Disabled people in the United States experience violent crime at rates nearly four times higher than their non-disabled peers. This is not incidental. It reflects structural conditions—dependency on caregivers, institutional living arrangements, communication barriers that silence disclosure—that perpetrators recognize and exploit. Yet when we examine how justice systems respond to these victims, we find architecture designed for a narrow band of human experience, one that assumes victims can speak, walk, see, hear, and process information in standardized ways.

The result is a compounding of harm. The original victimization is followed by what Judith Herman identified as secondary traumatization embedded in institutional responses—systems that demand victims adapt to processes rather than adapting processes to victims. For disabled crime victims, this secondary harm is not an aberration of the system. It is the system functioning as designed, built on assumptions of able-bodiedness that render entire populations functionally invisible.

Understanding this failure requires analyzing three interconnected dimensions: the specific vulnerability patterns that disability creates in relation to victimization, the concrete ways justice processes and victim services exclude disabled participants, and the universal design frameworks that could restructure these systems toward genuine accessibility. Each dimension reveals not merely gaps to be filled but foundational assumptions to be dismantled and rebuilt with disabled victims at the center of the design process.

The relationship between disability and victimization vulnerability is not simply one of physical limitation. It is structural. People with disabilities frequently depend on others for intimate personal care—bathing, dressing, medication management, transportation. This dependency creates power asymmetries that mirror the dynamics of coercive control. When the person who helps you eat is also the person harming you, the calculus of disclosure and escape fundamentally changes. Perpetrators understand this arithmetic, even if justice systems do not.

Institutional settings amplify these dynamics considerably. Group homes, residential care facilities, and psychiatric institutions concentrate vulnerable individuals under conditions of limited autonomy and external oversight. Research consistently demonstrates that institutional residents face elevated rates of physical, sexual, and financial victimization. Yet disclosure mechanisms within these environments assume a level of independence and communicative capacity that residents may not possess. The very conditions meant to provide care become conditions that enable harm.

Perpetrators targeting disabled victims frequently occupy positions of trusted access—caregivers, service providers, family members, fellow residents. This pattern complicates conventional victim service frameworks that assume a victim can physically separate from the perpetrator. For a person who relies on their abuser for daily survival needs, safety planning requires not just a protective order but an entirely restructured care system. Without that restructuring, the choice between safety and survival is no choice at all.

Communication-related disabilities create particular vulnerabilities around disclosure and credibility. Victims who use augmentative communication devices, who have intellectual disabilities affecting narrative coherence, or who process and express trauma differently face systematic credibility discounting. Law enforcement and prosecutors often interpret communication differences as unreliability. The perpetrator's word carries weight precisely because it conforms to expected narrative structures. The victim's account is dismissed not because it is untrue but because it is delivered differently.

What emerges is a vulnerability ecology—an interconnected system of dependency, isolation, communication barriers, and credibility deficits that perpetrators navigate with devastating effectiveness. Addressing victimization vulnerability requires moving beyond individual risk-factor models toward systemic interventions that redistribute power, expand communicative recognition, and disrupt the conditions that make disabled people structurally available targets. Prevention, in this framework, is inseparable from disability justice itself.

Takeaway

Vulnerability to victimization is not an inherent property of disability—it is produced by structural conditions of dependency, isolation, and communicative exclusion that perpetrators recognize and exploit, and that meaningful prevention must dismantle.

The failures begin at first contact. Emergency response systems—911 dispatch, police arrival, emergency medical services—are built around verbal communication and rapid information exchange. A Deaf victim who cannot use a voice telephone, an autistic victim whose communication patterns are misread as noncompliance, a victim with a traumatic brain injury who cannot provide a linear account of events—each encounters a system that interprets their disability as an obstacle to its process rather than a failure of its design.

Courtroom proceedings present particularly acute accommodation failures. The adversarial process demands specific cognitive and communicative capacities: sustained attention, rapid verbal exchange, the ability to withstand aggressive cross-examination, consistent narrative production under stress. For victims with intellectual disabilities, psychiatric conditions, or neurological differences, these demands are not neutral procedural requirements. They are gatekeeping mechanisms that determine whose victimization counts as legally cognizable. When a victim cannot perform credibility according to court expectations, cases collapse before they reach a verdict.

Victim services organizations—shelters, crisis centers, counseling programs—often replicate these exclusions despite their protective mission. Domestic violence shelters frequently lack wheelchair accessibility, sensory-friendly environments, or staff trained in communicating with people who have intellectual disabilities. Crisis hotlines operate primarily through voice telephone. Trauma counseling models assume verbal processing and standard cognitive function. The services designed to support victim recovery are architected around an imagined victim whose body and mind conform to normative expectations.

Information accessibility compounds these failures at every stage. Victim rights notifications, safety planning materials, court documents, and service intake forms are typically produced in standard print, at advanced reading levels, without plain-language alternatives, visual supports, or accessible digital formats. A victim who cannot read the rights notification cannot exercise those rights. A victim who cannot comprehend the intake form cannot access the service. Information inaccessibility functions as de facto exclusion, regardless of what the law technically entitles.

These failures are not a collection of individual oversights. They represent a design philosophy in which justice processes and victim services were built around a prototype victim—someone ambulatory, neurotypical, sighted, hearing, and verbally fluent. Every deviation from that prototype requires an accommodation, framing disability access as an exception rather than a baseline design requirement. This philosophy ensures that disabled victims must repeatedly prove their right to participate in systems ostensibly created to serve them.

Takeaway

When a system requires victims to individually request and justify accommodations in order to participate, it has built exclusion into its architecture—true accessibility means designing for human variation as the default, not the exception.

Universal design, as applied to justice processes, begins with a fundamental reorientation: instead of designing for the prototypical victim and retrofitting accommodations, systems are designed from the outset for the widest possible range of human variation. This is not merely a logistical shift but an epistemological one. It requires justice system actors to abandon the assumption that standardized processes are neutral and to recognize that accessibility is a precondition of justice, not an administrative addendum to it.

In practice, this means rebuilding communication infrastructure across every justice touchpoint. Police interviews should routinely offer multiple communication modalities—visual supports, plain-language questioning, augmentative device compatibility, trained intermediaries. Courtroom procedures should incorporate communication facilitation as standard practice rather than exceptional accommodation. Victim services intake should default to multi-format, multi-literacy-level design. When multiple communication pathways are embedded in the system's architecture, they become available to everyone without requiring individual victims to request and justify them.

Physical and environmental design must extend beyond basic ADA compliance toward genuine trauma-informed space. Sensory-friendly interview rooms, adjustable furniture, quiet waiting areas, and clear wayfinding systems benefit not only disabled victims but anyone experiencing trauma-related sensory overload or cognitive disruption. This is the practical dividend of universal design: what is necessary for some improves the experience for all. Trauma-informed environments and disability-accessible environments are not parallel projects but convergent ones, sharing core principles of safety, predictability, and user control.

Cognitive accessibility requires perhaps the most significant systemic transformation. Justice processes are complex, multi-step, and terminology-laden. Universal design demands plain-language defaults for all communications, visual process maps that orient victims to each stage, decision-support frameworks that present options clearly, and pacing accommodations that allow adequate processing time. These are not simplifications that diminish the process. They are clarifications that make the process genuinely comprehensible—and therefore genuinely participatory for every victim who enters it.

Implementing these frameworks requires moving beyond individual accommodation requests toward systemic capacity building. This means disability competency embedded in professional training across all justice roles, standing partnerships with disability service organizations, accessibility audits as standard operational practice, and disabled people themselves involved in system design from the earliest stages. The expertise of people with lived experience of disability and victimization is not supplementary to this work. It is the indispensable foundation without which universal design remains aspiration rather than functional reality.

Takeaway

Universal design is not about simplifying justice for some—it is about clarifying justice for all, recognizing that what is necessary for disabled victims improves access, comprehension, and participation for every person the system serves.

The systematic exclusion of disabled crime victims from justice processes and services is not a collection of unfortunate gaps. It is the predictable outcome of systems designed around normative assumptions about who victims are and how they communicate, move, think, and process harm. Addressing it demands structural redesign, not piecemeal accommodation layered onto unchanged foundations.

The frameworks outlined here—vulnerability ecology analysis, accommodation failure mapping, and universal design implementation—offer a systematic approach to that redesign. They shift the burden from individual disabled victims, who must currently fight for access to systems meant to serve them, to the institutions themselves, which must demonstrate their capacity to serve all victims equitably and without exception.

Victim-centered justice that excludes disabled victims is a contradiction in terms. The measure of any justice system's commitment to those harmed by crime is found not in its treatment of those who fit its design but in its response to those who require the most from it—and who have historically received the least.