Gender Violence

Women with disabilities experience high rates of violence, both at the hands of family members and of personal assistants.

In addition to family members, caregivers can include attendants, interpreters, homemakers, drivers, doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers, psychiatrists, therapists, counsellors, and workers in hospitals and other institutions. This large number of people and the intimate physical and emotional contact involved in the care they provide greatly increase the risk of abuse to persons with disabilities.

Because they must often depend on caregivers, women with disabilities face even more difficulties than other women in pursuing a remedy for abuse.

Access to Justice

Access to justice for any historically marginalized group is essential in order to address wrongs and seek remedies.

Women and girls with disabilities are often doubly disadvantaged in accessing justice on account of their gender and their disability status.

Far from ensuring that justice is assured, the justice system itself often presents barriers. Rooted in discriminatory attitudes towards women and persons with disabilities, these barriers serve to perpetuate and reinforce inequality.

Some examples include lack of safe and accessible transport to legal proceedings, insensitive and untrained police and court officials, and negative attitudes about women with disabilities, such as the false idea that their disability makes them unfit for parenting.

Access to Rehabilitation Services

Rehabilitation services are not available to the vast majority of persons with disabilities who may benefit from them.

Furthermore, services that do exist are very often inaccessible or unavailable to women and girls. In many war-affected countries, rehabilitation services are available only to men.

In developing countries, women and girls with disabilities are far less likely to have access to orthotic and prosthetic services for a variety of reasons, including lack of information, inability to travel alone for services, and lack of financial resources.

Access to Essential Health Care

Women and girls with disabilities also face major barriers related to their right to basic health care.

Obstacles in accessing general health care for women and girls with disabilities include discrimination and bias, lack of information, lack of transportation, and lack of respect for autonomy and privacy.

Right to Sexual and Reproductive Health Care

Women with mental and physical disabilities must fight to participate in decisions about their health care.

In many cases, health workers persistently refuse to advise women and girls with disabilities on appropriate family planning services and methods.

All too frequently, decisions are made for them without their consultation or consent, leading to a variety of human rights abuses, including forced abortion, sterilization, and psychiatric drugging.

Women with disabilities also face limitations on their rights to marry and found a family. Legal limitations may exist that expressly exclude women with disabilities from marrying.

Women with disabilities may be regarded as unfit for parenting or in other cases may be falsely told that having a child would be unsafe or unwise because of their disability. Those who have children often lose custody of them.

Education and Literacy

Gender bias results in low literacy and education rates for women and girls with disabilities.

Disability discrimination combined with gender discrimination serves to keep women and girls with disabilities out of school. In many countries, schools are inaccessible or too far away or may exclude both girls and boys with disabilities from attendance.

Workplace Discrimination

The labour market does not adequately accommodate women with disabilities, nor are there sufficient laws to prevent and punish harassment – either sexual harassment or harassment on the basis of disability.

According to the United Nations, only one quarter of women with disabilities worldwide are in the workforce. They are two times less likely to find work than their male counterparts.

Workplace harassment of persons with disabilities is also commonplace and biases can be particularly severe with regard to people with “hidden disabilities,” such as mental disabilities.

Pervasive ignorance frequently leads potential employers to reject women with disabilities because they mistakenly assume that the women will not be able to fulfil job requirements or that reasonable accommodation will be extensive and costly.

Adequate Standard of Living

In countries where women are most valued for their productive and reproductive capacities, women with a disability face even greater discrimination.

Typically, they are often allocated the smallest amounts of food and other resources. As a result, the survival rate of girl children with disabilities is lower than that of boys.

Few developing countries offer educational opportunities for girls with disabilities. Where opportunities for education exist in schools for children with disabilities, boys usually receive them.

Women and girls with disabilities living in urban slums face particularly extreme circumstances, lacking adequate shelter, clean water, and sanitation, and are exposed to high levels of gender-based violence and environmental pollution.