Bridging Communities, Advancing Rights

The Meeting Place is a brief and accessible selection of recent highlights and opinions, relevant for children with disabilities. Led by Disability Rights International, and in collaboration with the Global Coalition on Deinstitutionalization (GC-DI) and Lumos Foundation, the initiative works to bring together two global communities: those working on children’s rights and those advancing disability rights. 

IN FOCUS: Freedom from Violence

In this issue, we spotlight the right to freedom from violence. We will feature voices of survivors and experts by experience, academics and researchers, and outline key considerations, opportunities and resources.

"Violence, no love"

By Laurie Ahern, President, Disability Rights International (DRI)

I know violence. Unloved and unwanted. 

I grew up with a father who beat me with a leather belt and sexually abused and raped me. My mother looked the other way and hit me whenever she was in the mood. There was never a hug. Neither of them ever said they loved me. Rather, they often told me they wished they never had me. 

Violence against children – those with disabilities and many who will come to be disabled by living in an orphanage or institution – are regularly faced with a life of cruelty and abuse. 

Those of us who investigate inside the walls of these facilities have often seen the heinous forms of violence – physical and sexual attacks, lack of medical care, filthy surroundings, no books or toys or activities, tied to beds and cribs for days or weeks, clothes and beddings with a vile smell of urine and feces, and with teeth pulled out and stitches put in without any anesthesia because we were told, “Children with disabilities don’t feel pain.”  

Deprivation in so many ways - brutal and barbaric.

But there is one that can be the deadliest – lack of love. Babies and children must have touch, individual attention and love to survive. Even with food and medicine, without love they are likely to die. Known as “Failure to Thrive.” 

In the beginning of the 20th century, in the U.S. and UK, infants placed in orphanages, nurseries and what was called foundling hospitals, had death rates close to 100%. 

Most did not die from starvation or disease, but rather – void of love.

I am still alive today because a loving aunt took me in when I needed it the most – as a child. 

To end violence against children we must close the doors of institutions and orphanages, and support those who can surround them with love.                                                          

Addressing the violence of institutionalisation at Manila

By Lumos Foundation

There are clear links between violence as a driver of entry into care and as a risk within care systems: Lumos also views the institutionalisation of children as a form of violence itself. However, VAC and care are often considered separately, and children in alternative care are often missing from comprehensive evidence generation and efforts to end violence against children. In particular, we know that children with disabilities are not only more likely to experience the violence of institutionalisation than their peers without disabilities, but are also more likely to experience violence within institutions. 

Cross-sectoral advocacy is crucial to attempt to overcome this divide. This was apparent in efforts leading toward the 1st Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against (VAC)[DC1]  that took place in Bogota in November 2024, and brought together 103 governments to make formal pledges, marking an unprecedented milestone in child protection.

Lumos, BCN and the Open University conducted a qualitative content-based review of government pledges made during Bogota. Whilst VAC was the central focus of all pledges, explicit attention to alternative care and care reform was limited and uneven, with only a small subset of governments directly referenced a transition from residential care to family-based alternatives.  A small number of pledges did refer to the situation of children with disabilities within care systems; Austria, Rwanda, and Sweden all referenced plans to support children with disabilities to remain in family-based care, or be supported to live independently where appropriate.

In the lead up to the second global ministerial conference on EVAC in Manila, now is the time to influence and ensure that the critical intersection of VAC, Care and the rights of children with disabilities is not overlooked! 

There are various ways you can get involved:

• Read up on the VAC and Care pledges: https://oro.open.ac.uk/108515/9/108515.pdf 
• Try to get involved with the National Preparatory Session in your country for the Manila conference – details of these should be provided by UNICEF in the next couple of months. You can look back at the pledges made by your government at the last conference, and encourage them to commit to tangible actions related to care reform for children with disabilities. 
• Attend, support and share Satellite Events at the conference linking Care and VAC in November 2026 
• Both these sessions, and directly influencing the official Ministerial delegation that will be attending Manila in November 2026 is a great opportunity to:  
  • Advocate for the embedding of disability-inclusive alternative care, reform of systems and family strengthening more explicitly within VAC strategies, ensuring commitments are accompanied by financing and transparent monitoring.
  • Encourage stronger pledges linking VAC and care, explicitly including the rights of children with disabilities, with measurable targets, resourcing, and accountability mechanisms that can support implementation, and celebrate where these exist.

What being institutionalised taught me about resistance

By Rachel Litchman

"…Home was an awful place where I experienced sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. These were the reasons that almost every child, like me, ended up in the institution in the first place. And yet, home was also a place I had the autonomy to escape — in school, at the library, on long bike rides through the forest preserve. The institution, however, made escape an impossibility, segregation total, and abuse a matter of protocol.”

Read More

Ableism as Violence

An interview with Professor Angharad Beckett, FAcSS, FRSA, Centre for Disability Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds

Ableism produces measurable harm – to bodies, minds and lives. New publication by Prof. Angharad Beckett and Dr Miro Griffiths argues it should be understood not just as structural oppression, but as violence.

“Violence against disabled children very often wears the mask of care. Segregation and confinement are justified through benevolent-sounding language about protection, therapy and necessity, and smaller 'home-like' settings can reproduce exactly the same institutional logics. A family-like institution is still an institution. Child rights advocates need to look behind the language of care and ask who is actually being controlled, silenced and kept apart.”

Q1. Angharad, can you briefly explain how ableism is in itself violence and is not just a way of thinking that leads to violence?

This is the central argument of the book. Violence against disabled people is well documented, but it tends to be treated as a consequence of ableism, as if ableism were a set of prejudiced attitudes that sometimes spill over into harm. Miro and I think this gets things backwards. Violence isn't downstream of ableism; it's built into it. We describe ableism as a 'dispositif of violence', meaning a whole ensemble of discourses, institutions, laws, administrative measures and everyday practices that produces, normalises and legitimises harm against disabled people.

I should say we're not using 'violence' loosely or metaphorically here. Following the World Health Organization, we understand violence as the use of physical force or power, including neglect and acts of omission, that results in injury, death, psychological harm or deprivation. Like the British sociologist Sylvia Walby, we insist that violence has to produce real, measurable harm to people's bodies or minds. Where we disagree with her is on whether it requires physical contact. Withdrawing support, denying accessible services, systematically deprioritising the lives of persons with disabilities: none of this involves physical contact, yet it injures people, shortens lives, and damages mental health in ways that are well documented.

In the book we identify four forms this violence takes. Acts of commission are direct harm, such as hate crime or abusive restraint. Omission is neglect that causes real harm: the person left without food, care or medical attention, the accessible services never provided, the needs that go unmet until bodies and minds are damaged. Commission by omission covers deliberate decisions not to act: the doctor who chooses not to treat, the professional who chooses not to believe. And omission by commission describes policies that actively strip away support and protection, like cuts to disability benefits or social care. When a 'Do Not Resuscitate' order is placed on someone's file without their consent, or a child is classified as having 'no prospects' and confined for life, that isn't thinking that leads to violence. It is violence, and it's structured, systematic and sustained.

Q2. This is a newsletter that is meant to bring together activists in the children's and disability communities. Can you explain why ableism is a particular threat to children with disabilities?

Children with disabilities experience ableism in a particularly acute way because it intersects with their status as children. They have limited legal standing, little political voice, and few means of resisting. We know that they face disproportionate risks of abuse and neglect in every international context that's been studied, often within the very settings that claim to protect them. And when they do try to disclose, they are frequently disbelieved, or simply have no accessible way of reporting what has happened to them.

Confinement makes all of this worse. Around the world, children with disabilities are still routed into institutions, residential schools and units, often on the advice of professionals or because their families have received such inadequate support. Early confinement can set a child on a path towards lifelong institutionalisation. Classification does a lot of the work here. Labels like 'uneducable' or 'no prospects', which DRI's own researchers have documented, including in Ukraine, don't describe a child so much as decide their future, on the basis of a present-day judgement about their worth. When disabled children resist, their dissent gets reframed as 'challenging behaviour' or pathology, which then becomes further justification for controlling them.

Crises expose how disposable children with disabilities are considered to be. DRI's documentation of children with significant impairments being left behind during the evacuation of institutions in Ukraine is one of the starkest examples I know of ableism operating to determine whose lives are worth preserving.

Q3. What lessons about disability are particularly important for people in the children's community to understand?

I'd point to three things.

The first is that violence against disabled children very often wears the mask of care. Segregation and confinement are justified through benevolent-sounding language about protection, therapy and necessity, and smaller 'home-like' settings can reproduce exactly the same institutional logics. A family-like institution is still an institution. Child rights advocates need to look behind the language of care and ask who is actually being controlled, silenced and kept apart.

The second is that children with disabilities are not all passive victims. They resist, adapt and subvert; they possess what Liat Ben-Moshe calls 'complex personhood'. Their families are often their fiercest advocates too, though professionals routinely dismiss both. A great deal of harm could be prevented by listening to children, believing them, and taking their families' knowledge seriously. Connor Sparrowhawk, a young man with epilepsy and learning disabilities, drowned in a bath in an English health service assessment unit after staff dismissed his family's warnings. His death shows exactly what happens when we don't listen.

The third is that the answer isn't simply moving children out of large buildings. It's dismantling the assumptions that construct some children as needing "containment" in the first place, and investing in the family and community support that makes inclusion real. None of this is inevitable. Violence can be interrupted, and the children's and disability rights communities are natural allies in that work.

RIGHTS SPOTLIGHT:

Children’s Right to Access to Justice and to an Effective Remedy

By Taiwan Mad Alliance, member of TCI-Global

Wang Shiou-Wu, Founder of Taiwan Mad Alliance (TMA) and a TCI Fellow (2025), has made a Submission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for General Comment No. 27 on Children’s Right to Access to Justice and to an Effective Remedy.

The submission focuses on:

• Ensuring the rights and inclusion of children with disabilities
• Advancing deinstitutionalization and community-based alternatives
• Promoting child-led decision-making and meaningful participation

The submission strongly urges State Parties to fully implement the UN Guidelines on Deinstitutionalisation, to prohibit all forms of forced placement or institutionalization under the guise of “protection”, and to ensure that independent monitoring and access to remedies are available and accessible to all children, especially those with disabilities.

Read More

Left to Discretion: Child Victims with Disabilities in the Criminal Justice Systems in Austria, Romania and Serbia

By Validity Foundation and partners

“As victims of crime, children with disabilities are rights holders entitled to accessible information, procedural accommodations and communication support in criminal proceedings. The gaps documented in the report are widespread and show that, in practice, children with disabilities remain far from accessing justice on an equal basis.” 

Read more about the Project ENSURE and its outcome documents:

• The ENSURE project's International Synthesis Report looks at the barriers children with disabilities face as victims in the criminal justice systems of Austria, Romania and Serbia.
• The project has also produced a Model Rules-Based Process. This describes three support roles, the Special Representative, the Intermediary and the Support Person, and how each can help child victims with disabilities take part in proceedings and vindicate their right to access to justice.

Read More

KEY UPDATES AND OPPORTUNITIES:

Citizen Data: Disability Leadership in Monitoring Institutions Webinar

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026 

Time: 10am (ET)

Location: Zoom Webinar

Organized by: Disability Rights International (DRI) with support from the International Disability Alliance (IDA)

BACKGROUND

Throughout the world, millions of children and adults are segregated from society in institutions – orphanages, psychiatric hospitals, and other facilities. But government data is notoriously unreliable, and details of conditions in facilities are hard to come by. With support from IDA, DRI is putting on a series of online workshops to encourage and support advocacy groups to obtain documentation of institutional practices.

This introductory webinar addresses the need to monitor by non-governmental organizations, the right to access, and the use of citizen data to hold governments accountable. DRI will host a follow-up on children’s institutions. 

REGISTER & COMPLETE THE SURVEY

Register here to join the webinar on Sept 10th.

Please contribute to our survey on challenges to monitoring and need for skills development.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities holds its 35th Session

BACKGROUND

The 35th Session of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is scheduled to take place from 12-27 August 2026 at the Tempus Conference Room at the Palais des Nations. Provisional agenda, Program of work and Information note for stakeholders are available here.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE

Registration is now open: Register Here

Deadline: 27 August 2026

RELEVANT RESOURCES

Webinar examines overlap between international human right treaties

Protecting the rights of children with disabilities means drawing from the international law and enforcement mechanisms of two different human rights conventions – the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Chaired by UN CRPD Committee member Markus Scheffer at the UN Conference of States Parties, this webinar examines some of the challenges to enforcing rights based on two differing treaties.

Sponsored by the governments of Switzerland, Costa Rica, and New Zealand, the webinar was opened by Urs Germann, Head of the Federal Bureau for the Equality of Persons with Disabilities of Switzerland. He was followed by speakers from the Validity Foundation, the Human Rights Officer of the UN Petitions Unit, Disability Rights International, and Inclusion Handicap Switzerland.

Watch Now

GET INVOLVED:

You can help us advance disability inclusion by:

• Sharing testimonies - contribute personal experiences or examples that highlight barriers, progress, or lived realities of children and adults with disabilities
• Sharing this newsletter with your networks - help expand its reach by circulating it among colleagues, organizations, and communities who are engaged in or can support disability rights
• Proposing topics and content - suggest key issues, emerging trends, or specific areas that should be covered to ensure the newsletter remains relevant and impactful.

This newsletter is published by Disability Rights International with support from Lumos Foundation.

Disability Rights International (DRI) is a human rights advocacy organization dedicated to the protection and full community inclusion of children and adults with disabilities worldwide. DRI’s Worldwide Campaign to End the Institutionalization of Children is dedicated to promoting the recognition and enforcement of the right of all children to live and grow up with a family and not in any form of institution, orphanage, or group home. DRI is one of the founding members of the Global Coalition on Deinstitutionalization.

Lumos Foundation is an international non-governmental organisation working to realise every child’s right to grow up in a safe and loving family by transforming care systems around the world. Lumos works with governments, civil society, and international organisations to shift away from orphanages and other forms of institutional care towards family-based care and community-based services.