really good about ableism, so silver lining. Still feel for that guy though, hope he gets all the good things he deserves

I see people with prosthetic legs all the time at my work (grocery store) and I think nothing more of it than "that guy could do an absolutely dope robot costume for Halloween"

I did see someone with double prosthetic legs and that was cool.

Oddly enough Australia is one of the most accepting countries I’ve been in when it came to PWD. Elevators for every train platform and if one broke they fixed it straight away. They also didn’t exclude lower income people no where near as much as they do in the US, Canada or UK.

That said, the way they treat women, First Nations and POC or just about anyone who isn’t australian leaves much room for improvement.

Wonder if it's got anything to do with thalidomide disfiguration.

No, fuck off, that's got nothing to do with nationality.

This is just a case of some people being cunts.

For a community that prides itself on not being reddit, an unfortunate amount of reddits opinions and (lack of) values made it here alright.

Or maybe that has nothing to do with the community as a whole and is just a case of some people being cunts?

That's just horrible. And wtf is this "Yes it's a crime but what can we do?" bullshit. Man I feel sorry for that guy. No body deserves to be treated that way. He just wanted to have a nice night out. Fuck that restaurant.

It's 1000% a human rights violation. There are proper channels. Don't think police can do anything. The police even called it a hate crime, which it is not, because kicking someone out of a restaurant, regardless of the reason, isn't a crime in and of itself.

He said they had told him that although it was a hate crime, it was "unlikely" officers could pursue it further.

But when someone shop lifts from a corporation, here come the cops running

Time to lawyer up. Though I don't know how the law works there in Britland.

Fuck that restaurant, everyone is too "ugly" to eat there. I can think of many DC restaurants that would love to serve them.

I do feel for the guy, but I also feel bad for the restaurant. It's not an easy position to be in. It seems like a pretty rare condition and it's not like he will be carrying any sort of proof as to what the condition is let alone anyone on staff at the restaurant that could diagnose him or even say if the condition matches what he claims it to be.

If someone walked in with small pox I would hope the restaurant would eject them, but it's not like they would be able to say if it is or isn't small pox. It's a no win situation for both parties involved.

wait, in the article, why is his left eye removed in the first photo and his right eye in the next?

It looks to me like the first one was taken with the front-facing camera of a phone, and those often have a horizontal flip option

Pocket squares/boutonnieres are pretty much always on the wearer's left-hand side, so that's my guess as well.

Seems like BBC isn't checking their pictures or maybe he chooses which side to pop his eye in each morning

Lmao most downvoted comment for asking a reasonable question (albeit with a pretty well understood answer). Lemmy truly is reddit 2.0

Were you expecting philosopher kings with a more advanced heuristic than "I don't like this post"? The improvement is decentralization - that doesn't make the users nice or smart.

Well, I agree that the users here aren't nice or smart. So here we are.

Then why do you use Lemmy/Reddit at all?

Good question. I got off Reddit after they banned third party apps, but I should probably get off Lemmy as well.

There were a lot of great things about Reddit that originally led me there, but everything I loved about it was gone by the time I left. I was hoping Lemmy would fill that hole; I was looking for a place for great insights and opinions around niche topics. But Lemmy feels more like a political echo chamber, which is a shame.

The original comment we're responding to is a great example of that. There's no reason for ignorance to be hated like it is here, but dislike and getting on the negative bandwagon is what Lemmy thrives on.

I'll probably be gone soon, and your comments are a big part of that. I genuinely don't mean that as an insult, it's just that you inspired some retrospection introspection. I guess this comment is basically just for myself in the end, but thank you.