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Many within the disability community often face disproportionate risks when faced with violence and exploitation. As a result, Australia’s Disability Strategy is exploring upgrades to the justice systems that are meant to protect and uphold human rights.
Australia's Disability Strategy is a national roadmap, guiding governments, businesses, and communities to work together to build a more inclusive Australia, ensuring people with disability can fully participate in Australian life with equal rights, real opportunity, and respect.
Australia’s Disability Strategy aims to improve safety and justice by strengthening protections against violence discrimination and ensuring equitable access to legal processes, prioritising support for people with disability who are victims, witnesses, or defendants, and highlights the risks faced by women and children with disability, according to the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
Researcher and person with low vision, Jen Hargrave, says despite decades of activism, statistics regarding violence and exploitation remain alarmingly high across private, public, and institutional settings.
My whole career, we've been stating the same kinds of statistics about the prevalence of violence against people with disabilities, and particularly women and girls with disabilities," she explains. "Men with disabilities might be more likely to experience violence in public spaces... and women more so in private spaces like showers and bathrooms and bedrooms
Jen Hargrave
Over their lifetime, 64% of people with disability report experiencing physical violence, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, emotional abuse and/or stalking compared to 45% of people without disability, according to the Disability Royal Commission.
Young women with disability are also twice as likely to report experiencing sexual violence over their lifetime than young women without disability.
Ms Hargrave argues that systemic power imbalances and administrative burdens often prevent survivors from accessing necessary support and legal aid, leading survivors to seek support from their own community.
“A lot of self-advocacy groups meet…working together, building community, supporting each other, sharing information about how their legal rights might work, what to do if you feel vilified? what to do if you've been abused?”
Rosie Putland, an Autistic advocate, explains how her advocacy when navigating discrimination and the justice system comes not only from personal experience, but also from creating inclusive spaces for those who are often excluded from policy discussions.
I've had experiences of disability and of discrimination all throughout my life...coming to terms with what it means to be disabled, but also what it means to have been a disabled child as well, without necessarily having that language around it.
Rosie Putland
Ms Putland argues a significant barrier is the historical lack of validation for neurodivergent individuals and the broader disability community.
“I know what it's like to not be heard…to have your story questioned at a baseline level. That feeling of validation for the first time, or even four times over, it reminds you of those times that you haven't been heard.”
Ms Putland explains that neurodivergence requires a shift toward validating survivors’ experiences rather than treating their disability as a reason to doubt their testimony- highlighting how thoughtful approaches can better serve diverse needs.
"If we think about that in the accessibility lens, and how beneficial that might be for someone who has an energy limiting disability, or someone who's autistic... some of the things that are already in place for victims are actually really beneficial for neurodivergent folks as well.”
Former Disability Royal Commission Commissioner, Kate Eastman Senior Counsel (SC), is one of Australia's most respected barristers in safety, rights and justice that give remedies for discrimination on the grounds of disability and employment.
Having played a pivotal role in shaping many of the recommendations from the Disability Royal Commission, Ms Eastman SC is calling for a deeper, rights-based understanding of safety - one that centres dignity, autonomy, and justice for people with disability.
Our findings from the royal commission were very much that attitudes were often the sort of key barrier or key block. Those low expectations you could often see happen at a deep unconscious level that the person engaged in that was not even aware that they were saying or manifesting that idea
Kate Eastman
The human rights lawyer argues that the objective of achieving safety can often also be used as a way of restricting both rights and identity.
"Often the attitudes about keeping people with disabilities safe sort of prevailed over their rights, opportunities and expectations,” Ms Eastman SC claims. “We need to have a proper discussion about what safety means for people with disability that is a rights-based focus and understands dignity of risk.”
Ms Eastman SC believes that to achieve long-term change, the legal system must go beyond merely tweaking laws and pursue wholesale systemic change.
She theorises that weaving an understanding of disability into the craft of being a lawyer, the next generation of practitioners can help ensure the justice system properly accommodates the disability community as both participants and professionals.
“I would like to see that disability and awareness of disability almost like a core component of not just what you study at law school, but more specifically, what you study in that work that you have to do between finishing law school and becoming a practitioner,” she says.
If you liked this story, you can listen to the full episode of Building Inclusion, a podcast about Australia's Disability Strategy presented by Powered Media, right here.
This podcast by Powerd Media is supported by funding from the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing under the Inclusion and Accessibility Fund: Australia's Disability Strategy (ADS) – Community Attitudes grant program.