Our partners for the project are the University of Iceland’s School of Social Science and the Centre for Disability Studies. We chose these partners partly because they were from donor countries and partly because they had participated as partners in the project titled “Access to Specialized Victim Support Services for Women with Disabilities Who Have Experienced Violence,” which was devoted to women with disabilities as well as research and verifying the efficacy of services for victims of violence for women with disabilities.
This project took place in the years 2013-2015. The main coordinator was the Ludwig Bolzman Institute of Human Rights. The Queraum cultural and social research institute was responsible for implementation along with NINLIL (an association for empowerment and counselling for women with disabilities). Besides our Icelandic partners, the other project partners were the university in Giessen, Germany, and British universities in Leeds and Glasgow. Funding came from the Daphne project.
The project focused on three objectives:
- Analysing and appraising the legislative framework;
- Collecting extensive empathetic data – conducting research on women with disabilities in the form of group discussions and in-depth interviews while also conducting research on service providers in the form of an online questionnaire and interviews with employees);
- Creating recommendations for good practice and collecting examples of good practice.
In the project “Access to Specialised Victim Support Services for Women with Disabilities Who Have Experienced Violence,” sexual violence against women with disabilities was identified as one of the most frequently experienced forms of violence.
The researchers identified the following reasons as to why this type of violence occurs so frequently with women with disabilities:
- Women with disabilities are often considered to be asexual;
- A lack of education with respect to sex, sexuality, and relationships, which means these women don’t know enough about boundaries and this results in uncertainty when it comes to identifying violence. .
These results were a big inspiration for us in setting up the “I see!” project and our partners from the University of Iceland are a very valuable source of information and experience in this endeavour.