s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown: Violence Against Women With Disabilities: Probing the Scope of the Problem

realsesmith-deactivated20190307:

One significant issue when it comes to combating violence against women with disabilities is that it is severely understudied. Violence against women as a general topic has been a subject of considerable sociological analysis. Most of the studies on violence against women with disabilities in North America (where I have access to the most resources) are from Canada, feature small samples, and are limited in nature. Thus, it’s difficult even to perform relatively ‘simple’ actions like saying how much more likely women with disabilities are to experience violence than nondisabled women; some studies say twice as likely, for example, while others say 10 times as likely. The utter lack of statistics on similarities and differences when it comes to abuse in populations of disabled trans women versus disabled cis women is also a serious obstacle to creating meaningful tools for fighting violence against women, because disabled trans women face particular issues that disabled cis women do not; in just one example, they may face dual shelter inaccessibility because they’re disabled and trans.