Family Violence towards women & children with disabilities often more dangerous and more sustained. Women and children with disabilities can experience family violence from multiple perpetrators in multiple settings including home & community, or an institutional environment, and violence may occur multiple times across the course of their lifetime.

For Specialist Family Violence and Sexual Assault Practitioners, there is a need for nuanced Risk Aassessment and Safety Planning, also taking into account perpetrator patterns of behaviour and disability-based violence.

Persons using violence towards people with disability may target perceived ‘vulnerabilities’ or use ableist beliefs to weaponise the structural inequality, barriers or discrimination experienced by the victim survivor. They may use these tactics as a way to methodically gain power and control over the victim survivor and avoid taking responsibility for their use of violence.

Stereotypes about disability can form the basis of narratives provided by perpetrators to minimise or justify their family violence behaviour.

These ableist stereotypes and beliefs can also affect professionals’ responses to people with disability, through colluding with the narrative of the person using violence.

Common presentations of family violence behaviours and narratives among people who use violence against people with disability include:

– Exploiting community attitudes of carers being ‘virtuous’ and ‘helpful’ as a tactic of system collusion, undermining the victim survivor’s involvement in the service.
– They may present to the service in a way that the professional believes the victim survivor is ‘lucky’ to have them in their life. Similarly, the perpetrator may blame ‘carer stress’ as a way to avoid taking responsibility for their actions or behaviours, or minimise their violence or its
impacts on the victim survivor.
– Undermining or pathologising a person’s cognitive capacity, for example, through statements such as, ‘They’re crazy, you need to speak with me because they don’t understand things.’
– Weaponising community assumptions about people with disabilities as parents and threatening to institutionalise the victim survivor, and/or to have the victim survivors’ children removed.

People who use violence who are carers may also exploit confusion around navigating support systems such as the NDIS or Centrelink to maintain control as ‘gatekeepers’ to service access. For example, the person using violence might:

– Be the NDIS nominee and exploit this to make decisions for the person with disability, isolating them from support and misuse their finances.
– Present to services with the victim survivor and answer on their behalf and not allow the victim survivor to respond.
– Constantly express dissatisfaction with services or carers who are sent to provide in-home care. This constant dismissal of services could be another tactic of isolating the victim survivor and maintaining control.

Source: MARAM practice guides – working with adult people using violence

This section includes foundational resources that outline the experience of family violence towards women with disability.

Other sections that Family Violence and Sexual Assault Practitioners should refer to include:
▪ Applying a Disability Lens to MARAM
▪ Reducing Barriers of Access for People with Disability