Cripping Feminist Social Work: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness, Epistemic Injustice, and Sexual Violence Against Disabled People

Sexual violence against disabled people is well documented epidemiologically and forcefully denounced politically, yet it has rarely been theorized as a product of the ordinary organization of care. This conceptual article develops such a theorization from the medico-social systems of Belgium and France, where residential facilities remain the primary infrastructure of support for many disabled people and independent safeguarding is weak. Drawing on crip theory, feminist disability studies, epistemic injustice frameworks, and disability justice, we argue that forced intimacy (Mingus, M. (2017, August 6). Forced intimacy: An ableist norm. Leaving Evidence . https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/forced-intimacy-an-ableist-norm/) is not one risk factor among others but the structural medium through which normative and epistemic systems are joined. Because intimate bodily access is mandated and routinized as care, it produces exposure to violation and, in the same movement, disables its recognition: epistemic injustice operates before disclosure, foreclosing the resources through which violation could be named, and not only after it, in the discounting of testimony already given. We trace how disclosures are subsequently absorbed—through reattribution of signs to impairment, preemptive disqualification of the disabled person's account, and diffusion of reporting responsibility—and argue that the analysis is portable beyond this regime, to other configurations in which relational or bodily access is professionally mandated and interpretive authority professionally held. Implications for feminist social work practice, education, and research are discussed.