Addressing violence against women with disabilities through responsible and inclusive journalism
Issue Three
This third issue delves into the framing of news media narratives on violence against women and girls with disabilities, a few language considerations, and highlights of good reporting on the issue.
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I’d like to start with a disclaimer that this edition is just a perspective on a slice of a much larger issue. It is in no way a comprehensive or prescriptive opinion on anyone’s work. What it tries to offer is a little more insight on the problem of violence against women and girls with disabilities in India so that it can be used by journalists to hold authorities to account. It doesn’t include tools for trauma-reporting or reporting on gender-based violence in general, but recommends a few sources for it. There’s a swathe of other statistics and guidance available online for coverage of violence against women with disabilities which I haven’t been able to include here.
We’re on the seventh day of the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence Campaign. It is an international campaign that kicks off on 25th November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and runs until 10th December, Human Rights Day.
For this edition, I trawled the internet for news from India on violence against women with disabilities. Unfortunately, I found very little reporting. Most of it was about isolated cases, and lacked follow-up coverage. This reinforces what we're already aware of: there's a significant lack of reporting specifically addressing violence against women with disabilities.
Isolated case-specific or ‘episodic’ reporting on gender-based violence often just evokes pity for the interview subjects. If it doesn’t connect to systemic problems, or addresses the violence as relevant to the larger society, it is not of much use to the reader, and a missed opportunity to illuminate a rarely covered human rights violation.
Pompi Banerjee, a human rights researcher from Kolkata has worked at the intersection of mental health policy and gender-based violence. I shared with her, one of the several similarly framed articles from Indian dailies about sexual violence against a woman with an intellectual disability.
The essence of the linked piece is that a married woman with an intellectual age of 5 years and 4 months was raped and subsequently, pregnant. The accused was slapped with a fine of 40,000 INR and put behind bars after a trial.
The article makes no connection to the larger systemic issue of violence against women with disabilities.
Pompi said: “If I were not a human rights researcher, I don’t know what I would do with this news. I would feel a bit sorry that, oh my god, something horrible happened to someone, and then go about my own day.”
Violence against women with disabilities is an underreported global phenomenon.
According to a United Nations factsheet:
“Studies indicate that women with disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate at least twice that of the general population of women.
In the case of women with a cognitive or communication disability, their lack of understanding of the situation during a sexual assault and/or their inability to say no can be wrongly perceived as their consent.
Girls with disabilities experience discrimination and heightened vulnerability on account of their gender, age, and disability, and girls with intellectual disabilities are particularly vulnerable. It is estimated that between 40 to 70 per cent will be sexually abused before they reach 18 years of age.
A 2023 survey by an independent newsroom, The 19th, reveals that almost half of women with disabilities in the United States have experienced sexual harassment or assault in their workplace.
And there’s much more out there to confirm the vulnerability of women with disabilities worldwide to violence.
However, UN Women states that “only 27% of countries and areas (52 out of 190) explicitly protect and promote the rights of women with disabilities.”
How about India?
India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act of 2016 provides several provisions for protection against gender-based violence under sections 4, 7 and 12.
Additionally, a landmark 2021 judgement by India’s Supreme Court recognised the high risk of sexual violence on women and girls with disabilities. Human Rights Watch explains why the judgement is so significant.
The ruling acknowledges the threat of sexual violence for women and girls with disabilities as “an all-too-familiar fixture of their lives.”
The judgement also sets straight that women with disabilities are not weak, helpless, or incapable:
“Such a negative presumption of disability translating into incapacity would be inconsistent with the forward-thinking conceptualization of disabled lives embodied in our law and, increasingly, albeit slowly, in our social consciousness.”
Notably, the judgement emphasised that the testimony of a person with a disability should not be devalued or the person deemed incapable of testifying on grounds of a disability. Reasonable accommodations should be made for people with disabilities in the judicial process to get their testimony.
The judgement also called for “concrete reforms to make the criminal justice system more accessible for people with disabilities, including:
training judges, lawyers, and police officers on properly managing cases involving survivors of sexual violence;
creating a database of trained “special educators,” interpreters, and legal aid providers; and
collecting disaggregated data on gender-based violence from the National Crimes Record Bureau.”
Given the legal provisions, journalists have a lot of people to hold accountable. But when the connection with systemic problems and solutions is not made using data and other reporting, the story becomes just one of those pieces audiences want to avoid as bad news. Focusing only on the crime, atrocity and the survivor’s plight in the news can cause more disconnect than rage in a reader.
So what can be done?
Even in breaking news coverage, reporting should underscore violence against women with disabilities as a fundamental human rights issue necessitating law and policy intervention. Adding some data to highlight its prevalence in one or two sentences would not take too much time or come in the way of a tight news cycle.
The Supreme Court has acknowledged that women with disabilities "are not weak, helpless, or incapable". News reports ought to reflect that too. Journalism contributes critically to shaping societal awareness and dismantling the stigma surrounding disability and the disabled body.
Reporters can obtain informed consent from the survivor if they are willing to talk. For insight on informed consent, refer to the book, Silence and Omissions: A Media Guide for Covering Gender-Based Violence.
According to the book, “informed consent requires that journalists get prior permission to do an interview, explain to survivors how their information will be used and discuss their rights during and after an interview, as well as the potential risks to them of publicising their story.”
Many times, survivors do not echo their families’ perspectives, so this is important.
And why confine the discourse on gender-based violence solely to incidents of violence?
Follow up stories to news events and larger features could raise awareness about legal and policy provisions, police negligence, the lack of access to justice, and the support services and solutions being deployed by organisations. The social and cultural stigma of disability, negligence and overall invisibility of women with disabilities, the intersectionality of women with disabilities with their sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, caste, etc., are screaming for attention. Stories about how a survivor sought justice, or how they rebuilt their life, could help the readers understand the hurdles created by an inaccessible environment. The list of possible stories is endless.
The invisibility of persons with disabilities in India’s public data must also be called out. India’s 2011 census underreports the percentage of persons with disabilities as 2.21%, when the global figure estimated by the World Health Organization is 16%. Similarly, government agencies such as the National Family Health Survey, which provides essential numbers on health and family welfare, and the National Crime Records Bureau, which is responsible for collecting and analysing crime data, do not have data for women with disabilities. Without evidence, policies can’t be shaped and advocacy is difficult.
Should the survivor’s disability be mentioned in the reporting? Definitely when it is relevant to the story. The reporting should also highlight the complexity of hurdles faced by a woman with a disability.
Coming back to the piece from the Indian daily, the rape survivor in the story is a person with an intellectual age of 5 years 4 months. In spite of that, she was married and had two children. “As a reader, I wanted to know how she had given consent for marriage and having children,” Pompi said. But the reporting glossed over this completely.
Extensive global research exists on violence against women with disabilities, yet it primarily circulates within academic circles. Journalism has the potential to elucidate and disseminate this critical information to a broader audience. If it doesn’t, we’re excluding the largest minority in the world from our reporting.
Good reporting on violence against women with disabilities
“Why it is hard for disabled women, queer persons to leave abusive partners” by Geetika Mantri and this Laadli award winner “Why elderly women with disabilities are at highest risk of abuse, neglect” by Shreya Raman, both for Behanbox, demonstrate how finding alternative data in the absence of relevant government data can enrich reporting.
Nidhi Goyal, the founder of the NGO Rising Flame told The Third Eye in this video how “if it is not accessible, it is not safe for a disabled woman”. She also talks about the numerous other ways women with disabilities face violence from their families and society. Take note how the vulnerability of some women, and their dependency on their families, limits them from raising their voices.
In this collection of seven essays by Rising Flame, women with disabilities write about sexual harassment from within the disability community.
What is the appropriate language of violence and disability?
As for any reporting, language used should honour the choices of the interviewee.
Victim vs Survivor
Victims can be perceived as helpless, passive and powerless while survivor is a term that offers a person more agency. However, if you get a chance to ask, always go by a person’s preferences.
Suffering from a disability or afflicted with it?
None, actually. Saying that a person “has a disability” is enough. “Suffering” implies pain, distress or hardship. “Afflicted” is defined as “grievously affected or troubled”. Using these terms implies that persons with disabilities are miserable because of their disability, which might not be accurate.
Resources
Resources on media reporting on gender-based violence specifically against women with disabilities don't exist, but I would recommend guides on disability and gender-based violence in general.
Silence and Omissions: A Media Guide for Covering Gender-Based Violence created by the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) at Rutgers University.
This one with a Bangladeshi perspective from Daily Star’s Shuprova Tasneem, who was my colleague at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) in 2022.
My RISJ paper “A 9-step plan for 'curb-cutting' disability access in India’s news and newsrooms” has tips and tools for reporting on disability.
Thanks for reading this third edition. My thanks to Shampa Sengupta, Sanchita Ain and Pompi Banerjee for answering my multiple queries for this issue. Thanks to my friend Ritu Mahajan and journalist CK Meena for their valuable feedback.
Please share your feedback on what you liked or didn’t. What would you like to see in the upcoming issues? Just hit reply to share your thoughts, or say ‘hello’.
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Warmly,
Priti
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