Violence Against Women with Disabilities: Findings from Studies 
Conducted by the Center for Research on Women with Disabilities
 - 1992 - 2001 presented by Carol Howland on February 27, 2002. 

LAUREL: Good afternoon.
This is Laurel Richards with ILRU in Houston, and we want
inform welcome you to our Webcast today in which we'll talk
about research program that has been examining violence
against women with disabilities.

I want to start by acknowledging the support we have from
NIDRR, which has an initiative to make research findings
available to people who are not researchers, but who do have a
stake in the research outcomes.

And we're doing this project in collaboration with the Research
Information on Independent Living Project, which is jointly run
by our colleagues at the University of Kansas, the Research and
Training Center on Independent Living, and the ILRU program
here in Houston.

And in this particular presentation, is also supported by the RTC
on Health and Wellness which operates out of the Oregon
Institute on Disability and Development, Oregon Health and
Sciences University, as well as the Center for Research on
Women with Disabilities.

Before we get started, I have some very quick housekeeping
issues for lack of a better word, and I want to point out that on
your screen not only are you hearing the audio using realplayer
or mediaplayer or in the area, you can see typing that's going on.
This is realtime captioning, and it will go throughout the
program.

Now, there is an issue regarding buffering which means that
occasionally there will be a pause either in the audio or in the
captioning or in both, and for those of you who are working
from a telephone type modem of a 56k or less, the buffering will
be more frequent, but don't be concerned about it because it will
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left off.  It's a little bit like pausing a VCR.  As soon as you hit
the pause button, it goes back to exactly where you were.

If it lasts more than just a few seconds I would hit the refresh
button and start over, and if it lasts a whole lot longer than that,
feel free to call our technical assistance line, and that number is
(713)-520-0232.
And we've got folks standing by to give you any kind of
technical assistance.

Now, if you have a question that you would like to send in with
regard to what our presenter is discussing, feel very free.
We welcome those and would like to see a free exchange.
The way you do this is as you can see under step no. 2 in the
instructions for this Webcast, you click the button that says if
you have a question, click here.

It brings up your e-mail program, whether that's Eudora or
Outlook or Express or whatever you use and it's preaddressed to
us and you type in your question and hit send and we'll receive it
and at a certain point we'll give it to the presenter in live time.

So with those said, I also want to let you know that RACHEL
Kosoy will be our -- the person who fields these questions and
then passes them onto the presenter.

We are in fact at many different locations, our colleague
CAROL Howland is in her office across Houston. We at ILRU
-- some of us are in the ILRU office, some of us at home, some
of you are in your offices around the country, others of you are
working out of your home or wherever you are.

This is a very kind of casual way of presenting information.
It seems more personal going through the internet like this.
If you have associates and friends who cannot get on or are
having any problems, please tell them to call the ta hotline.
Now, that being said, I'd like to introduce our subject for the
day.

The title again is Violence Against Women with Disabilities.
And I'm just real, real pleased to introduce CAROL Howland
who is one of our neighbors here in Houston.

And she's with the Center for Research on Women with
Disabilities, and I believe honestly they are not very many
programs that are doing the level of research and the level of
importance of research that our friends at C.R.O.W.D. are
doing.

Today's subject is not only just so important, but it's just
incredibly grim and serious and one that we need to, as people
working in the independent living field and in disability rights
field, need to be aware of and help people address who may be
facing issues like this.

CAROL, I'd like to turn it over to you and please welcome and
please present to us right now.

CAROL: Okay, before I get started, because of the sensitive
nature of this subject, I want to encourage anyone who is having
any kind of personal issues with violence or abuse, if you
wanted to e-mail in some questions, those kinds of questions,
we would want to have RACHEL e-mail back with some
hotline numbers, both nationally or locally that you can contact
to address throws kinds of issues.

I just wanted to mention that up front because abuse is so
pervasive in our society and these kinds of things can affect
anybody.

Well, this presentation will focus mainly around a survey that
we did of programs to find out what services -- which kind of
abusive intervention services this were delivering to women
with disabilities.

And the reason we did this study was because our earlier
research unveiled just many, many shocking stories of abuse
and violence among women with disabilities and in studies that
were not even intended to address abuse.

The first one was a two stage study that began in 1992 where we
did local interviews with 31 women with a variety of disabilities
and the study was mainly about sexuality and reproductive
health and so as we asked them about their relationships and
they told us the story of those relationships, we discovered that
25 of those women had reported being abused in some way, and
then secondly, and the questionnaire that followed that was a
much larger national study, that was completed by nearly 500
women with disabilities and then in comparison with an
able-bodied friend that they also gave the interview to, we asked
specific questions about abuse because we had heard so much
about it and we had two pages of questions where they could
describe the length of the abuse and the perpetrators and both
emotional, physical and sexual.

Of course realizing that physical abuse also involves emotional
as well and sexual really involves all three types of abuse.

And then in addition, they were invited to write narratives if
they wanted to give us more details about these abusive
situations and there were about 181 women who described their
abusive situations in more detail in response to those questions.

And so instead of actually defining emotional and physical and
sexual abuse which is away a lot of presentations start, I think
that some of the women's stories themselves much better
illustrate just what these kind of abuses are like.

So I'm going to tell you a couple of those stories and tell you a
couple of the quotations that we heard.  I have a couple to start
with that I feel are good examples of emotional abuse.
And much of this abuse, even though some of it is like you
would see in the general population, a lot of it is very
specifically related to having a disability.  And a little later I'll
talk about our analysis of the types of abuse that were directly
related to disability.

The first case, a 49-year-old woman with a spinal cord injury
that was acquired at age 5 reported emotional abuse by her
father lasting 25 years, and she said at the onset of my disability
he stopped holding me, touching me.  This was a daily
experience.

Prior to disability we were close and this kind of emotional
abandonment is I think sadly more common than we'd like to
know.

And then in another, a 37-year-old woman who had had a joint
and connective tissue disorder from birth was first emotionally
abused at age 33 in a romantic relationship lasting one year, and
she said, my partner whom I was dating repeatedly stated to me
the only reason why he's dating me is because he knew no one
else would date me.

That's another typical way of controlling someone to say no one
else would want them and so they have to put up with whatever
they're going to dish out.

And another situation it was both emotional and economic
abuse where a 57-year-old woman with polio that began at age
one described emotional abuse by her husband.

My husband loved to intimidate me and criticized. He would get
me sexually aroused and then stop and expect me to clean the
house.

He eastbounding peblgtd me to give him all I earned saying
nobody else would want me.

And then a 45-year-old woman who had polio at the age of 2
described emotional abuse by a parent of one of her first grade
students.

This is an unusual story, and she said a parent of one of my
6-year-old students told me the child didn't get along with me
because he knew what I did in my past life that was being
punished with a disability.

So she was saying that the parent -- this sometimes happens
with certain religions where there is a belief that someone has a
disability because they're being punished for past since or even
past since in a previous life in this case, and she complained to
the school administration and said nothing was done about it.

And then some examples of physical abuse, a 49-year-old
woman with a spinal cord injury since age 17 reported after my
child was born, my husband became jealous and didn't want me
to get up and take care of her.

She would take my chair away from me and tie me up when I
pulled myself out of bed.

I left him the first chance I had.

And this is an example of restraint and having a person's
assistive equipment taken away from them.

In another case of physical abuse, a 36-year-old woman who
had a spinal cord injury since age 29 received her injury from
being shot by her husband, and if you go to any rehabilitation
center in the country, there are a number of people who got their
injuries as the direct result of being shot or attacked or attacked
with a knife or something like that.

And she said the emotional and physical abuse occurred
sporadically for about two months.

I filed for divorce and unfortunately I suffered a near fatal injury
as a result of a gun shot wound by him.  Subsequently, he killed
himself.

Then I have one story which was a little bit lengthier, but this
woman who had M.D. words since the age of 19 described all
three types of abuse by her husband lasting three years.

And she said that her abuse had started with her parents who
ignored her and she said didn't care about her feelings and in
this case their father didn't hit her, but he often beat her sister
and made her watch and then she reported that he constantly
verbally abused her telling her how stupid, useless and ugly she
was and nothing was ever done about it.

Then she described a combination of physical and sexual abuse
by boy friends.  She said the first time my live in boyfriend beat
me he punched me in the face while we were drunk.  A year
later he beat me severely.  He punched me and beat my head
between the gear shift between the seat and dragged me into the
house and kicked me several times.

He thought he had killed me and left me for dead.  I pretended
to be unconscious so he would quit.  He was drunk then, too.
After he left I left, too.  When I went home later that night I
took someone with me because I was afraid.  I do not remember
how we got back together but we did.

After a while, all three of his children had come to live with us.
When I was 32, he slapped me quite hard after we came home
from a bar.  I called the police and they came and took him
away.  They took the children to his mother.

He came back, loaded his shut gun and said if I moved he would
blow my brains out and then he raped me.  After this I was so
confused.  I knew I should leave but I did not want to leave the
children.

This is a very common reason that women with disabilities will
stay in a relationship like that and the way this is also
disability-related is that often the legal system will assume that
she cannot take care of her children and give them to the
abusive husband.

So there is a real concern there even more so than what happens
in the general community of women.

Then she goes on to describe other situations with the same
husband and just a lot of violence involving weapons.

Now, sexual assault we found in our national study was mainly
by strangers though in the disability population, a lot of it is also
perpetrated by caregivers and relatives and other people that
have direct contact with the girl or the woman.

This is an example of sexual assault much a woman who had
muscular dystrophy from age 2 and was gang raped twice at age
13.  So she said she was gang raped by three men when I was 13
years old.  Six months later two of the men plus two others
raped me again.  I was impregnated.

After a tempting suicide and hospitalized, the state prosecuted.
One man pled guilty and the others were acquitted.

And then just a couple others showing sexual assault.
This woman with a spinal cord injury from the age of 29
described being molested by her stepfather for nine years and
then physically abused by her second husband and then there
was also an attempted rape by a stranger.

And this woman had a very -- really on the spot creative way of
getting out of the rape situation.  She said that last year a man
forced his way into my apartment, threw me out of my chair,
and attempted to rape me.

My legs wouldn't cooperate and he hit me several times.
When he was trying to force my sweat pants down he saw my
catheter and told me what it was and I told him I had aids and
told him to administer the medicine.  It really scared me and
made me aware I need to be more cautious.

Then another woman with a spinal cord injury who had reported
both emotional and sexual abuse by her husband after the injury
said my first husband raped me when I could neither spread my
legs or lift them four inches.

And then lastly, there is a report from a woman who had polio
since age 3 and she had been physically abused by her father,
emotionally by her mothers and brothers and physically and
emotionally by her husband for 14 years and then describes all
of the different occurrences, hitting, kicking, punching,
incidents lasting several hours and ending in rape and she had
been hospitalized for those, in the emergency room twice and
did eventually divorce him.

But she had trouble getting any support from her relatives
because when she told them about it, all they would say is you
made your bed, so lie in it.  I liked her last statement about how
she got out.  Because she said so I ripped off the sheets myself
and got out.  That had a happier ending.

But these stories also demonstrate something else we found in
analyzing the data from the national study, was that even though
they were pretty much equal numbers of women with and
without disabilities, about 62 percent reporting some kind of
abuse, it lasted much longer for the women with disabilities and
there were a higher number abouter of person trait terse and I
think you saw that from some of the examples and often there
was life long abuse beginning in childhood and occurring with
various partners in adulthood.

And then we found that the most common person trait ther of
emotional or physical abuse was her spouse or partner and the
most common one for sexual assault was a stranger.

So there is kind of a misbelief out there that no one would rape
a woman with a disability, that no one would go after a woman
in a wheelchair who is out there, and sometimes that
misconception is also held by law enforcement and someone
goes to the police and reports a situation like that, particularly if
they've got a severe disability, maybe their communication is
impaired the police officer has some kind of stereotypes about
that and they assume the report couldn't happen and nothing is
done.

And I think that law enforcement is becoming more educated
about those sorts of things. Partly from the efforts of some of
the centers for independent living out there and some of the
battered women's programs.

Another thing that we've seen throughout these is that nothing
was done when the abuse was reported or the woman didn't
report it at all because she was so afraid of retaliation or didn't
see any way out.

So we began seeing that women with disabilities really had
limited options to resolve or escape from the abuse and it's hard
for any woman a lot of times to escape from a situation like that
and this is kind of a double jeopardy of having additional layer
of having disabilities that make escape more difficult.

So then the 181 narratives were then analyzed for vulnerability
to abuse that was specifically related to physical disability.
And we concluded that emotional abuse consisted of
abandonment or rejection or blaming the relationship problems
on the disability or belittling, this was very disability specific
abuse.

Disability-related physical abuse took the form of confinement
or restraint. Withholding or preventing the use of orthotic
devices or medication or equipment and also in the context of
the helping relationship.

There have been other researchers across the country that have
also done some more specific studies of abuse by personal
assistants, by caregivers, by people that someone is depending
onto provide assistance to personal care.

And disability-related sexual abuse often took the form of
fondling or forced sexual activity in return for accepting help.
And we heard that, I remember, in one story of a woman when
she was a girl with polio, that she would visit a friend's summer
home and that that friend's father that was kind of understood
that if he helped her up and down the steps, that she would
allow him to fondle her and those kind of situations occurred a
lot of times.

And abuse often occurred in disability-related settings such as
special education classrooms, residential facilities, or clinical
settings, and of course we've heard a lot about abuse in
institutions and that's been all in the newspapers and
everywhere, but these studies that we did were of women -- only
women living in the community, and these are studies that were
physical disabilities.

So we did not include intellectual impairment or people with
psychiatric illness and not also physical disability in this type of
study although others have done some studies of that.
And we also learned from these studies that there were several
reasons that women -- a woman with a disability was even less
likely than other women to seek assistance in resolving or
escaping from the abusive situation.

And one really important reason is that she may not have
anyone else to provide essential assistance with her personal
care and other activities of daily living other than the abuser, the
person traiter of the abuse, and also sometimes she felt she had
no other options except that she would be sent to a nursing
home and figured that the nursing home situation was even
worse and did not want to be in that kind of restrictive
environment.

As I mentioned before, she may fear losing custody of her
children if she leaves her home and that fear is too often well
founded.

You may be physically unable to execute safety and escape
plans, particularly if her community does not offer accessible
transportation and she doesn't have the upper extremity
functioning for exam to hide money or pack a suitcase or do any
of the things the abuse programs tell women to do in
preparation for getting out of that kind of situation.

And also, and this has happened I think too often in the past, if
she calls her local domestic violence program, if she calls that
hotline, she may be told that all the beds at the shelter are full
and given the name of another shelter which may also be full or
which may lack a wheelchair accessible room.

And the national domestic violence hotline keeps a database of
battered women's shelters throughout the country and there is
around 2200 that are listed as being wheelchair accessible and
that also have availability of interpreter devices for deaf clients,
but what that sometimes means is that only part of the program
is accessible, and maybe someone can get in the office door of
the administrative office, but the shelter is not, or maybe they
are sending the women to an accessible hotel or an accessible
room which is temporary, and then where does she go?

Back to the perpetrator.

So what we found in the survey as we'll discuss later is that the
degree of accessibility varied greatly from one program to
another, and this included some very -- everything from very
small rural programs to everything up to the biggest programs
that are out there.

It was limited somewhat in that the response to the survey was
not as good as we would have liked, and what we suspect from
some of the letters that we got is that mostly programs that had
served at least one woman, anyway, in the past year with a
disability, they were more willing to send the questionnaire back
and that possibly many of the ones that did not respond either
were not serving women with disabilities or did not know how
or maybe didn't want the ADA police after them.  So we didn't
hear from them.  So we can't always tell exactly why that was.

And then the other reason that we did the study was that so little
was none about the ability of domestic violence programs to
meet the needs of women with disabilities who are living in an
abusive environment, and what was known was the stories
about women calling and not being able to get any services, so
we wanted to find out what kinds of programs and which
programs were providing adequate services.

Another draw back is that many of the domestic violence
programs and their shelters are located in older, low rent
districts of the city the buildings are not easily made
architecturally accessible and virtually all of the programs said
that they had problems with their budget in providing services
both to women with and without disabilities and they were
frequently threatened with having to shut down their centers for
not having enough funding.

And we know that that's true because when we sent out the
surveys, many of them came back with the addressee unknown
or undeliverable and it really did look like a lot of these
programs -- new ones were coming up or moving for safety
reasons, but there did seem to be a lot of change within them,
both in addresses and even going on still.

And another barrier is a woman with a disability is able to enter
the shelter, she may be able to perform chores that she is
physically unable to do and that is part of the program and
particularly this is so if she has a less visible disability such as
multiple sclerosis and then sometimes in the shelter
environment if the people in charge say, okay, you don't have to
mop the floor tonight, the other women recent her.

First and foremost if her disability is very severe, the shelter
may not be able to provide assistance or care or provide
linkages to other agencies.

And we found that that really is the key.  The programs have
linkages with agencies and centers for independent living with
people that know how to serve women with disabilities and who
may have some kind of referral list of people that could go with
them and provide the assistance and some of the shelters and
programs would not allow the woman to bring her service dog
with her or would not allow her to bring her attendant with her.
So was not able to go.

And then also most of the shelters have a limit on the number of
days the woman can stay there. 

And when the time is up shookers may have nowhere else other
than back to the home of the perpetrator.

So in conclusion, we did the survey because we wanted to find
out exactly what services are being provided to women with
disabilities by battered women's programs.

We wanted to find out the barriers to providing the services and
which of these barriers were most difficult to resolve.

We wanted to know the extent to which women with disabilities
are actually seeking out these services because we were hearing
again and again that no women with disabilities called them.
There is probably some good reasons for that in some cases, and
we wanted to find out which types of outreach service programs
were found to be the most effective in getting abused women
with disabilities to seek assistance from domestic violence
programs.

Next I was going to give a little brief synopsis of how this study
was done and this might be a good place to ask Rachel if there
is any questions on what's already been presented before I go on
and get more into the specific study.

RACHEL:  we have a number of questions.

Identify a handful actually from a person that relates specifically
to the findings of the research. So let me give you those first and
most of the rest of them deal with what do people do from here.

CAROL: So now the findings from the survey of the program,
those aren't given yet, but if they have questions that were about
the findings from the interviews and the narratives that the
women wrote on our national survey of women with disabilities,
those would be good ones to put in now.

RACHEL: Let me give you these and tell me if you're ready for
them.  These are introduced as regarding overall findings of the
research.  The first is did you examine the assistance of sub tans
abuse by the abuse error the victim of the abuse situations?

CAROL: The answer to that is no, although certainly we heard a
great deal of that in the actual narrative. So some of the ones
that I had already described, it was cases where both of the
women -- both women -- that the woman and her partner were
drinking, and we do know that that is involved in a lot of abuse.
We didn't specifically ask about that.

RACHEL:  okay.  The next question about the findings, is there
a higher rate of abuse among a specific disability?
For example, higher level of incidents by women with hearing
impairments?

CAROL:  well, now, in the studies that I had just described,
these were only of women with mobility impairments.

So we didn't study in that one women with hearing impairments.
Although some of them might have had that, too, but what we
know from hearing from other research studies and also from
some of the violence experts out there is that abuse is very
prevalent among the deaf community, and there is actually a
specific program in Seattle that deals specifically with addresses
abusiveses in the deaf community.

So we really did not compare different kinds of disabilities.
We didn't compare physical to sensory to intellectual and also of
course folks like Dr. Sosby has done a lot of work at looking at
abuse and people with intellectual impairment, particularly
severe cognitive disabilities and it's much more prevalent than it
is in the physical disability community and certainly a higher
prevalence than what you find in the general population.
And I think that they report that nearly all people, especially
ones that are in institutions that have intellectual impairment
have reported some abuse.

RACHEL:  and those -- can you repeat that doctor's name and
maybe spell it?

CAROL: Sosby -- I think it's so-w-b-y and he's written a lot in
that area.

RACHEL:  and we can put his name and the program in Seattle
that deals with the deaf community, we can put those up on our
message board after this.

CAROL:  another possibility that would help is if we put up -- if
we have a number of papers that have come out of these studies,
and we have a reference list that could be helpful.

Those would be all of the main players that are doing research
on abuse and a variety of disabilities.

RACHEL:  a couple more questions in this vain.  Was there
they relationship between the experience of abuse prior to the
disabling condition and following the disabling condition?

CAROL:  women who had abuse at an early age, say beginning
in their families, were more likely to also have abusive
relationships later on as adults.

So having the early abuse just like in the general population
predisposed them to being subject to abuse as they got older and
as they were adult.


RACHEL:  okay.  Kind of the last question in this vein and then
I think I'll turn it back over to you and hold the other questions
until you're done, was were the respondents asked to identify the
age at which they first experienced the abuse?

CAROL:  yes, they were, and that's why when I was reading
some of these quotes, I think I had said -- yes --

RACHEL:  yeah, you did mention some ages there.

CAROL:  and sometimes it was very early on and as a matter of
fact, we heard of one indent in an interview where abuse began
at birth and the woman acquired her upper extremity
amputations -- both of her arms were amputated by the
physician who delivered her because she was drunk when he
was delivering her in some back area of Louisiana and he broke
her arms accidentally and he wanted to cover that up so he cut
her arms off.

It can begin right at birth, and we heard of sexual assault
occurring from age 3, 3, 4, 5, 2 -- and in many cases there were
many perpetrators.

One thing I recall is that in a lot of cases a member of a family
would be left to baby-sit for the disabled girl when she was a
child and oftentimes a brother or someone would bring in their
friends and say, oh, you can all have sex with Susie.

So that kind of thing did happen where it's almost as though the
girl was treated as though she had no say over what was to
happen to her and that was okay to do -- for people to do kind of
what they wanted.  It was sometimes uncles.

So there were a variety of different kinds of people in the family
that could be involved in the abuse.  So within the family of
origin, the most common people doing the abuse were -- was
the mother and then the father.

RACHEL:  okay, the other questions that we have so far really
deal with kind of what to do from here.  So let me turn it back
over to you to talk more about some of the results and then I'll
come back to you with these questions.

CAROL:  okay.

I think that some of those might get addressed -- as a result of
these studies, we do have some programs and some
dissemination packages and things that were done to help
address the abuse and some information that can go to both
centers for independent living and abuse programs.
So that might be good to bring up during that discussion.

RACHEL:  okay.

CAROL: So briefly I'll just say that the survey of the abuse
programs began by ofings teleconferences with an advisory
panel that we appointed that consisted of women from a variety
of disability backgrounds and a variety of cultural backgrounds
and also persons representing battered women, representing
centers for independent living and other interpersonal violence
researchers, and then we interviewed the panelists, and we
asked them to identify the issues and barriers facing women
with disabilities and resolving interpersonal violence that they
were familiar with and also the issues and barriers that the
domestic violence programs faced in providing the services and
the practices that they knew of for delivering the services, and
then we wrote a paper documenting those and then based on
their answers to these questions, we developed two
questionnaires.

The first questionnaire was mainly developed I guess to identify
which programs had any kind of service delivery to women with
disabilities, and then the second was designed to take more
detailed information about the nature of the service delivery.

So the first questionnaire asked about the number of women
with physical, mental or sensory disabilities served within the
past 12 months and we asked about whether there was a specific
program staff member assigned to provide services to the
women with disabilities, and we wanted to know what her field
of expertise was.

And then we looked at the services provided and effective
outreach services.

And then the second -- and then from that survey, only the
programs who had served at least one woman with a disability
got the second survey.

So we had 598 surveys returned and then it was about 374 that
actually served women with disabilities and returned the
surveys.

And then in the second one, we asked about wheelchair
accessibility of shelters and the means of insuring the safety of
the women.

The provision of wheelchair accessible transportation to the
shelter, communication access or other means for hearing
impaired women, and then the proportion of women with
disabilities that actually used the specific services that were
directed to women with disabilities, and then we asked about
funding sources with the idea that if a lot of centers were saying
-- a lot of programs were saying they did not have funding to
serve women with disabilities, that maybe this would reveal
some funding sources that they might not have heard of or else
let them know where is a program for getting their funding.
And then we also had some scaled questions about the severity
of the problems of service delivery that had been identified by
the expert panel.

And then we also sent a number of follow up questionnaires and
letters from the ones we did not hear tr.

So the results are limited to the extent that there were a lot of
programs that we did not get surveys back from and we really
don't know if they are so busy serving abused women that they
couldn't replay to the survey, which wouldn't be surprising, or
the they just were not serving women with disabilities.
That's one thing we would be able to know.

Just to give you a brief synopsis of some of the findings, the
programs said they had served up to 12,000 women with
physical, mental or sensory disabilities annually, but this
included information and referral.

So it ranged all the way from I. and r. to direct services and I
suspect that the ones that were serving 12,000 women were
talking about just giving out information.

The most common number of women with disabilities that had
been served in the past year was 20.

Although again that could range all the way from just 0 or 1.

And for nearly half of the programs, less than 1 percent of their
clients, their total clients that had been served within the past
year had physical impairments.

And only 16 percent of the programs had a staff member who
was specifically as signed to provide services to women with
disabilities.

And we found the disability group that was least likely to be
served by the abuse programs were women with visual
impairments and those had averaged only 2 percent of the
clients served.

And then 3 percent had hearing impairments.

7 percent had developmental disability, intellectual impairment,
9 percent had physical disabilities, meaning mainly mobility
impairment or disabilities from severe chronic diseases, and
then most of the women disabilities that were served had
psychiatric illness which is not surprising considering that this
could certainly occur as a result of being abused for many years.

And then there were 77 programs that employed someone
whose specific job was to help the women with disabilities and
the background of that person in most cases was social work.
That was about a fourth of them, and then secondly peer
counseling.

They were women that worked as peers to those women and
certainly a background of rehabilitation.

When we asked what services that were being provided to the
women with disabilities, and we had a checklist of those of all
of the different possible and desirable services, and the one that
was most likely to be offered was accessible shelter or referral
to accessible safe house or hotel room.

So the programs that responded to this survey were ones that by
and large had an accessible shelter available.

And then 80 percent provided individual counseling and this is
-- we were asking about services that were specific to women
with disabilities because of course they would provide all of the
usual services to them that were provided for women in general.
53 percent provided transportation to the shelter, and this is very
important for women with disabilities, some of which may not
be able to drive their own car or van or have access to mass
transportation.

73 percent provided group counseling.

47 percent provided interpreters for women with hearing
impairment.

40 percent provided workshops or other training on recognizing
potentially violent situations.

And this is something I call abuse proofing, just making women
aware of situations that should raise a red flag, a date situation
that maybe she shouldn't get into because there are things about
that guy that might mean that he's a con frol freak, for instance.
And 36 percent provided a modified safety plan that was
targeted specifically to women with disabilities.
And that's very important because many of the instructions that
are on the ordinary safety plans are things that a woman with a
disability might not be able to execute on her own, and a lot of
the safety planning in her case has to involve trusted other
people which sometimes are not there when someone has been
isolated by the person person traiting the abuse.

35 percent provided disability awareness training for the
program staff, and only 16 percent were doing presentations in
the community focusing on the needs of abused women with
disabilities, even though a large number of the programs said
that that would be the most effective way of outreaching to
women with disabilities, to let them know that there are services
available to them.

And only 13 percent had printed information that was targeted
specifically to women with disabilities.

12 percent educated law enforcement personnel about
disability-related abuse, and only 6 percent provided any type of
personal care attendant services, and this of course is a major
draw back to women with severe functional limitations being
able to go into a shelter.

So overall, the abuse programs provided an average of three
services that were targeted to women with disabilities, and this
is of the programs that had any services at all.

And then the majority and about 89 percent of the abuse
programs provided five or fewer services.

So there weren't very many that would have provided all ten of
the different kinds of services that we have listed.

When we asked about serious problems that were confronting
the providers of the abuse intervention services, we had a list of
different ones and asked them if it was a very serious problem
for that and 60 percent said that there was insufficient
specialized funding for disability-related services.
So there is that funding issue coming up again.

And then the next most common problem was inadequate
respite services.

62 percent said lack of transportation to attend was a problem.

And 42 percent said few women with disabilities contact them.
42 percent said that providing effective outreach to women with
disabilities was a problem and I guess what they are meaning is
that outreach is needed to get them to call in.

38 percent said that our staff cannot provide the amount of
assistance that women with disabilities need with personal
tasks.

37 percent said they felt that they lack knowledge about the
needs of women with various types of disabilities.

And 36 percent said that a serious problem is that there is a
general belief out there that few women with disabilities need
these kinds of abuse services.

And 34 percent said facilities are not easily modified as far as
accessibility.

Then there were a variety of other reasons that people felt were
a serious problem.

And some of those amounted to a lack of knowledge about how
to address their needs and having to do with law enforcement
not responding adequately.

But it's interesting that only 17 percent said that their emergency
shelters are usually full, and it could be, again, that the programs
that do have a problem with providing enough shelters for
women are also the ones that didn't have the time to send in the
survey.

Because we do know that a lot of people have reported that
there are not enough beds available.

And then the respondents to the survey said that community
presentations and training would be the most effective way of
outreaching to women with disabilities to make them aware of
the services offered and nearly half of them said that that would
be the most effective way of reaching the women, but yet only
16 percent of the programs were actually offering these
presentations.

And 40 percent said that printed materials would be effective
for outreach, but only 13 percent had specific printed materials
that were for women the disabilities.

And then 26 percent felt that collaboration with agencies and
advocacy groups that iser of women with disabilities would be
effective and only 9 percent saw newspapers, tv and radio
announcements to be a very effective way of outreach.

So or conclusions from the study is that a small proportion of
women with disabilities who are being abused actually receive
services from programs, and most of the ones that are being
served with disabilities have psychiatric disabilities, mental
illness kind of disabilities.

So only a small portion of women with physical and sensory
disabilities are being served by these programs.

The program staff were unlikely to have disability awareness
training which would enhance their ability to deliver the
appropriate services.

And even fewer programs had hired a staff member who was
assigned specifically to provide services to women with
disabilities.

Then the programs that did offer services to women with
disabilities were most likely to offer counseling and referral to
accessible shelters or safe houses, but not any of the other
services that would be helpful.

And women with very severe physical impairments could stay at
very few battered women's programs.

Only a handful of them offered essential assistance with the
personal care such as bathing and toileting that they would need
to survive outside their homes.

Law enforcement personnel are also unlikely to be conscious of
the needs of battered women with disabilities since few
programs educate law enforcement personnel about
disability-related abuse.

And also although most of the programs surveyed claimed to
have accessible facilities, it appears that few women with
disabilities are actually user the services and this could be
because they are not aware that the services exist for them or
they perceive that the services will not meet their needs.
And it could be that some women had called a program in the
past, perhaps before they were accessible, and found that they
could not meet their needs.

And one solution is better collaboration among the social
servicing, the various social service agencies.

So having collaboration between battered women's programs
and local centers for independent living can be very helpful and
mutually satisfying in first of all helping those domestic
violence programs under need the needs of women with
disabilities and at the same time helping the centers for
independent living understand the interpersonal violence issues
and there are some successful models for such collaboration that
exist now and one of those is in Chicago between the rehab I
will institution of Chicago and Access Living, and a second one
is in Ohio between the Loop Center for Independent Living and
Genesis House.

So I think we'd like to see more of those collaborations going
on.

RACHEL:  you know, Carol, that gets to some of the questions
that have been coming in.  And let me know if you're ready to
do this.  So people are asking about giving all this data that
you've collected, can you recommend some best practices and
some people are interested in best practices for these programs
that are serving women who are abused and some are also
asking about what should SILC's do?  And I know you also have
developed a number of materials as a result of the research
project.

CAROL:  okay, I think that talking a little bit about those
materials and what they contain would maybe address some of
those questions.
And we have developed an abuse intervention kit that is a
combination of a poster and some safety planning cards that are
designed just specifically for women with disabilities who are
being abused.

And then we have a how to publication for centers for
independent living and this is about working with abuse
survivors.

And this publication came out of another study and also a model
program that was set up whereas a result of a survey of the
independent living centers, four were chosen to receive some
funding to either expand their programs or to do some specific
things to address abuse of women with disabilities.

And so some of the things that were done by those programs
included the safety planning cards, the book for the centers for
independent living, and some of them chose to do things like
outreach, some other things that are in this abuse kit, there is a
directory of the abuse programs that were surveyed and it
describes the programs and the direct services that they have for
women with disabilities or categories of services and also the
outreach services.

Now, it is limited to I think about 1 75 or so programs that said
it was okay for us to publish them in the directory so that both
centers for independent living and battered women's programs
could call them up to find out what they are doing and how they
are able to serve the women with disabilities.

That's also part of the kit, or the specific books can also be
obtained separately.

Then there is also a specific guide for the domestic abuse
programs that includes a disability screening instrument and
different kinds of tips for working with individuals with
disabilities and for making the programs and service es
accessible.
That would include some ada resources.

RACHEL:  so, that's good, too.  Can you tell people how they
can get ahold of these resources?

CAROL:  yes, they can call us here at C.R.O.W.D. and order
them from Graciela Wright.  She takes the orders here for that.

RACHEL:  okay, and --

CAROL:  and our C.R.O.W.D. number is (713)-960-0505.
Or e-mail Graciela, she's gcw@bcm.tmc.edu.

RACHEL:  okay, great.  If anybody missed that or has
questions, you can always e-mail us at webcast@ilru.org which
is where you guys are sending your questions in.
CAROL:  and one other thing that we have is an abuse
screening tool that adds questions specifically about
disability-related abuse.

It's only four questions.

So it's very quick for, say, a center for independent living has
some consumers coming in and they can ask those questions to
screen for abuse up front and then refer them to programs or
whatever they need.

And the one SILC that used that screening tool, within a one
year period of the grant, they screened I think 84 women and
more than half of them had reported either past or present abuse
and were in need of services.

Because there was some question about the ability of
rehabilitation service providers and centers for independent
living to be able to recognize abuse when it occurs.

And often in the SILC's, that depends on having a peer
counselor there or somebody there who maybe had abuse
experience herself or worked in that area and she picked up on it
in the phone calls.

So having a screening tool like that would be away of screening
up front and then trying to help them.

Because we found also one of our investigators, Mary Ellen
Young did a survey of the rehabilitation service providers and
found that even though they had knowledge that abuse could
certainly interfere with placement of women with disabilities in
jobs and other kinds of programs, they weren't finding much
abuse and it was because they weren't asking any questions
about it.

Sometimes they found out about it just because the woman
mentioned it, but they didn't ask and if you don't ask, you don't
find out.

RACHEL:  we actually have a question that relates really
directly to that. Can I jump in with that?

CAROL:  sure

RACHEL:  this comes from somebody who works with an
agency for people receiving vocational rehabilitation services,
and the question says in the past few months I've received a
number of phone calls from women who are experiencing
domestic violence and trying to access VR services.

They're being denied because allegedly they are not ready for
employment because of the domestic violence situations.
Can you please address this issue and provide resources for
organizations that might offer some technical assistance?
This comes from somebody in Michigan.

CAROL:  the catch-22 there of course is that if the woman with
disabilities don't get employed, they have even a lesser chance
of escaping from the abuse.

And one of the things that makes women with disabilities
vulnerable to abuse, is economic stability.

So I guess one answer could be to call whatever local women's
programs or domestic violence programs that are available in
the area, and you could get a list of those programs by calling
the national domestic violence hotline and their number is
1-800-799-7233.

They have a database so they would be able to direct you to a
local program that maybe could collaborate and get some
services for the women.

And Michigan, because it's in the midwest, there seems to be
pretty good and better than other areas collaboration and
networking among the various social service agencies, and we
have found that in that area the women were more likely to be
able to get personal assistance services, personal care from an
agency in going into a shelter than they were in other areas.
So hopefully in Michigan, you would be able to find those
service agencies to collaborate with and get them some help.

RACHEL:  okay and along the lines of thinking about Michigan
versus others parts of the country, there is a question about
which region of the country has more instances of abuse to
women with disabilities?

CAROL:  I don't know if I can make a specific region except to
say that areas that are more economically depressed tend to have
more abuse.

I'm remembering attending a talk one time about specifically a
small town in Pennsylvania that had had a factory closure and a
lot of the people depended on that and as a result of that closure
and people having financial problems, the rate of domestic
violence went way up.

So economic depression I think is one sign.  Though I don't
know if you could pick a state or a region.

RACHEL:  okay, there is also a question kind of along that line
that just came in about rural versus urban, and kind of a three
part question.  So let me throw it out to you.

What percent of the centers that were surveyed were rural and
did you find any differences between the rural and the urban
centers in the services that they provide, and then finally also if
you could talk about what percentage of the individuals in the
national survey came from rural areas?

CAROL:  okay, in the national survey, we didn't look at whether
they were rural or urban because in doing the analysis of those
data, we did not keep their identifying information or the
addresses that the women came from, and it wasn't a study of
what region they were from so we didn't know that.

Now, in the study of the independent living centers that was
done by Nancy Swedlund and Peg Nosek, so I'm not sure -- I'm
looking here if they compared rural versus urban.
The end may have been too small to do a study like that.
Though I do know that this choosing the independent living
centers that were going to get funding to expand their programs,
they were able to give the funding to two rural centers and two
urban centers.

So there were enough from each of that category that were
delivering some level of service to abused women that they had
a good program idea for that.

So I guess I didn't really answer the question.  It may be one that
I need to look into more. 

RACHEL:  that's one we can put up on the message board then
and whenever you have a chance to go back and look through
the data, then maybe you can post some more specifics up there.

Okay, can I throw a couple more questions to you?

CAROL:  sure, I hope I can answer them.

RACHEL:  here is a short one.  Did the victims service agencies
that you surveyed have any difficulties in defining disability?

CAROL:  well, in the survey, we defined it for them. So I'm
thinking of the survey -- because we gave examples of what we
would consider physical disability, for instance -- of course we
can't be certain of how they then interpreted that at their
program because one draw back that we found is that many of
the programs didn't seem to recognize the more invisible types
of disabilities so they might not know, for instance, that a
woman coming in has ms that is maybe not very visible because
they didn't ask about it and there was one of the problems with
their data, their recordkeeping is that many of them didn't ask
any questions about disabilities or keep any data on that or even
about cultural background or anything like that.

So for the ones that did, you know, they would have been ones
that maybe asked that on the intake questionnaire.

So it's a good question about how the individual programs were
defining abuse.  -- I mean defining disability, and we tried to
give them a little bit of a description there in the letter that went
with the survey.

RACHEL:  okay, this question shifts gears a little bit and it
comes from south eastern Massachusetts and the writer says that
this issue is large in our area of south eastern Massachusetts.
It says where domestic violence shelters are funded in part or
greatly by HUD and/or community development block grant
monies, i.e. federal funds, should there not be a bigger stick at
the federal level to pursue architectural accessibility
improvements?

CAROL:  well, I'm not sure what is actually available out there
by the feds, but I do know that when the programs reported on
where they were getting their funding from, that they got most
of their funding and the highest levels of funding from state
grants and then secondarily from state grants.

So those were two funding sources and I don't know how one
would go about getting that funding, and that might be
something that they would want to seek out with some of the
other battered women's programs that are getting funding from
that source, getting federal funding.

RACHEL:  you can call your local DBTAC which is your ADA
resource center, and the number for that is 800-949-4232, and
they can explain to you how the Americans with Disabilities
Act might apply, especially to these programs if they are state
run programs.

And sometimes also if they're getting federal grants, there might
be a law that deals with accessibility that applies to the program.
So just other ideas for understanding where accessibility might
be necessary and some help in advocating for that.

Okay, I know we're getting near the end of our time here.
I think that I've asked most of the questions or kind of joined
them together where they were similar.

So let me turn it back to you to see if there are other points you
want to make and then I think that Laurel Richards also has
some additional questions she probably would like to ask as
well.


CAROL:  okay, I did want to mention that since doing the
NIDRR funded studies, that we did get an additional grant from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that focused on
developing a safety planning workshop for women with
disabilities, and this workshop is being developed here by
Heather Taylor and Rosemary Hughes and Beth Smith, and the
workshop is also being videotaped and it will be distributed.
So it's being videotaped right now and tested on some groups of
women with disabilities and should be available during the
summer, and this instructional program addresses the nature of
abuse and cycle of violence and barriers to leaving abusive
relationships and then has specific guidelines on developing and
implementing a safety plan.

This is something that will be coming up in the future.
So actually all of those grants have expired and we don't have
anymore money as usually happens, but that is one of the last
projects that was being done on the second grant that we got, the
CDC grant.

And also I just wanted to mention that in the program that was
helping to develop abuse intervention programs with the centers
for independent living, that the projects had very successful,
very positive results, and resulted in much stronger
collaboration with the domestic violence programs and other
service providers, and also increased the identification of
consumers that have been experiencing abuse so that their
violence problems could be addressed, and so it also resulted
ultimately in increased service delivery to the consumers.


RACHEL:  Carol, is there a way, if people want to be able to
read more about your study, is there a place -- can they look at
your website to find that?

CAROL:  yes, our website has different topic areas, so you can
click on abuse and there are some fact sheets there, though right
now we're in the process of renovating our website and having
even newer and better stuff up there.

Right now the old one is there that has some pretty good stuff.
And we do have a number of papers that either have been
published or are in the process of being published.

So that might be something that could be part of the reference
list that was going to be posted.

RACHEL:  okay, great.  I know that on your materials that are
posted up on the website where people went to access this
Webcast, that the materials that you've developed related to this
study are mentioned in that material, and --

CAROL:  and actually the handout was meant to give an
overview of all the projects and it's actually the text from the
abuse intervention kit includes a really nice shiny fold out that
has the major findings from all of the studies, and that's part of
that kit, and then also you can get that fold out separately.

RACHEL:  is there a cost for getting the kit?

CAROL:  the kit is ten dollars, and then people can also buy
some of the separate books.  Looks like the individual books are
ten dollars, too.  So you may look into the whole kit.


 RACHEL:  okay, and again, they can call 800-44-C.R.O.W.D.

CAROL:  yes, if someone is long distance, they can call on the
800 number and then also we have our local number of
(713)-960-0505 if you're in Texas.

RACHEL:  okay, great.  And can you slowly tell people your
website also?

CAROL:  okay, let's see, my -- the website.

RACHEL:  I have it here if you want me to tell. It's
www.bcm.tmb.edu and there flash and the word C.R.O.W.D.

CAROL:  that's the general website.

RACHEL:  people can access it through there.  And I just want
-- I know we're just about done with time.

A couple of questions are coming in so I just want to let people
know that any questions we haven't gotten to today, we will be
posting them on the message board, and after today, if you go
back and you look for how you accessed -- if you look on the
ILRU website for how you accessed the Webcast, there will be a
link there telling you where the message board is, and so that
will be up tomorrow or you can just look for our message
boards and it will be in the Health and Wellness Message
Board.

And so these final questions will be up there with answers
coming soon from Carol as well as these additional resources
that we've been promising along the way.

With that let me turn it over to Laurel.

LAUREL:  thank you, Rachel.  Carol, do you have some
concluding remarks you'd like to make?

CAROL:  no.

LAUREL:  then let me -- I just have a couple of real quick
things I want to ask you.

When you did the study, did you click any kind of demographic
information with regard to, say, employed, not employed or
income levels or ethnicity that had any -- that indicated any --
oh, I guess incidents of abuse in one category or another?

CAROL:  well, of course the survey of programs just went to
programs so we didn't have any information on the actual
women that were using the services, but in the national study we
did collect different kinds of demographic data and -- I'm just
trying to think if we actually looked at those points.

LAUREL:  well, we may post that as a question up on the
website.

CAROL:  okay.  But if the analysis hasn't been done, I don't
know if anybody  

LAUREL:  well, there is an opportunity for additional funding.
Based on the research that you've done and on all the readings,
if you had one immediate piece of advice for a woman who was
faced with an abusive situation, what typically is that?

CAROL:  well, I would say that she should call either the
National Domestic Violence Hotline or call the hotline for her
local program, and just see if locally there are services that are
accessible to her because someone may have called the program
in the past and maybe they weren't accessible, but I think they're
becoming more accessible, and then secondly, find out if there
is a local center for independent living because if they have not
been collaborating, that may be away of getting the
collaboration going.

LAUREL: Carol, to obtain that number, if they call the 800 --
the national hotline, can they receive the information regarding
their community?  Or is there much more direct --

CAROL:  yes.  As a matter of fact, they will check and see if
there is available shelter, if there is a bed available at the shelter
and if not, they will then call another one that's nearby and
sometimes that means going out of state.

Sometimes a state that's not very far away, say less than an hour
or so, would have a bed available or would have a way of
putting her up temporarily at least in a hotel.

LAUREL: that's the immediate step to contact the hotline?


CAROL:  right.

LAUREL:  then regarding a center, if I was running a center and
I heard this presentation, and we were collaborating, and based
on the research findings, what would you suggest a center do
immediately, say, for instance, starting tomorrow?

What do we do immediately to provide assistance to these
folks?

CAROL:  well, I think that the center should find out what
kinds of domestic violence programs are available in their area?

LAUREL:  maintain and I. and r.

CAROL:  yeah and call them up and find out in what way their
programs are accessible, and also get a copy of our Abuse
Intervention Kit which has a directory of many of the programs
out there and what services they do have and also of course it
has the book telling them how to better identify and serve
women who are using their center who may be in an abusive
situation and has not told anybody about it.

LAUREL: that's excellent.  Carol, this has been a terrific
presentation.  It's distressing as it can be, but just -- just real
useful, and the research you all have been doing in this area is
remarkable, and I suspect trail blazing.

CAROL:  and I think really that the challenge now is to find out
what works, what can be done to better help women with
disabilities who are being abused resolve the abuse situations.
Get out of it, find a way to -- and also find a way to not get
stuck in a situation like that again.

Of course some of the reforms are going to require some
systemwide type of reforms, some of the stereotypes that are out
there in our society about women with disabilities, and some of
the stereotypes that potential new dating partners might have
about women with disabilities, and really trying to find away of
reducing their vulnerability of getting into relationships with the
over controlling types that often perpetrate abuse.

LAUREL: well, good luck on --

CAROL:  and some other ways that they can get into
relationships that are not related or not abusive.

LAUREL: we hope you have good luck in getting another grant
soon where you can study the -- you know like a demonstration
model of, you know, identifying approaches that seem to be
successful and seeing about rep out ability. And thank you very
much for giving us the time today.

CAROL:  well, you're very welcome. And looks like there is a
lot of work to be done out there.

LAUREL: yes, and boy talk about worthwhile. So thank you.
And I'd like to just take a minute in closing to again to
acknowledge the support of NIDRR, that is the National
Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research for funding
not just some of the programs that Carol and her colleagues at
C.R.O.W.D. have been doing, but also this kind of program
whereby research findings can be presented to those of us in the
field who are not researchers, but genuinely have a stake in the
findings and in the outcomes.

And I want to also -- just note that we have with the RIIL
Project, the RIIL Project a database of information, articles, et
cetera, that have been written on a wide variety of
disability-related topics and the database has abstracts or
synopsis of these publications and then the reference for the
entire publication, so what I invite you, if you'd like more
information on this subject, to go to the address is
www.getriil.org, and run a search on abusiveness or violence
against women and to obtain some additional resources in this
area.

I also want to remind you that this presentation, along with all
presentations via the Webcast will be archived and the resource
materials will be all posted on that archive as well so that it can
be accessed by others who may be interested.

We have a presentation coming up next, I believe it's by -- it
will address issues related to the Supreme Court decision I
believe regarding the Toyota related decision.

We will soon be having the annual calendar of Webcasts
available and distributed to you, and we look forward to have
you join us for some more.
Right now I just want to thank you for staying with us during
today's presentation.

I want to acknowledge our colleagues who worked so hard on
this project and they include -- on the technical end, Rob
Dickehuth who makes this broadcast work.

We also have Marie Bryant who is our realtime captioner, and
then on the RIIL side, the University of Kansas fellows include
Jim Buddy, Glenn White, Cindy Higgins, and here in Houston
on the ILRU program, we have Marj Gordon, Sharon Finney,
Rachel Kosoy and Dawn Heinsohn, and invite you to look for a
calendar that will come out very quickly.

Meanwhile, we'll look forward to you on our Webcast next
time.
Thank you and good afternoon.