Where have all the Deaf feminists gone?

Part of my role with both my business and within my community is to facilitate workshops. Most of my workshops are around Deaf culture and access. Tomorrow I will be facilitating a workshop for hearing professionals who work with Deaf women who have experienced violence. I use violence as an all encompassing term to me anything from domestic violence, to stranger rape, to childhood abuse.

In researching for this workshop, I attempted to find some statistics relevant to the Deaf community. To my surprise there were none. There were many hypothesized stats, but nothing concrete. What is hypothesized and published is that 50% of Deaf women will experience violence in their life time. The basis of this is that these are the stats for the hearing population. I think this is flawed logic because of the societal perception of Deafness as a disability. The violence statistics for disabled women are much higher, closer to 90% of all women with disabilities will experience violence.

Beyond that, violence is not part of the discourse in our communities. Women don’t talk about these things at all. These are silent issues which are shrouded in denial by those who experience or witness it in the community. Without an active and continued discussion about the issues, important information is not passed through the community. I think as a Deaf feminist, and hopefully with fellow Deaf feminists reading this, we need to open up this conversation in our communities.

I have plans to do so, which are developing slowly. We shall see where it goes.