Women with disabilities more likely to suffer abuse

Calgary Herald
Reuters
Published: Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Women with a disability are more likely to suffer abuse by their spouse or partner, according to new research.

Dr Brian Armour, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, found that 37.3 per cent of women with a disability reported violent abuse in their lifetime, compared to 20.6 per cent of women without a disability.

“We need to ensure that prevention initiatives designed to reduce intimate partner violence explicitly include the needs of adults with disabilities,” Armour said in an interview.

Armour and his team estimated the prevalence of abuse by studying data from a large annual telephone survey of Americans designed to monitor the prevalence of key health behaviours.

They said women with a disability were more likely to report being threatened with violence at 28.5 per cent compared to 15.4 per cent in other women. Slightly more than 30 per cent said they had been hit, slapped, pushed, kicked or physically hurt by an intimate partner — about double the rate of other women.

“Future work is needed to get at why” this is so, said Armour, who reported the findings at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting in San Diego.

Armour said women with disabilities might be more vulnerable to intimate partner violence because their disability might limit mobility and prevent escape.

A disability might also adversely affect communication and the ability to alert others about the problem. Fear may be is another possibility.

“Since intimate partner violence is a public help problem, we need to ensure that prevention strategies for people with disabilities are widely adopted,” he added.

© The Calgary Herald 2008