People with disabilities are more likely to be victims of violent crime

From Joe Shapiro at NPR:

People with disabilities are one-and-a-half times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than are people without disabilities, says the first national study to compare crime rates.

The results, just released by the Justice Department, are disturbing. But they come as no surprise to those who work with people with disabilities. For a long time, they've known about this particular crime problem, at least anecdotally.

Sometimes cases get national attention, like the abuse revealed earlier this year at a state institution in Texas where workers trained and hired to care for the vulnerable adults there goaded them into fighting each other for the entertainment of the staff. Two of the staffers in the "human cock fight" case were recently found guilty and given prison sentences.

But what people in the field had long known, and what the Justice Department report confirms, is that crime is a daily fact of life for many people with disabilities and most of it never gets public attention.

The study, by Michael Rand and Erika Harrell of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, found that, in 2007, people with disabilities were victims of 716,000 violent crimes and 2.3 million property crimes.

Disabled women were the most at risk: They were victims at rates almost twice that for other females. And unlike other women, those with disabilities were far more likely to be victimized by people they weren't close to. The report found that 16 percent of violent crimes against females with a disability were committed by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend. Among women without disabilities, it was 27 percent.

The International Coalition on Abuse and Disability, run by University of Alberta professor Dick Sobsey, tracks individual reports of crimes against people with disabilities in the U.S., Canada and other places around the world. And the group's Web site gives an eye-opening, and distressing snapshot of just how often this crime happens and how it's often cruel and deliberate.

Among the posts over just the last couple weeks:

--A Canadian woman who was the caregiver for a 21-year-old woman with an intellectual disability accepted payment from a 73-year-old man for allowing him to have sex with the disabled woman. The abuse became known when the disabled woman became pregnant and had the child. The caregiver was convicted.

--In Louisiana, parents of a 14-year-old boy with autism and mental retardation objected to the light sentence--probation but no jail time--given a worker at a state institution who threw bleach in their son's face.

--A caregiver in Tampa was charged with second-degree murder and abuse of an elderly disabled woman in her care.

Update: We just heard from Dick Sobsey by email. He told us:

"I think this is a very good report. My only concern is that if people don't look carefully enough at the numbers, they will underestimate the magnitude of this finding. In other words, a 50% increase in victimization is bad, but it doesn't sound too alarming. The fact that rape and sexual assault were 2.7 times as high sounds more alarming. Also, some of the effect is obscured by including many different disabilities. Clearly the greatest risk was to people with cognitive disabilities and multiple disabilities."