CW: Sexual Assault, Abuse & Neglect
Needing another person to care for you can leave someone extremely vulnerable. For people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, caregivers enter the most ordinary and private parts of life—places most people rarely have to think about letting someone else enter.
That tension sits at the center of a lawsuit involving D.B., a 30-year-old woman with an intellectual disability who lived in a state-run Stabilization and Crisis Unit in Salem, Oregon. She was supposed to be protected. According to the lawsuit, at least two staff members were required to supervise her at all times, including at least one woman. Yet the lawsuit alleges that inside the system responsible for keeping her safe, a caregiver drugged and sexually abused her. A $9 million lawsuit was filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. It accuses the state of Oregon of negligence and sexual battery. It also seeks extra damages for the alleged abuse of a vulnerable person. The allegations have not been resolved in court. What the lawsuit describes is difficult to separate from a much larger pattern of sexual violence against people with intellectual disabilities.
A yearlong NPR investigation, based on previously unpublished Justice Department data, found that people with intellectual disabilities were sexually assaulted at more than seven times the rate of people without disabilities. NPR also found they were more likely to be assaulted by someone they knew and that assaults often happened in places where they were supposed to be safe, sometimes involving someone they had been taught to trust and rely upon. Even that figure did not capture everyone. The Justice Department data relied on household surveys that excluded people living in institutions, and a government statistician told NPR that the rate was almost certainly an underestimate. The figures also excluded 373,000 people living in group homes.
That absence is difficult to overlook when reading about D.B. People living in residential settings may depend on others not only for occasional help but for the shape and rhythm of everyday life. Care can mean allowing someone into private moments because assistance is necessary, while trusting that the person providing it understands the boundaries that come with that access. For some disabled people, there may be no simple way to step outside that relationship when something begins to feel unsafe. The institution surrounding the caregiver is supposed to be part of what makes that dependence safe.
This is why the supervision requirements around D.B. matter. According to the lawsuit, the system had already recognized that she needed particular protections. Those safeguards were not created after something allegedly happened to her. They were supposed to be part of her care all along. When abuse is alleged inside a care system, it can be tempting to focus solely on the person accused of committing it. That is because doing so makes the failure easier to contain. But D.B.’s case resists that simplicity. If safeguards existed specifically to protect her, then what happened to those safeguards is part of the story too.
Sources:
Bernstein, Maxine. “Woman with Disability Sexually Abused by Caregiver at Oregon State Facility, $9 Million LawsuitAlleges.” The Oregonian/OregonLive, 20 Oct. 2026, https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2026/10/woman-with-disability-sexually-abused-by-caregiver-at-oregon-state-facility-9-million-lawsuit-alleges.html .
Shapiro, Joseph. “The Sexual Assault Epidemic No One Talks About.” NPR, 8 Jan. 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/01/08/570224090/the-sexual-assault-epidemic-no-one-talks-about.