One Out of Three Women with Disabilities Experience Sexual Offenses

It was reported that 1 out of 3 women with disabilities had experienced sexual offenses in their workplaces and institutions for disabled. Specialists claim that “special measures to deal with these problems are necessary because these women are taken advantage of for their inability to resist.”

This study was executed from May to November 2011 by a group of women with disabilities, and the result of the study was reported on the 21^st of November at the Japan Social Welfare Conference held in Nishinomiya City in Hyogo Prefecture.

Out of the 87 women who responded to the survey, 31 (36%) said they had experienced physical sexual offenses.

One of the women with visual disability said that her boss at work “touched her breast and lower abdomen” while a woman with a physical disability wrote that “a care worker was feeling her breasts during bathing, and when she told her mother and she didn’t believe her, it made her very sad and painful.”

The group that conducted the research analyzed that such incidents are occurring because the women with physical disability cannot strongly resist due to their physical disability and those with learning disabilities face the problem of not being taken seriously for what they say.

Professor Keiko Kanou at Kansai University who conducted the research is making an appeal to “establish counseling services and create measures to deal with these problems now that the research confirms the suffering of disabled women who are target of sexual offenses.”

Translated by M. Doioka from 10/22 dated NHK News submitted to WAN by Midori