Few people would argue against the notion that everybody has the right to express their sexuality without being discriminated against, so long as it does not hurt another person. But how should these rights be implemented in practice and whose responsibility is it? While most non-disabled people can consider sexuality to be private and something to manage on their own, the same may not be possible for many disabled people due to inaccessibility, negative attitudes, lacking knowledge among professionals, and legal restrictions.
This research seeks to explore disabled people’s lived experiences of barriers to achieving sexual health and wellbeing. Specifically, the project aims to investigate the diversity of sexual access needs by using an intersectional perspective, with special focus on impairment type, gender, sexual identity and age. This knowledge will be used for development of an empirically-based theoretical framework for sexual access, which can facilitate implementation of the sexual rights of people with varying access needs in accordance with the CRPD.
The research will adopt a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative and quantitative methodology. First, individual interviews and focus groups will be held to explore in depth people’s experiences and needs around sexual access. Second, a survey will be distributed to a wide sample of people with access needs in an effort to map the types and prevalence of sexual access issues.
This study advances two academic fields: making sexuality studies more complex by adding disability, and making disability studies more complex by adding sexuality. It is innovative in several respects; by departing from a social understanding of access needs rather than focusing on certain impairment categories, by connecting policy aims to lived experiences and exploring how they can be measured, and by developing a novel theoretical framework for sexual health and well-being that includes access needs.