NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF KOREA Submission to the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – July 2022 Article 16 Freedom from Exploitation, Violence and Abuse 16 Investigation of abuse cases against persons with disabilities and protection of victims, etc □ Current status and problems ㅇ The government has a victim support system by crime types such as violent crimes, sexual violence and domestic violence as well as a support system by victim types such as children, the elderly, and the persons with disabilities. However, both systems exclude persons with disabilities as they do not consider disabilities. Counseling centers and shelters in charge of persons with disabilities are having a hard time due to insufficient material and human resources. ㅇ There are 18 Advocacy Agencies for Persons with Disabilities including 1 central and 17 regional, and this means one agency for every 146,000 registered persons with disabilities by region. Moreover, with only 3-4 employees at each agency, they are suffering from a shortage of manpower and budget. For this reason, they are having difficulties in providing rescue and follow-up care for victims. In addition, improvement is urgent for some of the shelters as space is not divided by gender in some shelters, or characteristics of disabilities or individual households (mental illness, challenging behavior, accompanying parents and children) are not considered, making it difficult to use the facility. ㅇ According to the data from the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the number of counseling cases of sexual violence against persons with disabilities are increasing from 20,886 cases in 2016 to 35,379 cases in 2020, but there are only 28 sexual violence counseling centers, 7 shelters for victims of sexual violence, 4 counselling centers for domestic violence and 2 shelters for the victim of domestic violence.18 ㅇ In addition, as there is no measure to support self-reliance after leaving the shelter, disabled victims of abuse, sexual violence, and domestic violence are entering residential facilities or returning to places of violence, exposing themselves to the risk of sexual or domestic violence. 32