Sexual citizenship and lifetime sexual assault: exploring the risks for sexual minority women with a physical limitation

Abstract

This exploratory study examines how the intersection of physical impairment, sexual minority status, and gender affects lifetime sexual assault. Persons with a physical disability, sexual minorities, and women all experience high rates of sexual assault. However, the intersection of these identities is rarely studied. The author draws on the concept of sexual citizenship to contextualize how vulnerability affects populations with multiple marginalized identities. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health Wave 4, analysis showed that both physical limitation and sexual minority status were positively correlated with higher risks of lifetime sexual assault in Binary Logistic Regression. Predicted probabilities derived from analysis indicated that sexual minority status had a larger effect than physical limitation on lifetime sexual assault, but sexual minority women with a physical limitation had the highest risk of having experienced sexual assault.

Acknowledgments

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/Add Health).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by grant [P01-HD31921] from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

Notes on contributors

Paul D. C. Bones

Paul D. C. Bones, Ph.D. (the University of Oklahoma, 2015) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, TX. His primary areas of interest are disabilities, ecological predictors of crime, hate crimes, and rural drug abuse. His recent publications have appeared in Deviant Behavior, The Journal of Quantitative Criminology, The Social Science Journal, and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He has also published a chapter on Race and Hate in Hate Crimes (Carolina Academic Press).