ABSTRACT
People with disabilities report human rights abuses on a daily basis and are regularly expected to overcome hurdles that do not block the paths of other Australians. In the past, people with disabilities were simply excluded from society — locked in institutions, segregated into special schools, and hidden within the private realm of the family. Out of sight, people with disabilities were also out of mind. Today the overt presence of people with disabilities in the community has forced recognition of some of the issues they confront. When people with disabilities are women, they have all the issues relating to gender as well as those relating to disability. For example, evidence of the rape and sexual abuse of young women suggests that anywhere between 70 and 90 per cent of women with intellectual disabilities are victims of such crimes by the time they reach 18.2 Similarly, where people with disabilities are also members of groups targeted on racial grounds, they must confront issues relating to race as well those relating to disability. For example, no group of children is as at risk of being deaf or blind as indigenous Australians. It is well known that 70 per cent of schoolaged indigenous children in the Northern Territory suffer hearing loss because they do not have access to readily available antibiotics, and blindness is 10 times as prevalent in the indigenous community.3 Further, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare suggests that the rate of disability in the indigenous commu nity is twice that of the general population.4
