last updated 4 August 2008

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), approximately 300 million women around the world have mental and physical disabilities. Women with disabilities comprise 10 percent of all women worldwide.  In low and middle income countries, women constitute 75 percent of all disabled people.

HRW notes that disabled women and girls face the same spectrum of human rights abuses that non-disabled women face, but their social isolation and dependence magnifies these abuses and their consequences. Women with disabilities tend to have lower educational, financial, professional, and social success than both non-disabled females and their disabled male counterparts.  Because women with disabilities are more isolated than most underrepresented groups, their plight typically has not been addressed. Women with disabilities therefore warrant unique attention when examining abuse and violence in the world.

Perpetrators of abuse against disabled women include family members, intimate partners, caregivers, and peers, and the range of abuse perpetrated is staggering.  Disability Awareness in Action has reported that women with disabilities suffer sexual abuse, forced sterilization, and female genital mutilation.  HRW has reported that women with disabilities have been subjected to marital restrictions, involuntary abortions, and forced relinquishment of their children.  In Africa, where the myth exists that having sex with a virgin can cure a person of HIV/AIDS, women and girls with disabilities are targeted for rape because they are presumed to be asexual and thus virgins.

Because many disabled women are placed in institutions by families who are unwilling or unable to care for them, the institutional setting is a common place for abuse.  According to a publication from Hesperian Foundation, examples of institutional abuse are:

• forced sex with workers, caretakers, or other residents
• being beaten, slapped, or hurt
• forced sterilization or abortions
• being locked in a room alone
• ice baths or cold showers as punishment
• forced medication (tranquilizers)
• having to undress or be naked in front of other people
• watching other people be abused or hurt
• being tied down or put in restraints

Disabled women have generally been marginalized in both the women’s movement and the disabled movement, mostly because they are seen as being on the peripheries of both groups. The issue of violence against women with disabilities deserves particular focus, as their voices may be dampened not only by their marginalization, but also by the particular attributes of their disabilities and the isolation in which those disabilities often place them.