Disabled women and austerity statistics

[womanformallyknownaswoman]

I keep looking at reports and find the depth of analysis is not nuanced enough around the effect of male violence on women’s capacity to earn. This is not my area of expertise as I'm not a statistician – I just like asking the questions….

I started here, Has 86% of the effects of austerity fallen on women. That’s high level and not bottom up. So I started to look for statistics on disabled women. Progressed to this WBG report on Disabled Women and Austerity. I have lots of questions I want answering and don't know where to find the answers, or if they exist. I emailed WBG who didn't have the answers. (They also ignored my request to stop conflating sex and gender by using such expressions as gender-based budgets ).

I looked into a source for that WBG report and found the following from the ONS :

• The GSS Harmonised Standards focus on a ‘core’ definition of people whose condition currently limits their activity. In summary the core definition covers people who report:
• (current) physical or mental health condition(s) or illnesses lasting or expected to last 12 months or more; and
• the condition(s) or illness(es) reduce their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.
• This differs from the DDA-based definition of disability previously used in the LFS in that it excludes the following groups which are “non-core” under the new Act:
• people with a progressive condition (specified in the Equality Act as HIV/AIDS, cancer or multiple sclerosis) that does not currently reduce their ability to carry out day-to-day activities.
• people whose activities would be restricted only without medication or treatment.
• As with all new questions, they are subject to ONS monitoring of responses for several quarters, and should therefore be interpreted with caution, especially when comparing with estimates for previous periods

Confused again

Re the WBG report itself, references are made about women being paid less than men, but without an indication as to what proportion of those deemed disabled are women, it’s hard to context it.

So the questions I want answering are:

1. In general, what is the definition of disabled for statistical purposes and does it capture ill health in women that cause incapacity to earn some extent? For example, if a woman has PTSD from DV:

a. PTSD is not necessarily counted as a disability.
b. The effects of PTSD are on a spectrum of disablement from partial to full.
c. Is the cause of the ill health captured eg born with; acquired through male violence / accident?

How are all these variances captured if at all?

2. Of all those registered as disabled in the UK, what percentage are women?

3. What is the actual number of disabled women including those with ill health (DWIH)?

4. What percentage of the total disabled is DWIH?

5. What percentage of those DWIH women are lone female parents?

6. What percentage of those disabled women are over 55 and over 65?

7. Within age ranges, what percentage are single/married/lone parent (both school age and adult children) / carer?

Is there a reliable repository of statistics on women that feminists can use to pull out the effects of austerity? Do the statistics about disability capture the full spectrum of the ill health of women, from partial to total disablement, from different causes - specifically male violence? Do the statistics further capture sex discrimination at play in women obtaining work of any kind as well as pay rates and does this vary by age?

I suspect the answer is no at all of the above.....

Can anyone provide a summary of what there is and what there is not?

Bump..

Those statistics are not kept. If they were, they would reveal another aspect of the impact of VAW and children, in a way that could not reasonably be ignored in a democracy.

There is evidence of 2 ways in which the statistics are manipulated downwards.

1. Reports of domestic violence are limited to 5 per person (I think per year.)

2. DV and rape statistics are only held for people between the ages of 16 and 74. This is a recent change; in previous years the upper limit was 59.
   2 years ago if a woman who was aged 60 was raped, the assault would not have been included in the statistics at all.

''Unlike estimates from face-to-face interviews, estimates from the self-completion module are not affected by the current method of handling high-frequency repeat victimisation, which caps the number of reported incidents at five''
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/domesticabusefindingsfromthecrimesurveyforenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2018

''Prevalence, long-term trends and attitudes towards domestic abuse experienced by women and men aged between 16 and 59 years and 60 to 74 years, based upon annual findings from the Crime Survey for England and Wales.''
www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/domesticabusefindingsfromthecrimesurveyforenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2018

So further down the page you can find stats on DV and disability, which states that disabled people at at a higher risk.

''those with a long-term illness or disability were more likely to be victims of domestic abuse in the last year than those without; this was true for both men (9.8% compared with 3.5%) and women (16.8% compared with 6.3%, Figure 8)''

Its also likely that disabled people find it harder to leave a situation where they are being abused, due to either poverty or housing needs, or both.
Its not hard to imagine the effect that would have on someone's mental health.

Its a complex problem, and generally the Govt isn't good at dealing with complex problems.

The dearth of data is shocking
The age and DV incidents cut off are similarly outrageous- the former because many older women are in DV - I know that where I am, circa 40% of those women murdered by their partner or "loved one"is over 50, so extrapolating one would expect similarly higher numbers of DV incidents to women over 50.