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"Working with Victims with Disabilities

Obstacles Unique to the Disability Community
One of the sections of the greater document: "Working with Victims with Disabilities, an OVC Bulletin", by Cheryl Guidry Tyiska, NOVA

Some of the numerous social and legal problems faced by people with disabilities can be summarized as follows:

Isolation
Our society often segregates persons with disabilities through physical and social isolation, with institutionalization representing the extreme. As a result of pervasive isolation, people with disabilities may not learn about available services and resources nor are they routinely informed of rights they have by law. This is particularly true for people with more severe disabling conditions, older people with disabilities, and younger people with developmental disabilities. Indeed, many people who are chronically victimized do not even know that society condemns such predatory conduct and has tools to end and redress that wrong.

Limited Access
Physical Accessibility: In many instances, crime victims with disabilities do not have physical access to services. Architectural barriers in buildings and public transportation systems mean that many crime victims with disabilities cannot visit criminal justice agencies or victim assistance programs. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) addresses key issues of accessibility, but as Symposium participants pointed out, there is an extensive lack of understanding of how Titles II and III of the ADA pertain to the criminal justice and victim assistance fields. Moreover, this lack of understanding is frequently coupled with a fear that making services accessible to crime victims with disabilities will require expensive, disruptive adaptations.

Attitudinal Accessibility: Attitudes to-ward the person with a disability is as important or more so than physical accessibility. In addition to accessible physical environments, program staff must be welcoming toward people with disabilities and show in their de-meanor and in the quality of their pro-grams that they sincerely want to work collaboratively to serve the community.

Underreporting of the Crime
Underreporting of crime is a pervasive problem that the victim assistance field is addressing on many fronts. For example, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)¹ estimates that 1,000 rapes occur every day in the U.S., but only about 300 will ever be reported to the police. A crime may go unreported for many reasons: mobility or communication barriers, the social or physical isolation of the victim, a victim's normal feelings of shame and self-blame, ignorance of the justice system, or the perpetrator is a family member or primary caregiver. In crimes involving a victim with a disability, one or more of these factors may prevent the crime from ever being reported. When the crime is reported, the reporting agency often fails to note that the victim had a disability, especially if the crime is reported by someone other than the victim. Later, assumptions and prejudice about the reliability of the testimony of victims with disabilities can deny them access to justice in the courts.

Limited Advocacy
Despite progress by disability rights activists, advocacy on their own behalf is still limited. Again, just as with many crime victims, a person who wants to access criminal justice decision making processes is unable to do so without adequate tools to enable full participation.

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