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"Working with Victims with Disabilities

Recommendations for Other Departments of Justice Agencies
One of the sections of the greater document: "Working with Victims with Disabilities, an OVC Bulletin", by Cheryl Guidry Tyiska, NOVA

1. The National Institute of Justice should work with the appropriate disability-related research agencies to establish a long-term research agenda focusing on the needs of crime victims with disabilities from the time of the occurrence of the crime through the entire criminal justice process. Such research should seek to determine the best methodologies for identifying the level and nature of victimization risk, the impact of criminal victimization on victims with disabilities, the need for specialized types of victim services, the ability to access victim services, and the challenges posed to the criminal justice system in investigating and prosecuting the offenders, as well as preventing future victimization.

2. The OVC funded project administered by the National Institute of Justice on "The Effectiveness of VOCA Funding in Meeting the Needs of Crime Victims" should incorporate specific strategies to measure the ability of VOCA sub recipients to identify and serve crime victims with disabilities and to identify the barriers that impede those efforts.

3. The National Crime Victimization Survey, the Unified Crime Report, and other data collection surveys should be redesigned to capture data on the incidence of violence against people with disabilities and the number of people who become disabled due to crime-related catastrophic physical injuries. If alternative survey methods are used, they should be designed and implemented with sufficient resources so that their findings are as authoritative as others produced by the Department of Justice.

4. Appropriate offices in the Department of Justice should work collaboratively to focus on the problems of crime against people with disabilities to foster cooperation in the development of policy initiatives at all governmental levels.

5. The Violence Against Women Grants Office and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice should work to enhance the physical and attitudinal accessibility of domestic violence and sexual assault programs to women with disabilities and actively discourage any kind of discrimination in service provided to persons with disabilities.

These recommendations represent only a first step toward building a better service delivery system for crime victims with disabilities. The Symposium participants who developed these suggestions are committed to continuing their work and to recruiting others to continue the work that they have begun.

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