The COVID-19 pandemic hindered plans to directly listen to resettled refugee and asylee women, girls, and GNC people living with disabilities, and it remains a critical priority of this body of work to elevate what we heard and what is known about challenges this specific group faces. While mental health, trauma, and isolation are discussed on other pages of this site, here we refer specifically to the challenges for refugees with physical disabilities.
Lens
Ability
"Refugees with disabilities are 'among the most hidden and neglected of all displaced people.'"
- Women's Refugee Commission
"I was able to spend time with other women my age; I was never lonely even with my disability. I thought I was going to get cured when I came here, but being here has made me more sick than before - it is not the sickness that people can see on your body, its loneliness."
- Woman from Liberia, New York City
Multiple Layers of Discrimination & Risk
Over 1 billion people live with some form of disability. Stigma can mean being hidden away by families and communities, and excluded because of physical and social barriers to accessing services. “Women and girls [living] with disabilities are often pushed to the extreme margins and experience profound discriminations. This can lead to lower economic and social status; increased risk of violence and abuse, including sexual violence; gender-based discriminatory practices; and limited access to education, health care (including sexual and reproductive health), information, services, justice, as well as, civic and political participation.”
Women talked to us about compounded with difficulties navigating English, accessing information, isolation, challenges with transport and mobility, women also talked about struggling to support for their children living with disabilities.
“Women and girls with disabilities are subjected to multiple layers of discrimination. Based on their gender and disability status they often face ‘double discrimination’. This inequality is exacerbated for women and girls with disabilities who are members of marginalized ethnic or racial groups or part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community.”
– https://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do/gender-equality-and-womens-empowerment/women-disabilities
“I have lived in the nursing home since I came. I don’t know a lot about what happens in the community. My problem here is loneliness. I can’t talk to anybody here, spend all day in bed...it’s the worse time of my life. I want to live in an apartment and maybe they can give me a home health aid and I can spend more time with my family. But they say I can’t receive that kind of assistance because I only have a green card...I feel like I left home to come be in a prison here.”
- Sara
Opportunities
Without specific outreach, consultation, inclusion, and funding, these harsh realities maintain their invisibility and perpetuate harm. There are numerous steps to working with resettled refugee girls, women, and GNC people living with disabilities to create conditions for their self determined outcomes and dignified lives.
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Community members know who and where women and girls living with disabilities live. Outreach for awareness raising of available services and expanding services is needed.
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Including resettled refugee leadership and co-design of programs and services ensures their inclusion and possible access from the start.
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For existing services/programs, on-going consultations with those living with disabilities can help provide solutions to how they feel safe and supported in accessing services and what they need.
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Funders can require accountability to women and girls living with disabilities and support specific budget lines in all grants that support their integration in all services and programs.
Photo & Quote Attributions
All names attributed to quotes have been changed to protect the safety of the speaker. The photographs that appear alongside quotes are not of the speaker.
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