WUNRN
Domestic Violence More Severe against Women with Disabilities - Research
Disability advocates say the discussion around domestic violence has so far excluded the experience of victims living with a disability
Australia - Stop the Violence – Violence Against Women & Girls with Disabilities – Link to Full 96-Page Report:
http://wwda.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/STV_Background_Paper_FINAL.pdf
Women
with disability can experience violence within their family but they can also
encounter it in institutions such as aged care homes, group homes, hospitals
and prisons. Photograph: Alamy
Monica
Tan – 10 June 2015
Tackling domestic violence may have finally
found its place on the national agenda, but disability advocates say the
discussion has so far “obscured” and “excluded” the experience of victims living
with a disability.
Dr Aminath Didi, an academic for a joint project
between the University of New South Wales and Women with Disabilities
Australia, spoke at a domestic violence conference on Wednesday in Sydney.
She said this exclusion happened despite the
fact violence suffered by women with disabilities tended to be “more extensive,
suffered over longer periods of time and more severe” than violence against men
with disability or violence against women without a disability.
Women and girls with disability made up 20% of
Australia’s female population or about two million, she said, and came from a
diverse range of sexual identity, ethnicity, employment status and type of
impairment.
The 2012-13 Stop the Violence project, conducted by Women
with Disabilities Australia, People with Disabilities Australia and UNSW, found
that violence “intensified in frequency, extent and nature when gender and
disability intersect”, Didi said.
Women with disabilities were more likely to
experience violence in residential and institutional settings and the nature of
this violence and abuse include the withholding of medicine and assistance
devices such as wheelchairs, or refusal to assist with daily needs like
bathing, dressing or eating.
Victims living in rural and remote communities
were further disadvantaged due to a lack of services, information and
awareness. And such problems were often seen as secondary to more basic needs
like access to nutritious food, shelter and security.
Part of the problem lay in an inconsistent
definition of what constitutes violence against women, Didi maintained. “It is
generally conceptualised in the context of spousal or intimate partner or
family violence, which frequently excludes what women with disability
experience, in the settings where they live,” she said.
She said violence against women with disability
extended beyond private and family dwellings into a range of institutions, such
as group homes, hospitals, prisons, special schools and aged care homes.
And these forms of violence could include
chemical restraint, forced or coerced sterilisation, forced contraception,
forced or coerced psychiatric interventions, violations of privacy, forced
isolation and deprivation of liberty.
“In these settings, violence is considered a
workplace issue,” Didi said, “and not a human rights violation and potential
criminal act.”
Joining Didi at the Ending Domestic Violence
Criterion conference was project chair and co-author of the 2015 report Preventing Violence against Women and Girls with Disabilities,
Associate Professor Leanne Dowse, who said women with disability “continue to
fall through a whole range of legislative, policy and service gaps”.
This was the result of the “multiple and
intersecting forms of discrimination which make them more likely to experience
or be at risk of violence”.
“Violence against women and girls with
disability in all its form remains widespread and largely unaddressed,” Dowse
said, and this was despite “clear obligations” by international human rights
law to do so.
Dowse said in relation to domestic violence
against women with disabilities, several international human rights monitoring
bodies had raised serious concerns about Australia’s low rate of reporting,
prosecution and conviction of perpetrators, and an ongoing lack of data,
inclusive legislation policy, services and support.
Figures on the prevalence and incidence on
violence against women with disabilities were “hard to come by”, she said,
“largely because our national statistical collection processes don’t take
disability status into account.”
But that limited evidence indicated more than
70% of women with disability experience a violent sexual encounter at least
once in their lifetime and were 40% more likely to be victims of domestic
violence than women without disability.
“Legislation policy and service responses tend
to view disability as an ‘additional group’, whose needs are exceptional or
additional to the central prevention agenda,” Dowse said. “This means efforts
and approaches to prevent violence against women in Australia are piecemeal and
inconsistent in definitions and scope.”
She said it was time to “demand accountability
from government and from other duty bearers in recognising and addressing the
rights of women with disability to live free from violence”.