Exploring the Requirements of Abuse Reporting for Persons with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Abstract

Incidents of abuse committed against persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) are woefully under-reported. One way of helping change this situation is to empower persons with I/DD with tools to self-report abuse. During abuse reporting the reporter is requested to provide a variety of information about the abuse and its context. In this paper wanted to understand which pieces of information are typically needed to successfully report abuse and whether persons with I/DD can provide them. Consequently, we conducted an exploratory survey of the staff at an adult protective services agency in our region and asked them about their experiences with receiving abuse self-reports by persons with I/DD. Overall, we found that persons with I/DD are typically able to provide enough information to successfully self-report abuse.