Alexandra Rutherford

Women with disabilities experience high rates of violence and harassment, yet meaningful violence prevention interventions providing the opportunity to learn how to be active agents in their own self-protection are virtually non-existent. To understand why, we draw on insights from feminist disability studies to explore some of the unexamined assumptions and discourses in gender-based violence prevention research. We then apply a feminist critical discourse analysis to focus groups with blind and partially sighted women to explore their talk about violence and self-defence to understand how they portray self-protective measures, and what practices those portrayals engender. We discerned three portrayals: self-protective measures as necessary against strangers, a delimited responsibility, and an effective means to an end. These portrayals and their subsequent practices demonstrate how the participants navigate violence while living with vision loss. We also consider the implications of our analysis for future directions in gendered violence prevention research.