Children with Disabilities

9. Communication Barriers

Communication barriers mean that many disabled children including deaf children have difficulty reporting worries, concerns or abuse. 

Some disabled children do not have access to the appropriate language to be able to disclose abuse; some will lack access to methods of communication and/or to people who understand their means of communication. 

Even if a child can find the confidence and the means to tell about abuse, many of the avenues open to abused children such as telephone help-lines and school based counselling are inaccessible to many disabled children. 

There is significant vulnerability for children who use alternative means of communication and who have a limited number of people who they can tell, since these same people may be the abusers. 

There is often a lack of access to independent facilitators or people familiar with a child’s communication method. 

Research into children’s advocacy services has found that over two fifths of services could not provide advocacy for children and young people who do not communicate verbally and over a third of services could not provide advocacy for children with autism. 

Although there have been some developments in the provision of appropriate vocabulary in augmented communication systems researchers have found these are not widely used and that professionals have concerns about the levels of understanding that disabled children might have about concepts of abuse. (Gov.uk, July 2009)