By Dr Ladan Hashemi, VISION Senior Research Fellow 

Disabled people are widely recognised as being at heightened risk of gender-based violence, and intimate partner violence (IPV) is one of its most common forms. Yet few prior random probability sample surveys in England have examined the full range of IPV (physical, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse) across different types of impairment, for both women and men. 

Existing research in this area has tended to rely on small, service-based samples rather than the general population, to focus on women only, and to treat “any IPV” as a single outcome rather than distinguishing between different forms of abuse. This matters because different forms of IPV have very different risk profiles and levels of visibility, and because without a general population sample of both genders, it isn’t possible to say whether disability affects men and women’s risk in the same way. 

To address this, together with my co-authors Dr Hannah Manzur, Dr Annie Bunce, and Professor Sally McManus, all VISION researchers, we used the 2014 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, a nationally representative survey of 7,546 adults in England, to examine the 12-month prevalence of four types of IPV among people with and without four types of impairment: physical health conditions, sensory impairment, learning impairment, and restricted activities of daily living (ADLs). We tested the same disability types and IPV types for men and women, using models adjusted for age, ethnicity, marital status, and socioeconomic factors. 

Disabled women had almost twice the odds of experiencing psychological IPV, and around two and a half times the odds of experiencing sexual IPV, in the past year compared to non-disabled women. No significant difference was found for physical IPV. Women with a learning impairment reported the highest rates of IPV overall (around one in five had experienced some form of abuse in the past year), and women with restricted ADLs were at particularly high risk of economic abuse. For men, using the same measures and models, we found no significant differences in IPV risk between disabled and non-disabled men. 

This gendered pattern is consistent with the wider evidence base on IPV, in which women experience more frequent and more coercive forms of abuse than men, and it suggests that disability compounds this risk specifically for women. Disabled women’s risk was concentrated in the less visible forms of abuse (psychological and sexual, rather than physical), which points to a real gap: safeguarding responses attuned mainly to physical harm may be missing much of what disabled women experience. Isolation, dependency on a partner for care, and barriers to disclosure are all likely to play a part. 

The lack of a significant association for men may reflect several factors. Our sample of disabled men reporting IPV was relatively small, particularly for sexual IPV, which widens the uncertainty around these estimates. Disability may also interact with stigma and barriers to disclosure for men differently than for women, and the broader evidence base on men’s experiences of IPV, disabled or not, remains much thinner than for women. Further research with larger samples of disabled men would help clarify this pattern. 

These findings support investment in violence prevention programmes specifically designed for disabled women, particularly those with learning impairments or multiple impairments, and highlight the need for routes to disclosure that don’t rely on abuse being physically visible. They also point to the importance of coordination between domestic abuse services, disability support services, and health and social care, particularly where a partner also provides care. 

To download the article: Disability and intimate partner violence in England: Gender stratified analyses of a probability sample survey