Testimony of Sonia, a deaf woman forcibly sterilised, offered by the European Union of Deaf People (EUD) and collected in the European Disability Forum and the CERMI Women Foundation (2017). “End the forced sterilisation of women and girls with disabilities”
Foto: Matías Jacobi
Sonia is a deaf woman, the daughter of hearing parents. There have always been communication barriers between Sonia and her parents, because the latter did not understand sign language. Sonia married a deaf man, and the couple decided to start a family. After a period in which Sonia tried to get pregnant, the couple went to the doctor for fertility tests. Her husband underwent all the tests, and the doctors confirmed that he was capable of having children. However, Sonia was subjected to more rigorous tests, and, in the end, they discovered that a few years earlier, when she was of legal age, she had been sterilised. She had no idea. She asked her mother, who replied that the doctor thought that sterilisation was the best option to prevent the transmission of the deafness gene to the next generation of the family. They subjected her to sterilisation without any information, without the support of a sign language interpreter and without her consent.
Forced sterilisation is a violation of fundamental rights, including the rights to bodily integrity, and constitutes a denial or limitation of sexual and reproductive rights. By carrying out this practice, women with disabilities are denied the right to produce a family, to be mothers and the right to freedom under the pretext of their well-being. The fear of pregnancy and its consequences, considering that women with disabilities do not have sufficient skills and/or means to care for their children, the physical repercussions for the mother, the fear that the disability may be passed on, etc. For years throughout history, such fears have been a great source of concern for families and caregivers of women with disabilities. This fear has conditioned their own lives, resulting in them losing autonomy and privacy, supervising and controlling them.
However, the cases in which sterilisations are performed without the informed consent of women with disabilities are not the only cases in which the consent, the will of women with disabilities is not considered. In many cases, when they face other forms of violence and want to report it, they are unable to do so due to the multiple barriers they experience when trying to access the justice system.
Women with disabilities who suffer violence from people in their immediate environment, although they want to report this violence, hardly have any opportunity to do so as a consequence of the high levels of vital and emotional dependence on the person who commits the violence. They are afraid of losing the support of their caregiver-perpetrator. In other cases, they may normalise violence by not being aware of their rights and not recognising this violence as a violation of their rights, or not being able to report it due to being over-medicalised.
If the woman (in question) has been deprived of her legal capacity, she will need the complaint to be filed by her guardian, and this may be the aggressor. If the disabled woman is a migrant in an irregular administrative situation, it is most likely that she will not report (any aggression) due to fear of being expelled. If the disabled woman is institutionalised, she will not be able to report violence outside the institution since interaction in these centres is limited to their caregivers and relatives, which makes contact with lawyers practically impossible. In addition, these centres may be located in areas far from where legal advice can be reached, and unequal power dynamics between women with disabilities and the staff of these institutions can discourage women from claiming their rights.
Even in the event that, finally, the woman can denounce the person in her environment who exercises violence, she faces the prevalence of insurmountable physical barriers such as the lack of accessibility of police stations, judicial headquarters, etc. and public transport that prevent their autonomous movement and make it difficult to report violence.
If the woman manages to overcome these physical barriers and manages to reach any one of the institutions that receive complaints (emergency services or police stations, etc.), they are faced with primary care personnel or police officers to detect signs of violence, personnel or officers who do not have sufficient training or tools such as specific action protocols for cases of violence against disabled women. This is especially the case in relation to the specific violence that disabled women may suffer, women who have information and communication barriers since there are no support services to provide the communication that these women require. And the information they are provided with is not accessible, so the care given to them is not adequate or accessible (in plain language, images, Braille, sign language, and audio formats, etc.) and is, therefore, not adapted to their needs.
Despite their willingness to report events, they may not be able to do so due to the barriers mentioned above and, therefore, they may not be immediately referred to comprehensive care centres on a temporary basis, until the complaint is judicially resolved.
If the woman manages to file a complaint, the barriers she faces do not end here. During the processing of the judicial procedure, she will again find a lack of information and accessible communication that will make it difficult for her to participate on equal terms with people without disabilities in the judicial process.
She may not be believed by the judicial body since, in many cases, their testimonies are questioned by the authorities, especially in the case of women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities. In these cases, women with disabilities may not remember the facts accurately or may not state them with straightforward logic, but this does not mean that they are untrue. But justice system operators interpret it in this way due to their lack of knowledge about how gender, disability and violence intersect. As a result, on many occasions, cases are shelved, especially if the only evidence of the violence that exists is the testimony of the woman, a woman who is not considered credible, which translates into total impunity for the perpetrator. Such is the obstacle course that women with disabilities have to face in order to exercise their will to report violence against them that it impedes their access to justice and, when they manage to report it, it limits their participation in judicial processes.
Collaboration between the European Union’s EUROsociAL+ Programme with the Mechanism for Monitoring the Inter-American Convention to Prevent, Punish and Eradicate Violence against Women (MESECVI) will contribute to the elimination of barriers to accessing justice for disabled women. This is because it will highlight barriers to accessibility and violence against women with disabilities, victims or survivors to facilitate their access to justice, within the framework of which recommendations have been directed at States party to the Belém do Pará Convention so that they comply with the obligations assumed when ratifying said Convention in relation to women with disabilities.
By Carmen Miguel Juan, expert for the EUROsociAL+ Programme
