Students with disabilities are not “on the radar” of colleges’ efforts and policies to prevent sexual assault, a new federal study has found.
This special report examines the challenges that students, academics, and colleges face in dealing with physical disabilities as well as conditions that are less visible.
The study, conducted by the National Council on Disability, a federal agency, suggests that undergraduates with a disability are more likely to be sexually assaulted than are their peers without a disability, and that colleges don’t know how to support them.
About 31.6 percent of female undergraduates with a disability reported having been sexually assaulted, compared with 18.4 percent of undergraduate women without a disability, the study found.
“Sexual assault has become a topic of concern on campuses and with the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, but seldom has the conversation included consideration of the needs of college students with disabilities,” said Wendy Harbour, a member of the council and director of the National Center for College Students With Disabilities, in a news release.
The study, described in a report titled “Not on the Radar: Sexual Assault of College Students With Disabilities,” is the first federally funded examination of how the needs of sexual-assault victims with disabilities are treated in colleges’ policies and procedures.
Campus assault prevention and education programs are not inclusive of students with disabilities.
“Campus assault prevention and education programs are not inclusive of students with disabilities,” the report says, “and college staff lack awareness that such programs should be accessible to students with disabilities, and staff are not trained in disability accommodations.”
Many colleges are also not fully complying with the Americans With Disabilities Act, the report says. The absence of procedures for communicating with victims who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the lack of support services for students with mobility disabilities, are among the areas where colleges’ sexual-assault policies fail at inclusivity. Other shortfalls include the inaccessibility of websites and printed information to students with visual impairments or print-based disabilities such as dyslexia.
About 19 percent of colleges’ professional-staff members said in interviews conducted for the study — and 12 percent of such staff members indicated in questionnaire responses — that all or some of their online education programs were not accessible. And at 10 of the colleges surveyed, the response rate to make programs accessible upon a student’s request ranged from 24 hours to 14 days.
Students with disabilities are not only off colleges’ radar in terms of sexual-assault policies and procedures, the report concludes. They are also invisible at the federal level.
Research on campus sexual assault, funded by the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women and the National Institute of Justice, has not included disability as a demographic category. A 2014 report by a White House task force, “Not Alone,” did not include it either.
Disregarding disability as a demographic status, the report says, sets “the tone for colleges and researchers to omit disability in campus-climate studies as well.”
To better serve students with disabilities, the report recommends that colleges include them as a demographic category in their campus-climate surveys on sexual assault. It also recommends that colleges create policies and procedures to deal with sexual-assault crises for students with disabilities so they can receive services within 24 hours.
“One campus said students with disabilities were not ‘on their radar,’” Harbour said, “but it’s time to change that and make national conversations more inclusive.”
