23: Same-Sex Partner Violence

Posted on | July 25, 2009 | 1 Comment

One of the most under-discussed areas of sexual violence is sexual violence in the LGBTQ community.  I’ve already written a couple of posts about sexual violence against transgender people, and a bit about sexual violence targeted at gay and bisexual men.*  Lesbian and bisexual women can also be targeted for sexual violence as a form of hate crime, by men who believe that rape will “turn them straight.”

Violence can also take place within LGBTQ communities, though.  As gay men are particularly and wrongly stereotyped as deviant sexual predators, it’s something that many would prefer not to discuss.  But the fact is that members of no group are entirely immune to acting as perpetrators of sexual violence, and many others believe that not discussing it is a lot more harmful.

Women can in fact rape women.  And while relatively uncommon compared to most other types of rape, they do.  Again, not all rape involves a penis (and in the case of trans women, not all rape requires a vagina to be penetrated).  Rape can be committed with objects, and with fingers.  Rape can be committed by one forcing another person to perform sexual acts on them.

I was unable to find many statistics on inter-community abuse, though I did learn that 15% of men who lived with a man as a couple reported being raped, assaulted, or stalked by a male cohabitant.  I also found some other general statistics on intimate partner violence within the LGBTQ community — and while by no means does all domestic violence involve sexual violence, a great deal in fact does.  A 1998 book shows that 25-33% of gay and lesbians had experienced domestic abuse — roughly the same as for straight couples.  And as could likely be expected, resources for survivors are often scarce.

For more information on same-sex partner violence, check out this article from Aardvarc (and/or pass along your own resources in the comments).

*EDIT: Just spontaneously realized that this could be read to mean that transgender people are wholly separate from LGB people, which is of course not true.  Transgender people can be and are lesbian, gay and bisexual and so the rest of the post of course applies as much to trans people as it does cis people.  My apologies.

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