It's shameful that a Paralympian was forced to wet herself – and if you think that doesn't involve or concern you, you're wrong

A wheelchair-using friend of mine was berated when he turned up at an Ilford station for not giving 24 hours’ notice (the point being that he didn’t know he was travelling 24 hours earlier). Another friend had to remove her glass eye to prove that, yes, she was entitled to a disabled travel card when another member of staff got antsy

Anne Wafula Strike lost the use of her legs to polio at an early age (Getty)

Shocking is an overused adjective, but how else would you describe what happened to Anne Wafula Strike while on a rail journey?

The Paralympian wheelchair racer and UK Athletics board member has revealed that she was forced to urinate upon herself while travelling from Coventry to Stansted with CrossCountry Rail.

The disabled toilet on the train was out of order. A member of staff did suggest that she get off to use the facilities at a station and then board the following train. But (and you can see where this is going) there were no staff on said station to assist her with getting back on.

So, yes, shocking. In “modern” Britain, a wealthy “first world” country. Horrible. That too. Depressing? Tick. Surprising? Well, no. That, sadly, is not an adjective that one could use to describe what happened.

I’ve been writing about similarly unpleasant incidents for years now. Last year was filled with them.

Over the festive season, I highlighted the cases of M&S and Cineworld, both of which refused a quite reasonable request from a mother to install equipment so her severely disabled son could use the toilet.

A few months earlier I wrote about Will Pike, who was paralysed from the waist down after being caught up in the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008. He had released a video that parodied Channel Four’s “Yes I Can” Paralympics campaign. It showed him trying to access a Caffé Nero (he couldn’t: no ramp), a Pizza Express where he fancied a drink (but no disabled toilet), and an American Apparel where he wanted to browse the menswear department (downstairs, no lift), among others.

A wheelchair-using friend of mine was berated when he turned up at an Ilford station for not giving 24 hours’ notice (the point being that he didn’t know he was travelling 24 hours earlier). Another friend had to remove her glass eye to prove that, yes, she was entitled to a disabled travel card when another member of staff got antsy.

These are just a few of the stories I’ve picked up, and that’s only in the last year or so. Thousands more such humiliations go unreported because the people who suffer them don’t happen to be high-profile sports people. They might lack the know-how to make a video that goes viral, and they probably don’t happen to be friends with someone who writes for a national news organisation.

Consider this: It can’t have been easy for Anne Wafula Strike to go public with what happened to her, and with what she was forced to do. It’s not the sort of thing people find easy to admit. There’s a fairly high chance that she is not alone and that others have suffered a similar indignity to the one she suffered, but were just too embarrassed to speak about it.

This, sadly, is what comes from living in a society that treats disabled people as second-class citizens at best; a society that views people with disabilities as a cost and a burden, when they’re not being characterised as scroungers and cheats.

Businesses like CrossCountry probably feel they can get away with running a train without a disabled toilet because so many others play the same game (the MD has apparently tried to apologise but it’s a bit late for that).

If you think this doesn’t involve you, or concern you, well, it does.

As I can personally testify, you are only a road accident away from getting the chance to experience some of these humiliations (and perhaps even worse).

Remember, too, you’re getting older. So if you’re not disabled now, you may very well become disabled in the future as a result of age. Or one of your friends or relatives will.

The attitudes that allow businesses to behave like this towards their disabled customers may soon affect you if they are not already doing so.

Not that that should come into it. None of the incidents I mentioned should have happened. They are shameful.

Anne Wafula Strike was born in Kenya and has spoken of the challenges she faced after polio robbed her of the use of her legs when she was young. Some people thought her disability was a curse from God. Others thought it evidence of witchcraft.

Scratch the surface and you will find that attitudes towards disability in Britain aren’t actually all that much better.

It is not Anne Wafula Strike who should feel humiliated, although I understand why she does. It is the rail company that put her in that position. And the country that allowed it to happen too. How about we do something to change that?