Author: Natalie Parmenter
Parmenter, Natalie, 2024 Exploring lived experiences of personal safety in supported accommodation with people with intellectual disability, Flinders University, College of Nursing and Health Sciences
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All people have a right to live in homes where they feel safe. This is not always the case for people with intellectual disability living in supported accommodation. This research privileges the voices of people with intellectual disability on how they understand and enact their right to safety. The existing literature has focused on barriers to safety such as isolation, uneven distributions of power, feeling ignored, being disrespected, and having difficulties accessing justice after abuse or exploitation. Research gaps reveal a need for further understanding of how people’s sense of ‘home’ helps conceptualise their sense of safety. Earlier research also identified a need to explore how people identified risk within the home and how they preferred to manage their safety from their own situational context.
In order to privilege the lived experience and expertise of people with intellectual disability who live in group homes, a narrative study underpinned by post-structuralist feminism and inclusive citizenship was used to address the research aims. The unique contribution this research offers is its employment of post-structuralist feminism as an epistemological tool to extract further meaning about what it means to feel and be safe at home. An inclusive citizenship framework was adopted to support the human rights framing. The research was centred around direct collaboration with people with intellectual disability who live in supported accommodation. The research method was a three-phase interview series with people accessing supported accommodation across two providers in Queensland, Australia.
The findings revealed several collective understandings of what it means to feel and be safe at home. Several participants explained their experiences of safety by recalling times when they did not feel safe. People’s sense of safety was often at odds with their experience of home. Disrespect, confrontation and loneliness resulted from limitations on control over their own space, being treated unequally or unfairly among other residents, not having their experiences validated and feeling alone, even in the company of others. Factors enhancing experiences of safety at home included having support to make choices about where and with whom they live, having strong bonds of trust with those closest to them, and learning to manage situations of safety independently or with assistance. People felt greater safety when they felt a sense of belonging, respect and dignity.
The research demonstrated that people with intellectual disability living in supported accommodation understand what conditions need to be met in order for them to feel safe. Their right to safety at home is compromised by multiple barriers. Their sense of justice is complicated by restrictions on their freedom and capacity to make decisions. People living in supported accommodation want to take more control and be able to resolve situations with greater independence. Their experience of solidarity will be increased if they can sustain and maintain meaningful connections inside and outside their home and have greater determination over with whom and where they live. This study has demonstrated that listening to people living in supported accommodation alone is insufficient. People with intellectual disability should be able to expect that, if they share what they want and need, community attitudes need to advance whereby their needs will be met with equal urgency as those of people without disability.
Keywords: intellectual disability, supported accommodation, safety, home, lived experience, post-structuralist feminism, inclusive citizenship, human rights, research gaps, risk identification, control, trust, justice, autonomy, community attitudes, solidarity
Subject: Disability Studies thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Nursing and Health Sciences
Supervisor: Professor Sally Robinson