In today’s blog, Phoebe Nagorcka-Smith (@PNagorckaSmith) explores what the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability had to say about family and domestic violence.

Content note: abuse, neglect, and violence experienced by disabled women

Last week, the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People With Disability released its final report. The report, split into an executive summary and twelve volumes, covers evidence from 7,944 submissions, 1,785 private sessions, 32 public hearings, 28 research reports, and 12 policy roundtables. All stories and statistics in the following paragraphs can be found in the Final Report.

How the Royal Commission came about

Following decades of advocacy by disabled Australians, the Commonwealth Government created the Disability Discrimination Act 1992. The Act codified the social model of disability. In other words, it recognised that disability is not an individual characteristic, but rather the result of the interaction of a person’s impairment with inaccessible and discriminatory attitudes, systems, physical environments, and forms of communications. The Act made it unlawful to directly or indirectly discriminate against a person on the grounds on disability in defined settings such as employment, education, the provision of goods and services, and accommodation.

Despite this legal protection, discrimination, institutionalisation, and violence persisted. In 2015, following sustained advocacy by people with disability and allies, the Senate Community Affairs Reference Committee began an inquiry into the violence, abuse and neglect of people with disability in institutional settings. A recommendation from this inquiry was to establish a Royal Commission into violence against, and the abuse and neglect of, people with disability. In 2019, the Prime Minister announced the establishment of the Royal Commission.

Disability in Australia, and disability for women

Almost one in five Australians (18%) are disabled – that’s 4.4 million people. At the end of last year, there were 573,342 National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants. Women make up 49% of disabled Australians but only 39% of NDIS participants. Women are more likely to experience chronic illness and disability that are not as readily recognised by support systems, including the NDIS and Disability Support Pension. This includes conditions that cause chronic pain (like fibromyalgia), chronic fatigue (like myalgic encephalomyelitis, / chronic fatigue syndrome), and conditions where you need a childhood diagnosis to access support, but that tend to be diagnosed late in women because of things like medical sexism and gender stereotyping (such as ADHD and autism).

Violence is shaped by gender and disability

Disabled people of all genders experience high rates of violence, especially women. Much like in the wider population, the Royal Commission found that disabled women are more likely than disabled men to experience sexual assault, violence, stalking, and emotional abuse perpetrated by a partner. This abuse can also cause disability in victim-survivors, including psychological trauma, brain injury, and physical injury.

Disabled women are also more likely to experience violence than non-disabled women, including intimate partner violence (29% compared to 14%), sexual violence (29% compared to 15%), and physical violence (43% compared to 25%). Women with cognitive (46%) and psychological (50%) disability experience sexual violence at particularly high rates.

We know from large surveys and police reports that women are most at risk of violence from people they know, including intimate partners. For disabled women, family and domestic violence can come from a wider range of people, including family, carers, co-residents in shared accommodation, and support workers. Participants told the Royal Commission that violence itself can also look slightly different. In addition to physical, sexual, spiritual, financial, and emotional abuse, coercive control can expand to limiting access to disability-related resources such as mobility or communication aids, medication, daily care activities, or their community.

Systems abuse

In addition to family and domestic violence, the 12 volumes of the Royal Commissions Final Report documented many experiences of systems abuse. This included both individual perpetrators using systems to control, neglect, and violate people with disability, and also systems themselves causing pain and distress. This included accounts of sterilisation of unknowing or unwilling women and girls, financial trustees unfairly limiting a person’s access to their own money, the Family Court or child protection systems removing children from parents with disability on the presumption that they couldn’t provide adequate care, and the criminal justice system disproportionately incarcerating people with disability, especially cognitive and psychological disability, while not prosecuting crimes against them.

Escape and prosecution

The Royal Commission also heard countless stories that showed disabled women face disproportionate barriers to getting help, escaping violence, and seeing successful prosecution of their perpetrators. The stories included women and girls: having their reports dismissed (including because they were seen as ‘unreliable’ witnesses or too difficult to communicate with); not having the funds to escape because of financial abuse, theft or fraud; relying on abusive partners or family for their care needs; having no access to disability supports in crisis accommodation; being mis-identified as the perpetrator; and, being fearful of having their children removed due to stereotypes about disabled parents. Some women also reported that men who perpetrated abuse were never held to account because the violence (including physical and sexual assault) was seen as a ‘disability behaviour’, and therefore dismissed by group homes or police.

The violence that disabled women and girls face within and by institutions that are, at face value, set up to protect people experiencing violence – such as hospitals, police, and the foster system – sets up victim-survivors for a double devastation. The stigmatisation of psychosocial disability in medical and legal settings, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the direct result of violence, has long been reported by women and children. It can result in women and girls being branded as unreliable, hysterical, and out of control. Women also reported inaccessible legal systems: them or their partners not being provided with Auslan interpreters, support workers to explain information, or legal support to draft documents for the court.

A policy framework for preventing and responding to violence against women with disability

While the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children recognises that disabled women and girls face violence that is both unique and frequent, it doesn’t translate that acknowledgement into action. Nor do the definitions of family and domestic violence across Australian state, territory, and national jurisdictions recognise all of the settings where disabled women and girls are likely to experience violence, and the range of people who perpetrate it.

The Royal Commission made 222 recommendations to address abuse, neglect, and violence towards people with disability. Recommendation 8.23 recommends a standalone action plan be developed to accompany the National Plan, that specifically addresses violence against women with disability. The recommendation goes on to say that the action plan should be developed by and for women with disability, prioritise cohorts most at risk (including women with cognitive and psychosocial disability), coordinate with other plans and strategies (including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Action Plan), and recognise the breadth of relationships and settings where violence against disabled women and girls occurs.

This is integral to progress, and must be a priority of the cross-departmental working group that the Commonwealth Government has pledged to convene in the wake of the Final Report. However it’s important to recognise how much of the violence and abuse, and many of the barriers to escape and recovery, could be effectively addressed if a ‘disability lens’ was applied to all policies as a matter of course. This includes family violence policy and funding, but also policy across all government departments at a federal, state/territory, and local level. For example, social housing should be accessible, services should be co-designed by people with lived experience, disabled parents and children should have the resources to maintain their family unit, the legal system should have mechanisms to listen to and prosecute crimes against people with cognitive disability, and Auslan interpreters should be available in every police station.

These problems are not new, and nor are the solutions. ‘Nothing about us, without us’ has long been a catch-cry of the disability rights movement, and advocates have spent lifetimes pursuing policy and social reform. But despite the fact that we should all be invested in solving these problems (because human rights are important, and also because 1 in 9 Australians will experience disability in their lifetime), we haven’t seen enough progress.

The Royal Commission Final Report is long, and it is difficult reading. I cried more than once reading the volumes that document individual testimonies. But bearing witness to this work, that so many disabled people, carers, friends, family, and allies contributed to, is an important act of justice. People shared their stories, and also their hopes for the future, and their vision for inclusion. If we are going to not only end the outrageously high rates of violence perpetrated against women with disability, but also see real equality in Australia, we need to treat the release of the Final Report as a call to action.

A note on language: I am disabled, and identify with the social model of disability, which is described in the blog. As such, I used the terms ‘disabled’ and ‘person with disability’ interchangeably throughout the piece.

This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.

Posted by Phoebe Nagorcka-Smith (@PNagorckaSmith)

Violence against disabled women: Findings from the Royal Commission