BY AJ TRAGER
YPSILANTI – In her Nov. 18 presentation, "Invisible Violence, Invisible Victims: The Health Related Consequences of Same-Sex and Intimate Partner Violence," at the Equality Knowledge Project conducted by the Equality Research Center at Eastern Michigan University, Bethany Coston discussed the most recent statistics on intimate partner violence (IPV) in the LGBT community.
Coston found that while LGBT people were more likely to experience IPV than their heterosexual counterparts, a third to a half of all LGBT individuals who do suffer physical injuries or emotional trauma from IPV do not ever reach out to a medical professional and the majority of LGBT survivors were not utilizing services at their local LGBT community center.
Historically, the focus of intimate partner violence and rape campaigns has largely showcased experiences of cisgender, heterosexual women. Even in the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women were not specifically mentioned aside from one paragraph that discussed areas of improvement and health disparities.
"Given the focus that history has had, that the government has had and our criminal justice system (has had), medical service providers, shelters and our academics have had on women as victims, you might finally be asking yourself, 'Well, how big is the problem of same-sex or LGBT intimate partner violence?'" Coston asked during her presentation.
The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey
The 2010 NIPSVS states that 65-75 percent of LGB people will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime.
In his 2014 PSA "It's On Us," President Obama states that 20 percent of women will experience sexual violence in their lifetime. However, in the results produced by the NIPSVS, straight women had a 65 percent chance, bisexual women had an 80 percent chance and heterosexual men had a higher than 20 percent chance of experiencing intimate partner sexual violence in their lifetime.
Coston ran tests against these percentages and found the discrepancy between LGBT experiences and heterosexual experiences to be significant.
"On all accounts of intimate partner violence, bisexual women experience it significantly more often than other women," Coston said.
Based on NIPSVS findings, physical violence rates are significantly higher than sexual violence rates against the LGBT community. Seventy percent of LGBT respondents reported suffering from at least one act of psychological violence and were more likely than most straight identified Americans to experience physical or sexual violence.
The NIPSVS study also looked at the rates of stalking in the LGBT community by partners or other individuals and again found that bisexual women were more likely to experience stalking than lesbians and gays.
"All statistics are higher than 45 percent – all of us have a 50 percent chance of getting stalked at some point by a current or former intimate partner," Coston said.
Coston's Research
Pulling from a telephone survey of 18,000 people, Coston used data from 7,000 LGBT identified individuals for her study: 3,000 heterosexual men; 3,000 heterosexual women; 600 bisexual women; 300 bisexual men; 81 gay men; and 67 lesbian women.
"Previous research tells us very little about the difference between people abused by a same-sex partner and people abused by an opposite sex partner and those outcomes," Coston explained. "It also tells us very little about LGBT people, as an identity, and heterosexual or straight people as an identity. In fact, only one study using nationally represented data has ever assessed health disparities following violence. What that study found was that all people, regardless of sexual orientation, experienced trauma that was both physical and psychological following victimization."
Coston studied mostly health outcomes and who sought service after experiencing an act of violence. Her findings focused on the quantitative analysis which showcases population statistics; however, it cannot discuss the lived realities of people and how severe the violence felt to them.
During her research, Coston discovered that no study has assessed physical injury rates or the rates that survivors are seeking health care. After studying her data, she found that the LGBT community was 26 percent more likely than heterosexual or straight people to seek medical care for injuries resulting from physical violence and psychological trauma.
Coston found that gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women are significantly more likely to suffer more physical injuries as a result of physical violence than straight people but were largely not seeking out medical help. Gay and bisexual men were found to experience psychological trauma more often but only 11.2 percent sought medical help and only 26 percent of lesbian and bisexual women sought help for their medical and psychological health.
Since the LGBT community is not seeking out medical help, Coston had to ask, "Are they seeking out any other types of aid?"
She found that gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women did talk to an advocate, counselor or psychologist 50-60 percent of the time and were also more likely to connect with a community service provider. However, 98.1 percent of LGBT people affected by IPV do not go to community service centers for help with emotional trauma and physical abuse.
In follow up research involving more complicated analyses, Coston found age to be an important factor in whether or not LGBT victims of IPV seek help. If the person is of a really young or older age they may have limited access to transportation and affordable health insurance or they may be on disability.
"If you have or perceive yourself to have poor mental health, you've had a disability and came into the relationship with a disability, you're more likely to experience victimization but also not go get help once you do," Coston said.
Moving Forward
"We need to be thinking about issues of sex and gender," Coston said. "Bisexual individuals were most likely to experience victimization and injury and it might surprise you to know that the majority of these individuals were abused by men."
Patriarchy may be an explanation, but gender is more complicated than filling out a box in a survey or asking a survivor about the sex of their former partners. Coston would like to explore how gender operates in a relationship and if gender identity is directly linked to power dynamics in same-sex relationships.
While her study included striking statistics for the LGBT community, it did consist of some inequalities. The sample size was largely comprised of middle-class, white individuals without immigrant status. Also, transgender people were largely excluded since the survey listed transgender as a sexual orientation alongside bisexual, lesbian, gay or straight.
Coston found that LGBT individuals largely do not seek out help from LGBT community organizations. Improving on the services that are already in place would be a good start to strengthening the support infrastructure for victims and survivors but, Coston said, communities also need training for police officers, law enforcement officials and medical service providers that is both culturally competent and accountable to victims and survivors – services that people will actually use.
"Talking about LGBT intimate partner violence and same-sex violence should not induce either of these two fears in any of us. One, that talking about it will be bad for LGBT people because it says something bad about the relationships and marriages that people worked so hard to gain; marriage equality means nothing when we are being abused in relationships. So those things need to be separated and we cannot be afraid that it is going to say anything bad about LGBT people. Two, we really need to stop being afraid that we will draw resources away from women who are victims. We keep talking about how limited the resources are and if you draw any of those resources away from women who have been abused by men there will be nothing left. Well I say, compassion is not a finite resource and so we need to be really caring about the people who are victims and survivors."
