Disability, gender and violence over the life course: global perspectives and human rights approaches

This edited collection explores the intersections of gender, disablement and violence, and does so with attention to the ways in which violence is experienced globally and across the life course. Disabled women’s experiences remain largely hidden in mainstream violence literatures and this collection seeks to address that invisibility. The aim of the collection is threefold: to expose the public and structural dimensions of violence experienced by disabled women and girls, to explore intersectionality and gender-based violence by highlighting the comingling of ethnicity, gender, age, impairment and indigeneity (for example), and to provide a global focus. In doing so, Disability, Gender and Violence Over the Life Course offers an introductory and broad route in to this area and, at the same time, reinforces that there is a crucial necessity for further theorising, and further research and engagement with mainstream criminological and intersectional theories that have previously disregarded disability and have been neglected by disability studies.

The book is comprised of three thematic parts – ‘Childhood’, ‘Adulthood’ and ‘Older Life’ – with each substantive section including individual chapters. The first part, ‘Childhood’, focuses on disabled children and issues of child abuse, forced marriage and disabled mothering understood through the lens of Indigenous mothers and children. The collection opens with Soldatic solidifying the global focus of the book more generally, which, I feel, is the most concretely important aspect of the volume. This section on childhood brings to the fore the relative invisibility of disabled children and their increased likelihood of being subject to coercion, childhood abuse and violence. Although not explicitly elaborated, Jones and Taylor’s contribution problematises the intersections of violence with particular impairments – also reflected in Thompson and Wadwa’s discussion of the forced marriages enacted upon girls and women with learning disabilities in black minority ethnic communities in Scotland. Critically, the visibility of disabled children is explored, and the authors argue for recognition of disabled children as credible narrators of their own experiences as a route to establishing effective and meaningful systems of addressing the abuse of disabled children.

These global experiences of disablement, gender and violence carry through to the section on ‘Adulthood’, where Haraldsdottir’s Icelandic women, Amin’s Malaysian disabled women, and Lorenzo and Kathard’s South African women offer rich empirical narratives of the complex intersections of gender and disability. These contributions draw out the myriad relationships between global human rights structures and pervasive and globalised systems of violence and disrespect of disabled women. Here Amin, in particular, draws on the role that the post-colonial context (in the Malaysian context) plays in the lives of disabled women and their experiences of and access to health care. She situates these within broader ideas of ‘gendered norms’ and, albeit not explicitly, brings into question the public/private divide in structuring the marginalisation of disabled women and their conceptualisation as ‘incomplete’. In this section of the volume (and across the volume more generally), vulnerability is problematised and unpacked in relation to women’s experiences of disablement and violence. Llewellyn’s intimate autoethnographic contribution narrates the ways that violence and coercion play out across the life course, often being imposed on disabled children’s lives but carried on in and through adulthood. Here, gender roles are, again, challenged where women as perpetrators of violence and abuse are examined through the ideas of invisibility that cut across the volume.

The final section focuses on ‘Older Life’ and the violence(s) and abuse that intersect with ageing. Although the smallest section of the volume, it raises perhaps the most invisible experiences of violence. Both Penhale and Parent, in their chapters, examine how ageing intersects with abuse and raises questions about age as a determinant of risk in itself. What emanates from these contributions are that, whilst older disabled people are often subject to the most nefarious forms of invisibility and neglect, violence is experienced through the life course as a continuation – including older life. It is this continuation that the collection, overall, identifies. Vulnerability, disability and dependency are raised here as being created through structures that disadvantage older disabled people, and older disabled women more specifically. The volume then, inadvertently, calls into question the contemporary proclivity towards narrowing and extrapolating childhood experiences of violence, and instead points to systems of violence that go on to impact girls and women throughout their lives in intersecting and connected ways.

Disability, Gender and Violence Over the Life Course is ambitious and looks to bring together micro narratives and experiences with macro-structural, globalised systems of violence that shape the lives of disabled women and girls. Emphasising violence over the life course is the strength of the volume, and for this reason, along with its broad focus on human rights structures, makes it of value to survivors, practitioners, activists, self-advocates, students and scholars who are engaged in discourses of globalised violence, disability and gender – and those who are not. While empirically rich and descriptive, the collection does not explicitly locate these multiple inequalities and oppressions in intersectionality theory and scholarship but does point to the neglect of disabled girlhoods and womanhoods in these discursive narratives. Similarly, a focus on disabled women’s (a)sexualities and LGBTQ + voices are largely missing (perhaps reflecting a further intersecting invisibility) but points to an opportunity to move us past assumptions of disabled women as lacking sexuality (as opposed to asexual). What the volume does do is bring attention to the invisibility of disabled women and girls in mainstream violence scholarship, and one result of this is to challenge disability scholars, gender scholars and violence scholars alike to pay more attention and engage in further research and dialogues with one another. In sum, this volume makes space for further opportunities to address pervasive inequalities in the lives of disabled women and girls.

Phillippa Wiseman
Scottish Learning Disabilities Observatory, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
[email protected]