Safe Spaces, Strong Voices: Protecting Women and Youth under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Introduction

The twentieth anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) offers a moment for honest reckoning: the Convention has shifted global norms and catalysed legislative reform across regions, but an unacceptable gap endures between rights on paper and rights in daily life. Women and girls with disabilities face disproportionate rates of gender-based violence – in homes, in institutions and increasingly in digital spaces – while survivors are systematically failed by inaccessible justice systems. Young people with disabilities remain under-resourced, under-heard and under-protected.

At the nineteenth session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention (COSP19), held in June 2026 at United Nations Headquarters in New York, the international community examined the CRPD implementation deficit two decades on, the structural dimensions of disability-based violence, the emerging threat of technology-facilitated abuse, and the evidence-based pathways that can translate the promise of CRPD into practice.¹

Rights in law, but not in life: the enduring gap in disability rights

When Lina,² a woman with disabilities from Vanuatu, became pregnant, her family told her she could not care for herself, let alone a child. They feared her baby might inherit a disability and viewed her pregnancy not as a source of joy, but as “another burden”. She faced rejection and violence from those closest to her. Yet what hurt most was the denial of her autonomy.

"They did not care that as a person with a disability I can make my own decision," Lina shared, underscoring exactly why – two decades after its adoption – CRPD remains so critical: when disability and gender intersect, particularly in the context of reproductive decision-making and the provision and receiving of care, discrimination is compounded, violence becomes normalized, and the absence of accessible services, social protection and support systems can leave women and girls with no safe alternatives.

CRPD marked a watershed in international human rights law, driving a profound paradigm shift away from charity or pity, and towards rights, autonomy and full equality in society. Yet two decades later, while legal and policy frameworks have proliferated globally, progress towards ensuring the daily safety of individuals with disabilities continues to be hindered. As one youth advocate captured it during COSP19, “Rights exist in law, but not in life.”

Twenty-four million reached: breaking the invisibility with data and services

For the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), addressing these gaps is central. UNFPA prioritizes disability-inclusive sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and centres the principle of Leaving No One Behind in its 2026–2029 Strategic Plan. These efforts are backed by its corporate disability inclusion strategy, “We Matter. We Belong. We Decide”, and are aligned with the new United Nations Disability Inclusion Strategy, UNDIS 2.0 (2026–2030).

A prime vehicle for catalysing change is the UNFPA We Decide Global Programme. Launched in 2016 and supported by the Government of Spain, this initiative has been instrumental in translating policy into practice across more than 80 countries. Through these efforts, between 2022 and 2025 alone, UNFPA reached over 24 million women and youth with disabilities globally, expanding accessible gender-based violence (GBV) and SRHR services.

For UNFPA, data visibility remains essential; without inclusive population data and its subsequent analysis, persons with disabilities remain invisible in policies and resourcing. By embedding the Washington Group Short Set of Questions on Disability into national censuses, UNFPA has helped drive the global inclusion of disability data in censuses from 33 percent in 2018 to 73 percent in 2020.

The new frontiers of gender-based violence against persons with disabilities

The intersection of gender, disability and violence generated a great sense of urgency at COSP19. Women and girls with disabilities are three times more likely to experience physical, sexual or emotional violence than persons without disabilities, and an estimated 40 to 68 per cent of young women with disabilities will experience sexual violence before the age of 18. Globally, one in five women is affected by structural and intersectional disability-based violence, and women with disabilities in particular are up to 10 times more likely than women without disabilities to experience sexual violence.

UNFPA moved beyond rhetoric to showcase practical, field-tested innovations. During its signature COSP19 side event on 10 June 2026 – "Safe Spaces, Everywhere: Advancing Practical Solutions to End Gender-Based Violence Against Women and Young Persons with Disabilities in Physical and Digital Spaces” – UNFPA and partners presented actionable blueprints.

At COSP19, UNFPA also showcased work under the United Nations Joint Programme on Unpaid Care, Disability and Gender - Transformative Approaches, funded by the Global Disability Fund. For instance, in Mozambique, the programme successfully pioneered visual communication tools like the Serial Picture Album, a breakthrough that bypassed literacy and speech barriers to help individuals with intellectual or hearing disabilities access SRHR services with newfound confidence.

Yet, as physical spaces become more inclusive, the frontiers of abuse are rapidly evolving. Twenty years ago, the architects of CRPD could not have fully anticipated the digital environments the treaty would need to address. Beyond the physical realm, technology-facilitated gender-based violence is a growing crisis that disproportionately affects women and girls with disabilities. For instance, smart-home manipulation, digital surveillance and the remote disabling of assistive technologies are actionable forms of abuse requiring urgent recognition in legal frameworks.

To confront these threats head-on, UNFPA engagement in COSP19 side events included highlighting its Making All Spaces Safe programme, positioning it as a model for extending harm-prevention frameworks into digital environments. Participants urged technology platforms to embed universal design and accessibility into digital safety infrastructure from the outset, and called for the co-design of digital literacy programmes with women with intellectual and psychosocial disabilities as a matter of urgency.

Who decides? Elevating meaningful participation and leadership

A recurring theme throughout COSP19 was the need to move beyond symbolic inclusion. True implementation of CRPD requires a fundamental shift from superficial consultation to structural power-sharing. When women and young persons with disabilities are absent from decision-making, their realities remain unseen, and solutions are designed without them.

Leadership development must be recognized not merely as a consultation exercise, but as a core GBV prevention strategy.

As stressed by youth advocates during the conference, empowerment and meaningful participation are non-negotiable rights. Realizing these rights requires equipping young people with disabilities with the power, resources and access needed to shape the systems that affect their lives. It is for this reason that UNFPA and Women Enabled International developed Our Bodies, Our Rights!, a curriculum that trains facilitators with disabilities to become community inclusion champions in countries such as Botswana, China, Fiji, Nigeria and Panama.

Twenty years of CRPD have proven that the world knows how to write rights on paper. The next two decades will be judged entirely by whether those rights are tangibly felt in daily life. To turn these commitments into a lived reality, we must back these laws with resilient, targeted budgets.

We cannot expect to build a truly safe and equal world using only the rhetorical promises of the past; we must finance the change directly and ensure that organizations of persons with disabilities are positioned as the primary architects of their own future.

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