Women Deliver: We can’t ignore disabled women, girls in GBV prevention
The just-ended Women Deliver conference in Kigali, Rwanda, has called for disability inclusion in the war on gender-based violence.
What you need to know:
- The just-ended Women Deliver conference in Kigali discussed ways of addressing the needs of women and girls living with disabilities in GBV programming.
- Activists from 170 countries expressed concern about the exclusion of disabled women and girls in GBV intervention, despite being at highest risk.
Twenty girls living with disabilities in a village in Uganda’s Masaka district were defiled and impregnated by relatives during the initial two-year period of Covid-19.
They delivered. But 16 of them lost their children. How? Their parents killed them.
This was a shocking revelation made by Maureen Kalungi, a team leader at the Uganda National Action on Physical Disability during a side event at the just-concluded Women Deliver conference in Kigali, Rwanda.
At the event convened by the United Nations Population Fund, activists discussed ways of addressing the needs of women and girls living with disabilities in gender-based violence (GBV) programming.
Her organisation did research on the impact of Covid-19 on adolescent girls living with disabilities in Uganda during the 2020-21 period. She was part of the research team.
“The police only came to know that parents were killing the children when one of the girls with intellectual disability ran to the police station to report her father, whom she saw strangling her one-year-old daughter,” she said during the July 20 event.
The activists from 170 countries at the event said they were deeply concerned about the continued exclusion of disabled women and girls in GBV intervention, yet they were three times more likely to experience violence than the ordinary fellows.
Disability inclusion
“Yes, disability inclusion is expensive, but we have to be intentional [in addressing this issue],” noted Lizzie Kiama, managing trustee at This Ability Trust, a Kenya-based disability rights organisation.
“We must have in mind [the aspect of] disability inclusion from the start of planning [for a GBV intervention],” she said.
Dora Single Alal – the country director of Thrive Gulu, an anti-GBV organisation based in Uganda – put into context the higher cost of responding to GBV among girls and women living with disabilities.
A year ago, they rescued a girl with a physical disability who had been impregnated through defilement. She said her expenses, including securing her a wheelchair, exhausted their budgetary allocation for their GBV prevention and response programme.
“Donors must be willing and ready to grant us adequate money to support survivors with disabilities. We cannot neglect them. We cannot ignore the fact that they are more vulnerable and they need more support to be free from violence,” she said.
