Rural Disabled Women’s Social Inclusion in Post-Armed Conflict Sri Lanka

This report describes the lives of women living with disability in rural Sri Lanka and is based on field work carried out in the North Central Province and Eastern Province of the country. The selection of these two provinces was based on the field presence of AKASA, the Association of Women with Disabilities, a small rural disabled women's advocacy group. The methods of data gathering focused upon group discussions and in-depth interviews. The findings that emerged from the qualitative data relate to several spheres of life: the personal, the family, the community, administrative regulations and the law. It was evident that 'disability' was not clearly identified as an abnormality. Rather, at the personal and the family level women living with disability had been encouraged to live a 'normal' life, coping as much as possible with their disability in environments that were not particularly accommodating of disability. This approach to disability is almost completely reversed at the community level where women experience marginalisation and other forms of restriction due to negative socio-cultural constructions of disability. According to the findings that emerged from the analysis of the interviews, the application of administrative regulations is irregular and, in certain cases, the scope of the regulations themselves was not clear to the stakeholders. Awareness of the applicable laws and the relevance of the human rights discourse to disability was low among the women who were interviewed. The findings from the interviews with women from the Eastern Province provided insight into the impact of the internal armed conflict on women living with disability. The armed conflict both caused disabilities and minimised the possibility of empowering women to live with disability. In the post-armed conflict context, due to interventions by non-governmental organisations and the more stable provision of services by the state, the quality of life of women living with disability has improved comparably. It was also evident that women from the two different ethnic groups, Sinhala and Tamil, were able to bridge the gap between them by working together in addressing the issues they faced due to their disabilities. A significant limitation of the findings of this report is the limited range of impairment type among the research participants. The women with disabilities interviewed for this research predominantly self-described as having a physical impairment. The life experiences of rural women living with cognitive and/or intellectual impairments are under-represented within the findings.