Background: Women and girls with disabilities, particularly refugees, face heightened risks of gender-based violence (GBV) due to intersecting vulnerabilities encompassing their gender, disabilities and displacement. Despite growing recognition of unique risks faced by them, there remains a lack of comprehensive theoretical integration which addresses this ‘triple vulnerability’, as existing research often treats these vulnerabilities in silos. A theory integration review was conducted to identify the theoretical gaps for understanding this ‘triple vulnerability’.
Methods: Various strings of keywords were used for a total of 10 subsets of intersections between the three domains, namely, refugee, GBV, and disability, across databases PubMed, Scopus, and BioMed Central. The inclusion criteria included studies from any three domains and studies focusing only on one domain published from 2000 to 2025. The exclusion criteria were studies published in non-English languages and case reports, duplicate publications, and conference abstracts. Relevant theories were filtered and mapped to four themes following thematic analysis: structural oppression, institutional oppression, interpersonal oppression, and individual vulnerability.
Results: It was found that there is a lack of theories used in studying the subsets “GBV + disability” and “disability + refugee + GBV”. After integrating the theories with major themes synthesized from existing literature, it was shown that there was a lesser number of theories relevant to “individual vulnerability” and “institutional oppression”. This reflects a lack of integrated models studying the health systems addressing the complex needs of disabled female refugees. Furthermore, theoretical frameworks are still non-existent in studying the inadequate inclusion in humanitarian and healthcare programming for disabled refugee females.
Conclusions: This research serves to guide future targeted interventions such as disability-inclusive humanitarian programming to systematically aid disabled refugee females. Future theoretical models may integrate gender-responsive health support systems to address intersectional vulnerabilities and ensure permanent accountability for inclusive health support programming and disabled refugee-centric healthcare models.
