Project Description:
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a critical issue for women and girls with disabilities globally, as they experience high rates of multiple forms of victimization over their life time, often exacerbated due to social exclusion and isolation. The forms of violence that they experience are often invisible or normalized, and go unrecognized in legal frameworks addressing violence. Systemic ableism and other forms of oppression continue to create barriers to accessing supports and services for survivors with disabilities, especially those living at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression – patriarchy, trans/homophobia, racism and ableism. However, experiences of women and girls with disabilities, including diverse women with disabilities, are mostly ignored from antiviolence efforts and policy strategies and programming. For this reason, women and girls with disabilities who are survivors of GBV play a critical role in advocating for systemic strategies that can effectively prevent and address GBV in their local contexts, influence local networks and transform national policy responses. This advocacy can be nurtured through various models of peer support and networking, where women with disabilities can connect to each other to discuss common obstacles and identify shared strategies to meet their needs and that of their communities. With peer support, participants' knowledge and lived experience are not only validated but also centered as integral and valued components of the process in building just transformational impact. In this project, we engage with diverse disability civil society organizations working in the transnational sphere to understand the dynamics of violence against women and girls with disabilities in their local contexts and efforts to prevent and address this violence. Through qualitative methods, we ask Gendered-Disability Based Violence (GDBV) advocates what they understand as the root causes of violence against women and girls with disabilities, including diverse women and girls, to be in their contexts, key challenges for survivors with disabilities, and their antiviolence strategies to transform broader social, cultural and political ablest norms that maintain structures GDBV. Specifically, we map the models that exist of GDBV peer support and advocacy across diverse locales and critical impacts – this could be at the individual transformative level, familial, community or national level via policy change. Using a scalar approach, we trace how local, regional, and transnational discourses, information, and resources inform mobilisation related to GDBV for women and girls with disability at different scales and in different contexts – that is, thinking through the ‘boomerang effects and transformational impacts’ of their actions. This chapter contributes to theorising antiviolence mobilisation from Gendered-Disability Justice in a heteronormative, ableist, patriarchal world and engages with transnational dynamics of violence prevention and advocacy efforts from the perspectives diverse disability civil society organizations who are engaging in transnational advocacy to drive local change within their national and local policies from policing through to everyday respect and strategies of support. |
RA Position Duties and Resposibilities
(Include Interaction with Research Team Members, Supervisory Arrangements):
Ethics Documents to Prepare 1. Protocol: Justification, research questions, methods, risk mitigation, consent process 2. Support documents a. Recruitment script b. Information letter and consent form c. Interview guide (including demographic information) d. Confidentiality agreement for interpreters |