In my last post I wrote about how society’s treatment of
women and girls with disabilities can contribute to the domestic violence we
experience. Essentially, when you treat us like we’re a burden or like we’re
worth less than other women, we start to believe it ourselves. I wrote about
this to raise awareness about not only domestic violence against women with
disabilities, but also to raise awareness of how society views and treats women
with disabilities.
Many women and men with disabilities lauded my post and
thanked me for finally talking about this issue. Many women and men without
disabilities thanked me for bringing this issue to their attention and truly
reflected on their actions and how they could help make a change in how society
treats women with disabilities. Unfortunately, some people took this as an opportunity
to question and challenge both the domestic violence women with disabilities
experience and the societal treatment of women with disabilities. They demanded
evidence of the domestic violence rates for women with disabilities and proclaimed
that it’s not just women with disabilities that experience such violence.
Well, duh. Obviously others experience this violence, but
the point is that women with disabilities experience it at much higher rates. If
you want evidence, go to google. The statistics and facts I give you are not
from secret sources. They’re from the DOJ, they’re from national and
international organizations that spend large parts of their budgets doing
research on this issue, and they’re from real women who experience the abuse.
The point is women with disabilities experience much higher
rates of violence (Want proof? Check out the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics
that show in 2011 women with disabilities were THREE TIMES as likely to be
victims of violent crimes than women without disabilities).
There are many reasons that women with disabilities who
experience violence don’t seek help. Sometimes there are physical or systematic
barriers that prevent a person from seeking help. Sometimes it’s societal
issues, like the self-esteem issue I wrote about last time.
I chose to write about the self-esteem problem last time
because that is what I know best. I feel that before articulating stories about
other women I needed to share my own, after all, my story is mine to tell. The
experiences that other women have gone through are not my own, therefore they
are not my stories to tell. However, in order to end violence against women
with disabilities, society needs to learn about the problem. We can’t stop a
problem that we don’t know exists.
For this reason I am providing you a list of why some women
with different disabilities cannot or do not seek help. This list is by no
means comprehensive. The examples I have included are real examples from real
women who experienced real abuse. I have not included their names or any other
identifying information.
Poverty
Many women with disabilities have fewer economic
resources, thereby increasing their inability to seek help. Poverty is a factor
that prevents many people without disabilities from seeking help. For women
with disabilities, it’s a bit different.
Imagine you are a woman living in poverty and
you are being abused. You may not seek help because you fear that you
will not be able to afford your own home, food, transportation, and other
living expenses without your abusers financial assistance. You may have kids
too. How will you be able to support them as well? These are real concerns that
people with and without disabilities face.
With disability it goes a step further. Imagine
you are a wheelchair user. You live in a rural area with no bus stop in your
area. No paratransit either. You certainly don’t have a wheelchair accessible
van because those things are ridiculously expensive and you can barely afford
to pay your rent. How will you get out of your house to go to a shelter or any
other place to seek help? Accessible taxi? Ha. They’re still fighting like hell
to get accessible taxis in NYC, they certainly don’t have them in your
neighborhood.
Fear
All people who
experience abuse struggle to leave because of fear. Every person is different
and fears different things, but people with disabilities have fears that people
without disabilities don’t usually even think of.
Fear of losing assistance or being institutionalized
Say you’re a person
with a disability that requires assistance from a personal care attendant, but
your attendant is abusing you. Your attendant started off fine, helped you
shower and get dressed, but eventually she became controlling. She started
becoming more aggressive when helping you shower and dress. Then she started
hitting you when you took too long to put your pants on. A few times when she
got really angry she would put her cigarettes out on your legs. You want the
abuse to stop, but if you report your attendant then you won’t have anyone to
help you shower and get dressed every day. How will you get out of bed in the
morning? If you go without an attendant for too long, insurance will deem that
it is “unsafe” for you to live in the community without support so you will be
sent to an institution. An institution where you lay in bed all day, eat
whatever gross food they put in front of you, never go outside, and possibly
experience more abuse. What do you do?
Fear that you will get in trouble
Now let’s say you’re a
person with an intellectual disability. You live in a group home and one of the
employees is sexually abusing you. You know what is happening is wrong, but
when the employee touches you sometimes it feels good to you. You’re afraid to tell
because you know what is happening is wrong, but you think you might get in
trouble because it felt good to you. So you don’t tell because you don’t want
to get in trouble.
Fear of Not being Believed
What if you’re a woman
with a mental health disability? Maybe you have anxiety or depression or a
personality disorder or maybe PTSD. You are being abused by your partner or
your parent or someone else close to you. You want to tell someone about the
abuse, but you fear no one will believe you because everything thinks you’re “crazy”
already.
Fear of Further Abuse
You’re a woman with a
disability that lives in the community and your attendant is abusing you. She
hits you occasionally when she gets angry, she leaves you sitting in the same
position for hours which causes you to get bedsores that become infected, and
sometimes she thinks it’s funny to refuse to help you with your toileting needs
and you end up sitting in your own feces for hours. If you tell someone, maybe
your attendant will find out and make things even worse on you. Right now she
only hits you sometimes and neglects you, but if you tell she might start
hitting you more or worse. Maybe it’s better if you just suck it up and don’t
tell anyone so things don’t get worse.
Inaccessibility
Physical Inaccessibility of Shelters
You use a wheelchair
and your husband is beating the crap out of you all the time. You’re fed up.
You know you shouldn’t have to take this. You find a way to get to your local
women’s shelter to seek help when your husband is out of town for the weekend.
You get to the front door of the shelter and you only see stairs. You can’t get
in. So you call the shelter while you sit outside, staring at the steps that
are preventing you from seeking help. They come out and agree to carry you and
your chair inside. It’s humiliating, but you take it because it’s your only way
to get away from the abuse. Once you’re inside you try to go into an office to
talk to an employee, but the doorway is too small and you can’t get in. They
come out and you meet in another area and then show you around the shelter. You
try to get in the bathroom, but it’s completely inaccessible. The bed is so low
that you can’t independently transfer yourself from your chair to the bed. So
you can’t sleep there or go to the bathroom there or even get in and out of the
door without others carrying you, how could you possibly stay?
Programatic/Systematic Inaccessibility of Shelters
You have multiple
sclerosis. It’s hard for you to walk, but you make it to the shelter and decide
you want to stay there to get away from your abusive partner. The shelter says
you can stay but has a no narcotics rule. You take prescribed narcotics to treat
the extreme pain you experience from your MS. They refuse to make a reasonable
modification to their rules for you. So you can get away from abusive partner
or you can treat your MS, but not both.
Inaccessible information
You’re blind and your boyfriend is verbally and
physically abusive as well as completely controlling. He does not let you have
a phone and sometimes he doesn’t even let you go to class. On a day he does
allow you to go to school, you talk about domestic violence in one of your
classes and different options victims have to seek help but you can’t read any
of the handouts. You want to seek help from a shelter, so you skip your next
class to go to the school library to google your local shelter before your
boyfriend comes to pick you up. Unfortunately the website isn’t accessible so
the screen reader can’t read any of the information. You don’t exactly want to
ask the librarian to read the information to you either. Why is it so hard for
you to seek help?
Communication Barriers
You’re Deaf and you use TTY to call your local
shelter. When the person at the shelter answers, they don’t want to deal with
TTY communication, so they hang up. You’re upset because you feel rejected when
it took you so much courage to finally seek help, but you won’t give up. The next
day you go to the shelter for help, but they refuse to get an interpreter so
you can communicate with them. You demand an interpreter because you know your
rights. You tell them the ADA requires them to provide an interpreter as an accommodation.
They finally agree to provide an interpreter during meetings and therapy, but
for the other 22 hours of the day you have no access to communication with
others. No one else in the shelter knows sign language. You feel so isolated
and alone. Maybe it’s better to go back to your partner. After all, he knows
sign language. He communicates with you. And he doesn’t always hurt you. Maybe if you go back things will get better? At
least you know you won’t be so alone.
Or maybe you have a speech disability. Your
speech is difficult for others to understand and often people need to ask you
to repeat yourself multiple times in order to get what you’re saying. You don’t
mind repeating yourself but most people don’t have the patience to listen to
you. Your attendant understands your speech, but your attendant is the one who
abuses you. You try to tell others when your attendant is around, but everyone
just smiles and nods, pretending to understand you. Will anyone ever listen?
Of course, what if you’re completely nonverbal?
Lack of Understanding
You Don’t Understand
That You’re Experiencing Abuse
You have an intellectual disability. Your mom
hugs you and kisses and feeds you, but she also yells at you, hits you, and
controls everything you do. You know your mom loves you and you don’t like when
she hits you and yells at you, but she tells you that she has to yell at you
and hit you because you’re a bad girl and she needs to teach you a lesson. You
don’t understand that she is being abusive, so you never seek help.
You Don’t Realize
Specific Actions Are Abusive
Your husband loves you and he would never hit
you. He’s never laid a hand on you. But, sometimes when he’s mad he refuses to
let you have your wheelchair. He takes it away from you so you can’t reach it.
You end up lying in bed for days sometimes – laying in your own urine because
you can’t get to the bathroom. Sometimes you get bed sores from laying so much
and twice the bedsores have gotten infected causing you to be hospitalized for
days. But that’s not really abuse, right? He loves you. He’s usually very good
to you, he just gets frustrated sometimes. It seems like an insult to women who
experience real abuse to say that
this is abuse. It’s fine.