BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Glob. Women’s Health
Sec. Quality of Life
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fgwh.2025.1580691
Profiling abuse and neglect of women with disabilities: a step towards prevention of mistreatment of vulnerable populations
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Center for Molecular Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2Department of Clinical Science, Faculty of Medicine, Umeå University, Umeå, Västerbotten, Sweden
- 3Centre for Healthcare Ethics, Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics, Karolinska Institutet (KI), Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
- 4Region Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
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Women with disabilities are at increased risk of violence and neglect, and the physical and psychological barriers to seeking help often lead to prolonged periods of abuse. In addition to being a leading cause of acute injuries and numerous chronic diseases, exposure to violence also negatively affects mental health.The aim of this cross-sectional quantitative data analysis was to investigate potentially distinct experiences of violence among women with disabilities resulting from cerebral palsy (CP), multiple sclerosis (MS), traumatic brain injury (TBI), stroke, arthritis as well as isolated sensory disabilities including visual-or hearing impairment. Indeed, our data shows that type of mistreatment, perpetrators and required personal assistance differ between disability groups.Interestingly, the highest frequency of violence/abuse was observed among women with hearing impairment. Together with MS, this type of disability was also more frequently associated with denial of help with basic needs or prevented use of assistive devices comparing to the other groups.Our results provide an insight into the types of abuse characteristic for certain disability groups, which can help develop more targeted preventive strategies. Furthermore, our findings indicate that prevalence of violence in certain disability groups remains unchanged despite societal efforts, hence calling for further research and more targeted interventions to prevent mistreatment of vulnerable populations.
Keywords: Disability, Violence, abuse, Women's Health, Targeted interventions
Received: 20 Feb 2025; Accepted: 30 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Savard, Gavriilidis, Lindblad, Huang and Zeitelhofer Adzemovic. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Josephine Savard, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Center for Molecular Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
Milena Zeitelhofer Adzemovic, Region Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden
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