Abuse and Hate Crimes

Abuse and hate crimes are serious problems in the lives of many disabled people. Abuse can take many forms, including: physical, sexual, emotional, medical, and financial abuse, as well as maltreatment and neglect. Physical abuse can include hitting, slapping, and pushing; sexual abuse can involve unwanted touching, sexual contact, or rape; emotional abuse can including bullying, threatening, and intimidating a person; medical abuse can involve overmedicating a person or denying them appropriate medications; financial abuse involves wrongfully using someone else's finances; and neglect may range from failure to provide basic necessities to putting someone at risk through unsafe practices.

Many studies show that disabled people are far more likely than nondisabled people of the same age and gender to be the victims of abuse. However, the studies that have been carried out on disability abuse have often been conducted on small populations of people with specific impairments. For instance, Sullivan, Vernon, and Scanlan (1987) and Elder (1993) reported sexual abuse among Deaf youths at rates higher than 50 percent. Jacobson and Richardson (1987) found that 81 percent of psychiatric inpatients with multiple disabilities had been abused. Pava (1994) studied the vulnerability of vision-impaired people to sexual and physical assault, concluding that one in three of her sample had been targets of either attempted or actual assault. In an Australian study, Wilson and Brewer (1992) reported that people with an intellectual disability were 10 times more likely to experience violent crime victimization than other adults. McCabe, Cummins, and Reid (cited in Chenoweth 1999) found that 20.5 percent of people with an intellectual disability had been raped, compared to 5.7 percent of a control group of nondisabled people.

There is an abundance of literature suggesting that disabled children experience far higher rates of abuse than nondisabled children. Ammerman and Baladerian (1993) concluded that the rate of maltreatment of disabled children is 4 to 10 times higher than nondisabled children. Sullivan and Knutson (1998) examined nearly 40,000 hospital records and reported rates of maltreatment among children with disabilities that were 1.7 times higher than nondisabled children. A later review of school records by Sullivan and Knutson (2000) indicated maltreatment among 31 percent of disabled children compared to 11 percent of the overall school population. A number of studies suggest that abuse is often carried out by people who are known to the victim—family, friends, other disabled people, and even paid caregivers. However, many cases of abuse are not reported to authorities because of the victim's shame, fear of retaliation, fear of not being believed, or reliance on third parties to report the abuse.

Sobsey, Randall, and Parrila (1997) suggested that there may be different patterns of abuse for disabled boys than disabled girls. They reviewed the case files of 1,834 children and found that 62 percent of girls with disabilities and 38 percent of boys with disabilities experienced sexual abuse, 59 percent of girls with disabilities and 41 percent of boys with disabilities had been emotionally abused, and 56 percent of disabled boys were neglected, compared to 44 percent of disabled girls.

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