Tag: Women with Disabilities

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An Interview with Stephanie Ortoleva, Founder of Women Enabled International (November 14th, 2022)

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Stories/Lived Experience

Symposium

Author: Dr Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez, MSCA Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute

Stephanie Ortoleva and Ana Maria Sanchez Rodriguez
Stephanie Ortoleva and Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez

Stephanie Ortoleva, founder of Women Enabled International (WEI) advocates for women and girls with disabilities. She says that, “disabled women are organizing for ourselves because we have found that other movements, whether it’s the women’s rights movement or the disability rights movement, very often don’t include our issues as the key points of their advocacy. Disabled women just aren’t going to be silent anymore” (Ford Foundation, 2020).

In the summer of 2012, I started my research journey as an intern for WEI. WEI wanted to help and join the work on the revision of laws in India and globally. The central issue was violence against women and girls with disabilities. The same year, Stephanie and Hope Lewis published a seminal work on violence against women with disabilities called: Forgotten Sisters – A Report on Violence Against Women with Disabilities: An Overview of its Nature, Scope, Causes and Consequences.

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Gender-based Violence and Disabled Women: Let’s Talk

Social Lives

Author: Eliona Gjecaj is an early-stage researcher in the DARE project (Disability Advocacy Research Europe) based at the University of Iceland. Her PhD research focuses on ‘Violence against Disabled Women: Access to Justice’ in Iceland and the UK.

Eliona Gjecaj
Eliona Gjecaj

Today, on International Women’s Day, I would like to celebrate all the survivors of gender-based violence, especially disabled women, and encourage others to come forward and tell someone. Gender-based violence is not and should not be taboo. Much like the saying ‘talk the talk, walk the walk’, we must have the experience talk. We must access the justice walk.

Let’s first  highlight that there are so many unheard experiences of gender-based violence of disabled women that we need to hear, to believe, to recognise as breaches of law, and thus, provide support and access to reporting and prosecuting such violence. Lack of disability-rights-based knowledge, awareness, and training should not be the defence, but rather acknowledged and addressed. Not just in Ireland, but in many countries across Europe.

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