Module 2: Why does violence against people with a disability occur?

So before we start, we would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that we are meeting on today. I am joining you from the lands of the Quandamooka people. And I am on the very chilly lands today of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I would like to, we would sorry, to acknowledge their ongoing connection to land, sea, sky, and country, and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging.

So just a reminder that we will be referencing experiences of violence in the training today. we ask that everyone prioritizes their wellbeing. Step away and take a break if you need to. If you are feeling upset or distressed by anything we discuss today, please reach out to 100 Respect on 1800 737 732 So we have developed the training today, with a workbook.

So it’s been designed for you to fill in your responses throughout the training. We will prompt you and, let you know when it’s time to turn to your workbook. So we encourage you to pause the video and fill out, your responses when the time comes

So today we’ll be focusing on what causes violence against people who have a disability. So we’ll be looking at and defining ableism. We’ll be talking about violence against women who have a disability, what causes this. Violence against men who have a disability. Violence against people from LGBTQIA+ communities.

And then we’ll be putting all of this together, so looking at, Our Watch’s drivers of violence for people who have a disability. we’ll also be showing you a short video that looks at myths and assumptions around disability, and linking to that to, the really high rates of violence that people with disability experience in our communities.

Just before we get going, a quick note on language. You will hear us using person-first language, such as person with a disability, as well as identity-first language, such as disabled person, throughout all the modules. And if you’d like a full explanation of what all that means, please do go back and check out the start of module one, where we discuss it in more detail.

People in the disability community have their own preferences. So some disabled people do like person-first language, some disabled people do like identity-first language. it’s important that we respect and use, the language that, clients prefer. But know that overall there isn’t a particular right and wrong at this stage.

So why does domestic, family, and sexual violence with, against people with a disability occur? So we know that unfortunately, like many marginalized groups within our community, people with a disability experience extremely high rates of domestic, family, and sexual violence. In order to provide supportive responses to people after an experience of violence, it’s really important for us to consider why people with a disability experience such high rates of violence.

This will, I think this understanding will ensure we are not only providing the appropriate support, but ensure what we are doing when we’re there to support and help, that we’re not continuing to perpetuate experiences of violence. but also so we can do what we can within our role and within our communities to help prevent experiences of violence against people who have a disability.

To start off with, we wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about ableism. so ableism is essentially a belief or an action, where people with a disability are viewed or treated differently, different, oh goodness, differently to people who don’t have a disability and ableism affects us in terms of being able to access spaces or not, to access services, whether we can access support, whether we can access information.

ableism also means that disabled people are often not believed when we come to someone to share perhaps that we have experienced violence or are experiencing violence. ableism also means that disabled people are often thought of as either having no sexuality, it’s just not a part of them whatsoever, they are these asexual beings.

Asexuality of course being a completely valid, identity. But not all disabled people are asexual, that’s the important bit. Yeah. the other end of the spectrum is that we’re often seen as hypersexual. similarly a lot of the time disabled people aren’t given information about sex or sexuality because, again, parents, families, support providers don’t really think about that as something disabled people would do.

Ableism. we can be seen as incapable and don’t have the chance to do things that other people do. This is all ableism. I actually run a business where my primary focus is providing relationship and sexuality education to disabled people because of what I have seen in terms of disabled people not getting that information, and the really bad outcomes that can be a result of that.

And I think it also links back to, in module one we were talking about the convention on the rights of, persons with dis- with a disability. I can’t remember how they say it. but we were talking about our rights as disabled people. And in my work providing sex ed, you often do come across, for example, parents who are shocked that their disabled young person is thinking about or, doing particular things related to sex and sexuality, and they don’t really want them to have that information.

So it’s, but then at the same time, we know under the CRPD, actually, we have a right to education on the same basis as everyone else, and that includes relationship and sexuality education. We all have the right to start a family if that’s what we choose. So it’s, a bit of a, a bit of tension, between the rights that are enshrined in international law versus the ableist, assumptions of society.

And unfortunately, people using violence do take advantage of these stereotypes, through the lens of ableism in order to, perpetuate violence against disabled people if we’re looking at violence against women who have a disability, we know that women with a disability experience domestic and family violence at a higher rate than women without a disability.

And so the reason behind that is the overlapping forms of discrimination. So we’ve got ableism, in which Tess described, and we have some examples here around people with a disability, all being the same, not being able to work, need, not being able to make their own decisions, not being able to look after their money, not having sex, or having too much sex on the other side of things.

And then that the other discrimination that women experience is, of course, gender inequality. So gender inequality is when people aren’t, they’re not treated equally because of their gender. So some examples of gender inequality might be that women are seen as inferior to men. they need to do all of the domestic duties around the house, care for the children, not work.

so gender inequality means that women have less power, have less opportunities, and because of the overlapping forms of discrimination, are more likely to experience domestic, family, and sexual violence. and so women with a disability, of course, experience the, double disadvantage of experiencing both forms of dis- discrimination.

so we’ll talk about the specific drivers of violence for gender inequality and ableism, shortly Okay, so it is important to say that men who are disabled also, can experience violence, and in fact, disabled men are more likely than men without a disability to experience violence. gendered stereotypes and assumptions are oppressive for everyone, for men and for women, who are disabled, because those stereotypes are often linked to ableism.

disabled men, they don’t neatly fit that stereotype, and that’s a generalized statement in its own… A generalized statement in and of itself, which is not what we want. some men who are disabled may be seen as not measuring up to, the standards, the stereotypes

the ideals of, an ableist culture, essentially. Yeah. and so that can- involve things like masculinity, strength, physical ability- their status … their wealth, their power… their authority, their independence. And so because disabled men are seen as, not fitting this standard that our ableist society, holds men to, men who have a disability are then more likely to experience social isolation, loneliness, discrimination, stigma, and they’re also less likely to disclose that they have experienced violence.

So it’s really important to, acknowledge this, that disabled men absolutely, do experience violence as well. And particularly… Sorry, Jane, you’re a bit too quick for me. Oh, I’m sorry. No, you’re quite all right. I was just gonna say that particularly men with an intellectual disability, are particularly likely to, have an increased risk of being, of experiencing violence, but that overall, the statistics do show that disabled women are still more likely than disabled men- Yes

to experience domestic, sexual, family violence. so yeah, it’s, important that we absolutely acknowledge that this is not an issue solely concerning disabled women. It involves everyone. Okay. similarly, although a lot of discussion, in media, in policy, everywhere, focuses on women and their experiences of domestic, family, and/or sexual violence, we’ve just said that this is something that men also can experience, and it’s also something that is an issue for people who are LGBTQIA+.

And of course, taking our intersectional lens, LGBTQIA+ people who have a disability Are even more likely to experience, domestic, family, or sexual violence. So we know that people from the LGBTQIA+, community experience much higher rates of domestic and family violence, sexual violence compared with the people who are LGBTQIA+ without a disability.

Why, is the LGBTQIA+ community experience these such high rates of violence? So narrow ideas of gender, of bodies, of sex causes discrimination, which is increases these, the likelihood of these experiences. But as Tess has, shared earlier, around ableism is still a core driver of violence against LGBTQIA+ communities.

However, we also know that because, they identify as being from this community, heteronormativity or cisnormativity are also the causes. So this means that people of the belief that you can only have a relationship, if you’re a man, you have a relationship with a woman, if you’re a woman, you have a relationship with a man, and that there are only two genders, and that is male and female.

So this type of discrimination and the overlap of ableism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity are the causes of domestic family violence, sexual violence for LGBTQIA+ people who have a disability. And Tess, there’s some really horrific statistics, around this that, that we found, that you found in your research.

this came out of the Private Lives 3 study, and- The analysis actually was possible thanks to the recent Royal Commission into violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation of people with disability. they looked at this data again and tried to pull out information, about this particular intersection of LGBTQIA+ identity and disability.

and some of the things … So it is Australia specific, this data. And some of the stats that came out of it, they found that, yeah, as Jane was saying, the more complex, a person’s support needs are and the higher the level of support they need increases the risk of domestic, family, and sexual violence over the course of an individual’s lifetime.

and the language that they use here does sound like the medical model, rather than the social model, talking about severity of disability. You can think of it as, to do with someone’s support needs. so for example, they, found that for LGBTQIA+ adults without a disability, there was a 55% likelihood that they would experience domestic, family, or sexual violence at some point in their life.

but when you look at that intersection of LGBTQIA+ identity and disability, they found that 67% of people with, low support needs would experience this kind of violence. 69% of people with moderate support needs, and 73, almost three quarters, of people with high and complex support needs experience domestic, family, or sexual violence at some point in their lifetime.

They also found that LGBTQIA+ people who were cisgender, so they were the same gender when they were born as they are now as, an adult, they were less likely to experience violence than, gender-diverse people. So for cisgender women, the number was 77%, and for cisgender men it was 70%. Whereas looking at gender diversity, for trans women- It was 78% likelihood.

Trans men, 84% likelihood. And for non-binary people, 85% likelihood that they will experience domestic, family, or sexual violence at some point in the course of their life. So some really concerning statistics for Australia. How do we put all of this together? So Our Watch have, put together a resource called Changing the Landscape, which I really would encourage all of you to go and have a look at, and it really goes through the specific drivers that drive violence against women, children, people who have a disability.

So as we’ve discussed, gender inequality and ableism are the main causes of domestic, family, and sexual violence for women, children, gender-diverse people. Men with a disability are also impacted by narrow ideas around gender, masculinity- Which is linked with ableism and increases their chance of experiencing violence.

As Tess discussed, men with intellectual disability experience particularly high rates of sexual violence. however, because they are a man and there, there is a gender privilege, it means that they do not experience domestic, family, sexual violence at the high rates of women and gender diverse people.

So if we’re looking at some of the gendered drivers specifically, so having a look at the orange box, we can see that, the, some of the drivers include men’s control over women’s independence, believing that people should behave in a certain way because of their gender. So these are those rigid, rigid, gender stereotypes that we’ve been talking about, and male friendships based on aggression, dominance or, control.

So when this overlaps with ableism, so this can look like, again, Tess, gave a, wonderful explanation earlier, but negative stereotypes, assumptions, normalizing violence against people with a disability, controlling people’s lives, and excluding people. So these eight drivers between the two different types of discrimination is what we, is what causes such a high rates of violence.

But if we consider down the bottom and the, part in the middle there, there’s also some other intersecting factors, which means that there are other marginalized groups who will also experience particularly high rates of violence. So again, Tess earlier shared some really horrific statistics around, gender diverse people and their experiences of violence.

So we know that, trans and gender diverse people are, can be impacted by the same gendered drivers as women. however, they’re also impacted by cisnormativity, heteronormativity, and those really rigid gender binaries. So that is, there’s only two genders, it’s male and it’s female, and anything other than that is, is not okay and is not normal So this can also, within that sort of that middle part, if you are a First Nations person, if you’re an older person, if you come from a culturally and linguistically diverse community, again, there is another overlapping form of discrimination that you’ll, you may experience in your life, which further increases, the likelihood of experiencing violence.

So these are… I really encourage everyone to go and have a read of that resource. It really gives this a lot more depth and really, provides a lot of examples around what we can do as a community to prevent violence against people who have a disability. So we’d like you now, to have a listen to this, or have a watch, apologies, this five-minute video.

So we know that negative views about disability is a form of ableism and one of the causes of violence against, people who have a disability. So this can look like, myths around disability, assumptions, stereotypes So we’d like you to have a look at this video because it really highlights some of the experiences that women who have an intellectual disability have around stereotypes in their life.

This video was actually created by, Wild Women, so women who, come to Wild. So it is their story, their voices. so have a play, and then we’d really love you to turn to, your workbook. the video link can be found in your workbook. have a watch and please respond to questions one, two and three.

Pause the video and then we’ll see you shortly. To wrap up module two, we have a few key takeaways of what we’ve been discussing. So the evidence is really clear that people with disability experience higher rates of violence than people who are not yet disabled. and we know that those high rates of violence are due to intersectionality, again, this, intersection of gender inequality and ableism compounding to, produce more disadvantage, more likelihood of abuse.

And we know that for disabled people, their experiences of violence, of seeking support, of being heard, of being safe, are again really impacted by these overlapping intersectional forms of discrimination. All these different parts of their identity, belonging to marginalized communities, makes their, compounds their disadvantage so that, ableism, having a disability, gender inequality as a woman or gender-diverse person, racism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, like all these different, marginalized groups, all of that compounds to increase the likelihood of experiencing domestic, family and sexual violence for an individual and we, can do our bit by preventing violence, reducing violence, by considering the way that we think about people who are disabled, the way we treat people who are disabled.

And, I was just reflecting on, ableism at its most fundamental, at its base level, is about believing that disabled people are lesser than non-disabled people. Believing that, and so therefore it is okay to, enact violence against them, or disrespect them, or all of those things.

So really unpacking the way that we, as a society think and treat, people who are disabled. And that is the end of module two. Thank you for coming along with us, and we will see you in module three.