Disabled People Face More Physical, Sexual and Verbal Violence

When violence research refers to “women” or “disabled people,” whose experiences disappear into an average, and who cannot enter the survey at all? Éva Baradji and Olivier Filatriau’s 2020 study, Les personnes handicapées sont plus souvent victimes de violences physiques, sexuelles et verbales, was jointly published by DREES and SSMSI. It places French victimization surveys alongside police records, making disability and gender inseparable questions while exposing the accessibility of research itself as part of safety.

Read the population and the time window

The study pools eight Cadre de vie et sécurité surveys from 2011–2018: 86,600 respondents aged 18–64 living in ordinary households in metropolitan France. Questions concern the two years before each interview, including incidents not reported to police. These percentages are neither lifetime prevalence nor an annual incidence estimate for 2018.

Disability is identified through household questions about disability, discomfort or difficulties in everyday life, rather than only through administrative certification. That definition shapes the comparison groups. The original study also uses logistic regression to adjust for age, employment, household composition and residential characteristics. It explicitly states that these relationships remain descriptive and must not be interpreted as causal.

How gender and disability change the conditions of safety

Among female respondents, 9.0% of those identified as disabled reported physical and/or sexual violence, compared with 5.8% of women without reported disability. This comparison belongs to the stated sample and two-year recall period. Differences remain after adjustment for several characteristics. The finding challenges a homogeneous account of women’s exposure to violence without establishing that a bodily condition itself “causes” abuse.

The study distinguishes whether perpetrators belong to a victim’s household from where an incident happens. An offender outside the household can attack inside the victim’s home or in shared residential spaces. “Outside-household violence” therefore cannot simply mean a stranger’s attack in the street. Familiar surroundings do not necessarily provide safety; relationships of dependence and everyday contact also require scrutiny.

The feminist question arising here is how support can be both available and accountable, rather than defining disabled people as naturally fragile and needing others to decide for them. Receiving assistance can coexist with rights to speak, refuse and seek help. This is an institutional question prompted by the evidence, not a protective intervention tested by the study.

Inability to answer must not become insignificance

The household survey excludes residents of specialist institutions. Individual questionnaires prohibit proxy answers and offer limited accommodations, leaving some people with sensory, cognitive or psychological difficulties unable to participate. These are explicit boundaries of the study. An experience not collected by a survey cannot be treated as harm that did not occur.

Police records from 2018 supplement the survey with cases involving institutional residents and a wider age range. But they cover incidents reaching police, with incomplete disability identification and contextual information. The share of recorded cases involving a particular offense is not its prevalence in a population. The two materials complement one another; they do not combine into a total without blind spots.

A specific tension follows: how can confidentiality, independent testimony and accessibility be held together? Assistance may alter the conditions of disclosure, yet its complete absence can silence people. Safety policy must address these conditions rather than demand a single way of recounting experience.

From evidence of risk to support and autonomy

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice offers a route through community-organized support, asking how assistance can avoid becoming control. Feminist, Queer, Crip questions standards of normal bodies, independence and value. These theoretical and activist works are not the French study’s conclusions, but connect evidence of violence to support conditions, institutional responsibility and disabled people’s own decision-making power.