Crippled

by Frances Ryan

  When Bethany’s husband abused her, ‘stupid’ was his favourite insult. Bethany, sixty, is Deaf. She first met her husband in London over forty years ago. Back in the early 1980s, he showed no signs of what his future behaviour might be. ‘He was lovely,’ Bethany says. For the first twenty years of their marriage, they had what she describes as a typical relationship – ‘Just normal rows’ – but when his mother died, he changed, and the verbal abuse started. Cunt. Stupid. ‘Every name under the sun,’ she says.

  I speak to Bethany through a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter and with the support of Marie, a manager from DeafHope, the UK’s only specialist domestic violence service for Deaf women. Bethany’s husband never learnt BSL and she could only understand him by lip reading. Soon enough, her disability became part of the abuse. ‘He knew I couldn’t hear but he’d ask me questions and make out I was stupid,’ she says. It became normal for him to exploit the fact she couldn’t hear and mock her for it, chipping away at her confidence.

  They had two young children – a son and a daughter – and Bethany kept the abuse quiet to try and protect them. With the verbal and psychological abuse came controlling behaviour. ‘Everything was about him. He wanted to be in charge. No one could say “no”,’ she says. ‘Everything I did was wrong. Even my best.’ Sometimes, she would make dinner only for him to tell her to start again and cook something different. The message was always about him being in control of her: ‘I’m your husband so if I say it, you do it.’

  Bethany was already isolated due to her disability – she hadn’t worked since giving up a cleaning job when she had children and the majority of people around her didn’t know sign language. But her husband began to control who she saw and when, eventually stopping her visiting her family. On the rare times that she did visit her parents, her husband would send her a text: ‘Come home now.’ I ask her what might happen if she didn’t go and she shakes her head quickly, gesturing that this was never an option. When she did go back, they argued and the abuse escalated. He physically grabbed her shoulders and shouted in her face, knowing she could feel his screams but not hear his words.

  Britain has a pandemic of domestic violence against disabled women, with the charity SafeLives estimating half a million disabled women aged sixteen to sixty-four in the UK are suffering domestic abuse.12 According to research by Women’s Aid, one in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetime. For women with a disability, this figure more than doubles.13 As with non-disabled women, ‘domestic abuse’ is defined as being abuse at the hands of a current intimate partner or an ex-partner, but for disabled women this expands to include people in other trusted positions: family members, personal care assistants and healthcare professionals.

  Refuge, which runs forty-two refuges across twenty-three local authorities nationwide, tell me that a third of the women they assisted long-term in 2017–18 had one or more disability.14 ‘The disabled women we support report physical, sexual, coercive, psychological and economic abuse. We see many cases where the perpetrator is also the carer,’ a senior manager explains. ‘Exploiting their disability, perpetrators have opportunities to maintain greater control over their victims, keeping them isolated, stopping them working, denying or misusing medication, or preventing them from attending medical appointments. They also use their disability to humiliate them, threaten to have them sectioned or their children taken away.’

  Go through the data and at every turn, disabled women are at greater risk of abuse and its consequences. Public Health England in 2015 found that disabled women, as well as being more likely to be abused, experience domestic abuse for longer periods of time, and more severe and frequent abuse than those without disabilities.15 (Disabled men are also more likely to be victims than their non-disabled male counterparts but the role of gender means that it’s still women with disabilities who are more affected. Disabled men experience a similar rate of domestic abuse as non-disabled women.16) Research by SafeLives found that disabled women are twice as likely to have attempted suicide following abuse (22 per cent) than non-disabled women, while studies also show that disabled women are twice as likely to suffer assault and rape.17

  And yet there is little mainstream attention given to this crisis. I have never heard a politician discuss the needs of disabled women when talking about domestic violence, while there are few disability-specific refuges available despite disabled women being significantly more at risk than others. Beverley Lewis House in London, for example, is the only specialist refuge for women with a learning disability in the country. It’s hard not to think that cultural attitudes towards disabled women have a hand in this. There’s still a deeply embedded reluctance by society to acknowledge disabled people’s sexual relationships; the asexualization ascribed to disabled women means that some don’t associate us with being at risk of domestic violence, and if they do, the men with us can be perceived as – far from abusers – saints for ‘putting up’ with a disabled girlfriend. Such misconceptions around disabled women’s lives can go to the heart of services meant to protect them; a two-year research project by the University of Kent’s Tizard Centre in 2015 found that less than half of police officers in England, Wales and Scotland felt that women with learning disabilities were more at risk of domestic abuse.18

  Moreover, it is not only that there is a lack of provision for disabled women, but also that there is limited awareness of what resources are out there. Talking to refuges and experts in the area of domestic violence or disability, I questioned them on the availability of support for disabled survivors. Each admitted they could not say how many refuges or services there were in the UK specifically designed for disabled women. ‘Not enough,’ as one put it.

  Bethany first tried to leave her husband in 2008 once the children were older. But she found first-hand that being disabled made this even harder. ‘I tried to find someone to help me,’ she says. ‘The council. Refuges. Nothing. It was all for hearing people.’ Over the next eight years, Bethany made what turned out to be many thwarted escape attempts. At one point, she turned up at a refuge having left her husband only to be told they had no interpreters. Instead, she had to ask the staff for help by writing it down on bits of paper; summarizing her years of abuse in bullet points. The emotional toll alone meant it was hard enough to find the words but the language barrier made it impossible; like many Deaf people, BSL is Bethany’s first language and she can’t write well in English. ‘I needed help but there was no one,’ she says. In the end, she had to go back to her husband.

  Research consistently shows that, as well as enduring higher rates of domestic abuse, disabled women experience more of these barriers to accessing support to escape, anything from the lack of a sign language translator for a Deaf survivor to a staircase as the only entrance for a wheelchair user.19 Just one in ten domestic violence refuge spaces in the UK is accessible to people with physical disabilities, according to a BBC investigation in 2018.20 Talk to those on the ground and inaccessibility is often cultural as much as practical; while many refuges stretch their limited resources to make adaptations to refuge accommodation and encourage outreach staff to consider disability, some staff often are not trained about the needs of survivors with disabilities. Effectively this means they are unable to support women when they need it most.

  Marie tells me that, for example, the ‘no-visitor’ policy at refuges to protect residents can mean staff frequently do not let in interpreters, even if they have been paid for by a charity. Many refuges will not accept Deaf women at all, she says, citing concerns about ‘health and safety’, such as how someone might not hear a fire alarm or a doorbell. ‘We loan equipment, like flashing doorbells, but some still say “no, we can’t deal with that”. And it puts Deaf women at risk.’

  As local governments have seen their budgets squeezed, provision for women escaping abuse has been another grim causality. Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Guardian in 2018 found that refuges for women an
d children in England, Wales and Scotland had seen a funding cut of £6.8 million since 2010, amounting to an average cut for each refuge of £38,000.21 The consequences are potentially deadly; a report by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in 2017 found that more than 1,000 women and children have tried to leave their abusers only to be turned away from shelters in the last six months of the year,22 with other studies finding that many refuges are turning away as much as 60 per cent of their referrals due to lack of space.23 Specialist services are often the first to go, with some of the few facilities that existed for women with physical or learning disabilities closing their doors as austerity measures came in. In 2017, Women’s Aid said almost a fifth of specialist refuges have now closed since the coalition first gained power.24

  The cost-cutting has in many ways been defined by a push for councils to commission cheaper generic one-size-fits-all bed spaces for domestic abuse survivors in place of the security and expertise that come with refuge places. It’s dangerous and short-sighted – only giving abuse survivors a roof over their heads rather than the psychological and practical support they need to rebuild their lives – but particularly so for those with additional needs, such as disabilities or language barriers. In 2016, Bethany was finally able to leave her husband – this time going to stay with her now-grown-up son and then her daughter. But when she asked her local council for help being rehoused in London, Bethany was told she was not a priority on the long social housing waiting list on the grounds she had technically chosen to leave her husband and home. Instead, she was given one option: a hostel. That would mean a Deaf abuse survivor being forced to sleep in a room next to men she had never met and whom she could not hear or communicate with. ‘I couldn’t explain it [to the council] because no one could understand,’ she says.

  Changes to the benefit system in recent years have made this harder still. As large-scale cuts to the ‘welfare’ bill kicked in after 2010, Kafkaesque bureaucracy and heavy restrictions have increasingly defined access to benefits. Universal Credit (UC) – the IT-based all-in-one system intended to replace the old benefit system by 2023 – is a key part of this, with both disabled people and domestic abuse victims two groups particularly affected (unlike the outgoing system, UC is paid to the main breadwinner, meaning male abusers can withhold money from their victims). In 2018, an influential group of MPs, the Home Affairs Select Committee, warned that Universal Credit rules were ‘making it harder’ for victims of domestic violence to leave abusive relationships and avoid economic abuse and control. The scandal meant that in January 2019 the new welfare chief, Amber Rudd, announced a u-turn allowing women to receive universal credit payments if they are the household’s main carer.25

  Victoria Harrison Neves from Refuge tells me the service is concerned that changes to the benefit system generally are now making it more difficult for women to leave their abusers, or even stopping them entirely. ‘In our experience, Universal Credit [for example] can … limit the ability of women to save up even very small amounts to escape abuse, like a taxi to a refuge or relative’s house,’ she says. Even if a victim does manage to leave, further social security problems mean women – many who ‘flee with little more than the clothes on their back’ – often have to wait lengthy periods for their benefits.

  To help her gain financial independence after leaving her husband, Bethany was advised to apply for Universal Credit but the process was foreign to her: she’d never used a computer before but was expected to apply online, had to wade through complex paperwork despite BSL being her first language (‘It was so wordy,’ she says), and had to set up her own banking as her husband shared her bank account. Even reaching the helpline was blocked because of her disability. Bethany had to ask her son to keep phoning the DWP to get support but officials often refused to talk to him on his mum’s behalf, even after he explained she was Deaf. In the end, her son passed the phone over and said, ‘Use your voice so they can tell you’re Deaf, mum.’ It took the best part of a year and intervention from DeafHope support workers and her son, as well as a sicknote from her GP, for Bethany to get her benefits.

  It meant that even when she gained a one-bed flat with the help of her children, Bethany had to borrow money from them in order to feed herself while she waited for her social security to come through. The flat was unfurnished and she had nothing to her name but a television and a bed. ‘I had to save for a year to buy furniture. Little bits,’ she says. I ask her what she did without chairs and a table. ‘I’d just sit on the bed all the time.’

  In the end, after two decades of abuse and with support from DeafHope, Bethany was able to rebuild her life. For seven weeks she attended workshops by the service – six to eight survivors with two interpreters – and wishes she were still attending them. Resources, though, are tight. DeafHope has recently lost its funding for the whole of Surrey, which means they can no longer support women in the area. They’re still providing a service for London and the South East, but worry there’s ‘very little hope’ for Deaf people experiencing abuse who live in the rest of the country. In a climate of ever-squeezed funding, Marie and her colleagues fear that provision for Deaf and disabled women is seen as a ‘luxury.’ ‘When there’s less to go around, a … marginalized, largely invisible population is naturally not top of the list.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a primal fear that your children will be taken and no matter how hard you fight, you can’t get them back,’ says Jemima, one of the staff at an advocacy and advice centre run by, and for, disabled people in south-west London. Jemima, who uses a pseudonym here to protect the identity of the women she helps, has seen this fear lived out a number of times in recent years and is at the forefront of what in many ways is the local effort to keep disabled mothers with their children.

  Across the country, there’s a growing pattern of children being removed by the state. The number of looked-after children in England in 2018 was the highest it has been since 1985.26 One in five children under five are referred to childrens’ services; adoptions are higher than in any other European country, and now stand at the highest level since data was first collected27 (more than 90 per cent of which are done without the consent of the family, according to Legal Action for Women, a legal service and campaign group28).

  There’s a clear class bias to this. Research by Legal Action for Women in 2017 warned that low-income women are unjustly being separated from their children due to poverty.29 Charges of neglect are being used to ‘punish’ women for their ‘unbearably low incomes.’30 The Child Welfare Inequality project in 2017 found this class difference to be so severe that children living in the poorest neighbourhoods of the UK are almost ten times more likely to be taken into care or placed in a child protection plan than those from affluent areas.31 This is not surprising: parenting is much harder if you don’t have enough money to provide food, housing, heating and clothing.

  The influx of deep cuts to services since 2010 has only exacerbated this trend, with the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) in 2017 stating that austerity policies were ‘fuelling record numbers of children being taken into care’.32 It pointed to ‘welfare’ cuts, reductions in family support services such as Sure Start, and rising poverty levels as contributing to ‘families find[ing] themselves at the point of crisis with little or no early help available’.33 This is compounded by the fact that poorer local authorities – facing greater overall demand for child protection services and proportionally larger funding cuts – are increasingly rationing expensive early intervention services that might have previously caught problems before they turned into a crisis. In 2018, the charity Action for Children found that council budgets for early help services designed to prevent families reaching crisis point have shrunk by £743 million in five years – amounting to a cut of more than a quarter.34 The pressure to cut early intervention services is likely only to increase in the coming years; the Local Government Association estimates that children’s services will face a £3.1 billion fun
ding gap by 2025 just to maintain the current levels of threadbare service.35

  However, the reality for disabled mothers and their children is rarely considered. There’s a significant gap in data monitoring the risk of disabled women unjustly losing access to their children, but what we do know is deeply concerning. For example, parents with learning disabilities are fifty times more likely to have their children removed from them and taken into care than their non-disabled counterparts.36 Similarly, there is a noticeable lack of research on the impact of cuts on disabled women’s right to raise a family, despite disabled women anecdotally being particularly vulnerable to losing access to their children, especially if they are also from a BAME background and working class. After all, being a disabled mother means you are considerably more likely to be taking on caring responsibilities or coping without a wage, particularly if you’re a single parent.

  Research by the disabled feminist organization Sisters of Frida in 2017 showed that disabled single mothers are 50 per cent less likely to be employed than non-disabled single mothers.37 This risk of poverty has only increased in recent years as disabled mothers have faced vast cuts to disability services and benefits; the UK Women’s Budget Group calculate that disabled lone mothers stand to lose more than £7,000 per year by 202138 – that’s over a quarter of their income – due to a decade of cuts. That figure rises to over £10,500 (32 per cent of their income) if they have a child with a disability too.39 These are mothers who already have to navigate day-to-day life with poor health and unequal access to services, often while being perceived as inherently less capable simply by virtue of being disabled.