Agora, at Guttmann Barcelona, is consolidated as an open space for debate and think on various topics. In this case, the last conference held in the Agora has been focused on disability and gender violence, deepening in the fact that violence against people with functional diversity often goes unnoticed and against which it is necessary to fight.

The talk by Asun Pié, social activist and professor of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the UOC, was about the differences between the medical-rehabilitative model and the social model in relation to people who suffer a disability and it put the focus  on gender-based violence on women with disabilities. That is a broader and more complex problem than not only as a double discrimination based on gender and capacitist discrimination.

For this reason, it is necessary to deep into the root causes of discrimination, claiming empowerment and the right to decide on one's own body and one's lifestyle. Asun Pié, also, denounced how there are cases of normalization of violence towards people with disabilities. That goes beyond physical aggression, and in many cases is verbal and emotional. Often this discrimination comes from the caregivers themselves, who many times they are family members of the person with disabilitie, so that it is essential to develop systems where these people can denounce and be heard.

Agora will continue to make proposalswith the aim of presenting and disseminating the debate of ideas around the issues that are part of the social commitment of the Institut Guttmann.