People With Disabilities and Violent Victimization in the Heartland: Results from the First Phase of the West Virginia Community Quality of Life Survey

Abstract

Studies of violent victimization in rural and remote parts of the U.S. are in short supply and the bulk of those done so far focus mainly on man-to-woman violence in intimate relationships among people without disabilities. There is, indeed, a major need to broaden the focus of rural victimological research to include violence against people with disabilities, which is the main objective of this article. Relying on original exploratory data generated by the first phase of the West Virginia Community Quality of Life Survey (WVCQLS), population estimates of four types of violent victimization are presented: stalking, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and hate and bias assaults. The results show that a large number of rural West Virginia residents with disabilities experience these forms of victimization. Directions for further empirical and theoretical work are discussed.