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Yoursay
Advocacy Tasmania
Employment and Australian Disability
Enterprises (ADEs)
This submission was authorised by Leanne Groombridge on 29 March 2022. For further comment, please contact ceo@yoursaytas.org.
Contents
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Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability
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Prevalence of violence
Your Say Advocacy Tasmania (Your Say Tas) is an independent, client-directed advocacy provider that operates in Tasmania. Your Say Tas’ advocacy services exist to support our clients to have their own say, be heard and understood, and to address issues that affect their fundamental human rights. Among other groups, Your Say Tas supports people with disability who are seeking support to access or have their say with health and disability services, and who have experienced violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation in a range of contexts including in employment and in particular ADEs.
This submission is based on the reported experiences and expressed views of our recent clients. Where case studies have been provided, we have changed key details or merged the experiences of several clients to ensure the confidentiality of our clients is respected. These experiences are presented in conjunction with a consideration of the broader literature.
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Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability
Prevalence of violence Internationally, it is recognised that there is an increased risk of interpersonal violence experienced by people with disabilities (E Lund, ‘Interpersonal Violence against People with Disabilities: Additional Concerns and Considerations in the COVID-19 Pandemic’ (2020) 65 Rehabilitation Psychology 199, 199). Similarly, Australian research prepared for the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (DRC) found that people with disability are more likely to experience violence than people without disability, including physical violence, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, emotional abuse and stalking (Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health, Nature and Extent of Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation Against People with Disability in Australia, Research Report, 2021, 9 - 10).
People with disabilities also experience higher rates of sexual harassment than those without disabilities and women with disabilities experience high rates of sexual harassment than men with
disabilities (Australian Human Rights Commission, Everyone’s Business; Fourth National Survey on
Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces (2018), 8). However, data on financial abuse and exploitation, as well as bullying and discrimination, which are recognised as being experienced disproportionately by people with disability is not collected in Australia, (Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health, Nature and Extent of Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation Against People with Disability in Australia, Research Report, 2021, 16).
Previous information received by the DRC in response to the Employment Issues Paper identified the following key themes in relation to employment:
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Systemic neglect and discrimination against people with disability in job seeking and employment settings
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Higher incidence of violence in the workplace than their colleagues without disability, especially sexual violence, and bullying
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The ineffectiveness of ADEs as a pathway to open employment In line with these themes, ongoing bullying and abuse by fellow employees or managers in ADEs were the dominant issues reported by Your Say Tas clients. Since 1 July 2019, Your Say Tas has supported six clients specifically regarding making a complaint to management at an ADE based on bullying and/or abuse in the workplace.
Case Study: and ea• c•
sought the support of Your Say Tasto speak with management because he felt scared andc• unsafe in his workplace. He reported that a manager was verbally abusive and directed him to work in situations or environments that were unsafe. He had spoken about some incidents with management but not all because he experienced difficulties with communications and was fearful of the consequences of making a complaint.
sought the support of management about ongoing bullying from a fellow employee. The clientcca did not want to go to work as a result of the behaviour of the employee. ea• had previously spoken to management but the employee’s behaviour did not change.
Another issue raised was the lack of information about (or the lack of) a reporting pathway.
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Case Study: D
experienced bullying in an ADE but did not want to say anything because he felt that there0-was a power imbalance, and he didn’t want to be seen as a trouble-maker. He was also aware that there was no reporting pathway in the organisation based on prior experience, so he had no confidence in any outcome following making a complaint.
Anecdotally, some clients indicated that they would like to work in other employment, but barriers existed to accessing other types of employment. While we have supported clients to communicate or deal with issues around ADEs in other capacities, these issues either did not have the ADE as the main subject of the advocacy issue, or did not involve taking complaints to or about the ADEs themselves. Due to the limitations of our IT systems, it is difficult to make a thorough analysis of all issues that have peripherally involved ADEs; however, some examples are given below:
Case Study: A
A• sought the support of Your Say Tasto assist in communications with her accommodation provider about her level of participation in daily activities, which included a placement at an ADE. A• reported that she had been working at the ADE ’Jor ages“, with her family members implying it had been decades. During the course of her advocacy issue, A-reported that she was unhappy with her ADE as they were not letting her work in the areas she wanted to. Aa stated that she wanted to try working in a customer-facing role to build those skills, and had initially been told the ADE would make a plan to facilitate this. However, it never happened; when A• queried it, she reported having been told she wasn’t capable ofit and that there was no point “wasting everyone’s time”. A accepted this and chose not to pursue the issue, but her family expressed anger, saying that A would be entirely capable oflearning with the right support, and that the ADE just used A.for cheap labour.
Case Study: B-
worked in an ADE where she did mainly dish washing and cleaning duties. She was working witha• an advocate to navigate her NDIS Plan review. Bllllstated that she wanted to get a job where she got paid properly, saying that she received only a few dollars an hour even though she could work “as fast as anyone else”. She expressed frustration that she had tried to speak to her ADE and other supports in her life about finding a pathway to a job in open employment, perhaps with NDIS funding for a support worker to assist her as necessary, but had found nobody was willing to help her.
Barriers to complaint It is also recognised that people with disabilities experience considerable barriers to reporting abuse, including fear or lived experience of not being believed because of disability, fear of retaliation from the perpetrator, inaccessible reporting mechanisms and lack of provider knowledge about the intersecting issues impacting abuse and disability (E Lund, ‘Interpersonal Violence against People with Disabilities: Additional Concerns and Considerations in the COVID-19 Pandemic’ (2020) 65 Rehabilitation Psychology 199, 201). These themes are also evident in Australian research that has identified challenges that exist both in reporting violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and in the lack of education about how to identify and report such conduct.
Your Say Tas has previously highlighted the limitations of self-reporting for persons with disability. While self-reporting allows a person with disability to determine for themselves what is an
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acceptable or unacceptable level of risk, there are significant practical, cultural and systemic barriers that can discourage people with disabilities from speaking up when they identify a risk.
The voices of people with disabilities in Tasmania have a history of disempowerment. It is the lived experience of many Your Say Tas clients with disabilities that speaking up about abuse and neglect frequently effects no change, or worse, attracts punishment. Many Your Say Tas clients describe a cost-benefit evaluation in which speaking up about abuse or neglect is not considered to be worth the effort and risk involved.
Barriers to speaking up about abuse and neglect reported by Your Say Tas clients include:
e Lack of knowledge about their rights, either in general or with specific services
e Lack of knowledge of complaints and reporting mechanisms
e Lack of support to communicate and engage with the required systems
e Lack of transparency and accountability among services, making it difficult to demonstrate where risks occur
e Ineffectiveness of existing complaints and reporting mechanisms in practical terms, especially regarding prevention of abuse (as opposed to incident response) Fear of punishment or previous negative experiences around complaints and reporting Negative cultural perceptions of complaints and reporting
e Lack of resources or basic stability (e.g. needing to prioritise their time, energy or financial resources to deal with other matters, such as housing or health problems)
A regular experience reported by Your Say Tas clients is that of being considered an ‘unreliable witness’ because of a perceived lack of capacity to report crimes reliably. In the context of the criminal justice system, a significant number of Your Say Tas clients with disability have experienced an investigating police officer dismiss their concerns and not progress their reporting of violent and abusive behaviour. Many Your Say Tas clients report that this ‘unreliable witness’ effect extends into other areas of their daily lives, leading to them not being believed when making reports about their symptoms, support needs, or other experiences. This cultural attitude allows the voices of people with disabilities to be silenced and overruled when they try to self-advocate for their rights and needs, or to report violence, abuse, neglect or exploitation.
A significant issue highlighting concerns around the believability of sexual abuse in an ADE arose in the case study of SIE:
Case Study: Sill
SHB worked for an ADE and disclosed an incident of sexual assault by a manager. She reported this to another person within the management chain in the organisation and was not believed on the basis that she had agreed to go out to dinner with the manager, and so she was told that the conduct was consensual.
Education and access to advocacy
Education in relation to the identification of inappropriate conduct and the existence of rights in the workplace is also a key issue to address violence in employment. It is Your Say Tas’ experience, highlighted in previous submissions, that many people with disability in the community have a poor understanding of human rights in a general sense, let alone context- or service-specific rights. Anecdotally, this issue seems to be more severe in Tasmania than in other states. Significantly in the
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context of ADEs, there were very few direct reports to Your Say Tas of violent conduct or concerns in relation to exploitation.
Most directly reported issues related to a single ADE employer where Your Say Tas has historically conducted regular education sessions with the support of management. This is not to suggest that this employer was unique in the level of abuse/bullying in the workplace, but to indicate that a lack of awareness of rights and the existence of advocacy support presents a barrier to seeking assistance. Indeed, given that the majority of formal ADE issues came from that ADE employer, which had gone to some efforts to facilitate access to advocacy, it should be considered that those issues represent a sample where the ADE is proactively attempting to support the rights of the people with disability it employs. It is concerning to consider what sorts of issues may be occurring at other ADEs which have been approached by Your Say Tas over the years, but which have denied advocates access to the premises.