Physical Rehabilitation and Violence: Initiatives of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research

The paper presents an analysis of violence-related data from the National Spinal Cord Injury Database within the context of violence-related projects of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services. The National Spinal Cord Injury Database is managed by the Spain Rehabilitation Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which is one of 13 Model Spinal Cord Injury Care System centers funded under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. There are 1,732 cases of spinal cord injury (SCI) due to violence enrolled in the database. This enrollment provides a longitudinal sample, an analysis of which shows that African American individuals and persons of Hispanic origin represent an increasing percentage of new cases, and that an increasing percentage of individuals within these populations is incurring SCI as a result of violence.