Responsive services to address gender-based violence against women with disabilities

ended

In the European Union, 40 million women with disabilities (WWD) are vulnerable to gender-based violence, whether in the forms of physical, psychological or virtual injuries. However, both specialised and mainstream support service providers, as relevant professionals, still fail to prevent gender-based violence against WWD and support them in a person-centred way. The RESPONSE project proposes to bring together the different relevant actors to increase stakeholders’ knowledge and capacity about rights-based and gender-responsive services in addressing gender-based violence against WWD. We aim to enable the knowledge flowing from the disability sector to the victims’ rights sector and vice-versa, creating an ultimate space for joint learning and cooperation. The project will start with a State-of-the-art report at both EU and partner country levels. Following this, we will produce a Training & Awareness Raising manual in four languages and a series of capacity building workshops. This will help to implement concrete measures in real situations. Finally, in order to multiply the reaching out the potential of the RESPONSE project, (a) partners will run a raising awareness campaign, (b) the manual will be turned into a Massive Online Open Course which will be openly available (EN) at EASPD´s existing e-learning hub and (c) a final European event will be organised to disseminate policy recommendations and mark the setting up of an informal collaborative network. RESPONSE will create short-term new experiences and insights for both specialised and mainstream service providers on how to develop gender-responsive services to address and prevent gender-based violence and for WWD on how to truly participate in such a process. Improved stakeholder cooperation will be the logical result in the medium term. The long-term impact will be the better integration of services resulting in more sustainable services and increased quality of life of WWD and their families.