Investigating Multiple Discrimination against Disabled Women

Being asked for evidence can become another barrier when the institutions asking have not collected the relevant data. In this November 2016 article, Kumiko Usui describes the DPI Women’s Network Japan’s inquiry into difficulties experienced by disabled women. Campaigners repeatedly encountered demands for numbers alongside official disability statistics with little gender breakdown. They pursued better public statistics while organizing their own research. The absence of a table did not mean the absence of an injury; it helped determine whose experience could become a policy question.

Who conducts the inquiry, and who gets counted?

The 2011 inquiry combined an open-ended questionnaire with interviews, gathering accounts from 87 disabled women across Japan. Interviewers visited people including women living in hospitals and women with intellectual disabilities. Disabled women conducted the interviews and analysis themselves. The choice matters: a form alone can exclude people whose circumstances make a written response difficult. A different way of meeting participants changes what can enter the record, not simply how much data a project collects.

A parallel review examined gender-equality and domestic-violence-prevention plans in all 47 prefectures. Accounts of daily life and documents of institutional intention answer different questions. A plan can mention disabled women without providing services they can actually use. Usui also identifies the reverse gap: disability policy can fail to recognize gendered inequalities. Placing the two fields together exposes people falling between their categories, rather than imagining that two separate services automatically add up to adequate support.

These are accounts gathered to make neglected problems visible, not a probability sample estimating national prevalence. The article’s percentages belong to its respondents and questions. They cannot establish the proportion of all disabled women experiencing violence in Japan. That limit does not make the accounts politically disposable: a failure of protection can require action without being the most common experience in a population.

Support must include the possibility of refusal

The article connects sexual harm to everyday authority. Supervisors, institutional staff, assistants and relatives can occupy positions that make refusal or reporting difficult. Poverty and difficulty obtaining economic independence intensify those relations. The problem therefore exceeds whether an isolated person has learned to speak assertively. What happens to assistance, housing or employment after she objects is part of the conditions under which an objection can be made.

Unwanted assistance from men with bathing or toileting provides a particularly concrete example. Receiving necessary support does not cancel privacy or a person’s wishes about intimate contact. Nor does recognizing this problem mean that all male assistants are dangerous or that withdrawing assistance creates freedom. The relevant question is whether someone can shape how support is given without losing it. Care organized around the provider’s convenience can leave its recipient with very little authority.

Usui also discusses pressure on pregnant disabled women and their exclusion from assumptions underlying sex education. Those concerns prevent protection from becoming another demand to give up sexuality or reproductive choice. Her account links research to campaigning and changes in policy language. That is an activist’s account of influence, not an independent estimate of what one survey caused, and it describes its historical moment rather than current Japanese law.

Mia Mingus’s access intimacy approaches a related problem through relationships: can needs be expressed without humiliation or punishment? Data Feminism asks who defines categories and bears the work of making neglect legible. Read together, these works distinguish being counted, receiving a service and having power over its terms. More visibility matters when it changes the conditions of support, not when it merely asks those already excluded to provide another account.

Suzanne Scott’s French study of disability and mistreatment raises another survey tension. Requiring personal, private answers can prevent someone else controlling testimony, yet exclude people unable to answer independently. Compared with Usui’s participant-led interviews, the question is not which data are automatically more truthful, but how confidentiality, communication support and authority to define harm can coexist. Their different samples and questions prevent their percentages from validating one another.