End the Silence: A Survey of Abuse against Men with Disabilities

A growing body of research suggests violence and abuse are serious problems for women with disabilities, who are at greater risk than non-disabled women (Brown, Stein, & Turk, 1995; Curry, Powers & Oschwald, 2003; Hassouneh-Phillips & Curry, 2002; Hughes, Swedlund, Petersen & Nosek, 2001; Powers et al., 2002; Saxton et al., 2001; Sobsey & Doe, 1991; Turk & Brown; 1993; Young, Nosek, Howland, & Chanpong, 1997). The social context of disability, including factors such as poverty and social isolation, invalidation of the victim with disability, environmental inaccessibility, reliance on support from others, and perpetrator's perceptions of reduced risk of discovery, has a powerful impact on individuals' increased risk for violence (Andrews & Veronen, 1993; Hassouneh-Phillips, McNeff, Powers, & Curry, 2005). Given that abuse against women with disabilities is such a serious problem, why has so little attention been given to investigating abuse against men with disabilities? This omission may be the result of a combination of factors. Fear of recrimination, dependence on the abuser and concerns about losing independence make both female and male victims reluctant to report abuse. Further barriers to abuse reporting by men with disabilities include predominant societal assumptions that men should be more capable than women of protecting themselves (Furey, 1994; Saxton, et al., 2006). Unlike the disabled women's abuse movement, there is not an organized effort among men with disabilities to bring attention to this problem. Finally, the lack of reporting or support services targeted to men may contribute to the minimization of the problem (Brown et al., 1995). Throughout our investigation of abuse against women with disabilities (e.g., Curry, et al., 2003; Powers, et al., 2002; Saxton, et al., 2001), we were often asked why we were not studying abuse perpetrated against men with disabilities. Women and men with disabilities, as well as professionals, shared many stories of men being victimized by intimate partners and people who provided formal or informal personal assistance, suggesting violence is a serious issue for men with disabilities. The study described in this paper is an effort to begin addressing this void. Background Abuse of Men in General Understanding of the problem of abuse against men with disabilities can be derived from current knowledge related to the abuse of men without disabilities as well as findings on the abuse experiences of men with disabilities. The only population-based survey of abuse of men comes from the National Violence Against Women Survey (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). A comparison group of 8,005 men completed a telephone survey about their experiences of rape, physical assault and stalking: 66% of the men reported physical assault as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of perpetrator; 7.3% reported lifetime physical intimate partner violence and 3% reported an attempted or completed rape as a child or adult. Within the past year, 3% of the men reported a physical and/or sexual assault by an intimate partner. Much of the research on violence against men has been conducted with subgroups, such as elder, gay and bi-sexual men. For example, The National Elder Abuse Incidence Study (Tatara, Kuzmeskus-Blumerman & Duckhorn, 1998), an analysis of adult protective services and other aging services records, documented that older women living in the community are significantly more likely than older men to experience all forms of abuse by others, controlling for the higher proportion of female elders in the population. Abuse was more likely to occur to elders who had difficulty caring for themselves. Interpretation of these findings is complicated by the possibility that older men with disabilities and those in their lives may have been reluctant to report their abuse. A second example comes from Ratner and his colleagues (2003) who administered questionnaires to 358 males between the ages of 19-35 that identified themselves as either gay or bisexual. …