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May/June 2006
The hate didn't end with the death of Matthew Shepard. It is alive and kicking and social workers are helping those targeted by anti-LGTB bias and intolerance. Editor’s Note: Social Work Today recognizes the use of LGBT as the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender for many organizations. However, for the purposes of this article in which the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP) plays a major part, we are honoring the agency’s request that the acronym LGTB (lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual) be used. “In its mission statement and as an agency, AVP has committed to utilizing LGTB as one way to address the level of bias that results in people of transgender experience often going unrecognized or included only as an afterthought. Bias is often subtle and can easily occur by doing things as they’ve come to be accepted without recognizing the impact on the person or group that is being spoken of. As part of our work, we strive to highlight such issues and effect positive changes,” says Diane R. Dolan-Soto, CSW, the AVP’s director of clinical programs. • A 17-year-old high school senior who received repeated death threats and was called a “faggot” by one of his teachers considered homeschooling because he didn’t think he would make it to graduation. • Following a sexual assault by multiple young men in her neighborhood, a Hispanic transgender woman was denied medical treatment by police officers, who used inappropriate, transphobic language. • A 6-year-old kindergarten student, repeatedly harassed by her classmates because her mother is a lesbian, was beaten up at her bus stop and on the bus. When her mother and her mother’s partner contacted the school principal and assistant superintendent, they were offered no help. The little girl said she would rather die than go to school. • Several organizations supporting victims of lesbian, gay, transgender, and bisexual (LGTB) hate crimes received multiple threats, including references to shooting and war, following media coverage of same-sex marriages. • A teenage transgender woman and her friend were shot while sitting in their car, which was then set on fire. All these incidents were reported in 2004 to one of the more than 20 antiviolence organizations that comprise The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP), a network dedicated to tracking and assisting victims of bias crimes targeting LGTB individuals. Bias crimes, often referred to as “hate crimes” because they are based on hatred and prejudice, include verbal harassment, threats of violence, property damage, assault, rape, and murder. While name-calling and other forms of verbal harassment may not be perceived as violent, they often rapidly escalate to physical assault. Throughout human history, those who are different—who behave outside what the society defines as “normal”—have risked oppression and persecution, often with violent consequences. Today, many LGTB individuals live with harassment, discrimination, and the threat of potential violence every day. Each year, thousands will become victims of hate crimes. According to the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP), incidents of bias-related violence often coincide with the level of visibility of the LGTB community. The AVP is the nation’s largest crime-victim service agency for LGTB and HIV-affected communities. According to the AVP, when recent political efforts focused on LGTB issues to galvanize voters opposed to LGTB rights and same-sex marriage, media coverage increased, and unfortunately, anti-LGTB violence did, too. A 2005 NCAVP report on national hate crimes statistics reveals some disturbing trends in violence against LGTB individuals and organizations—substantial increases in assaults with weapons, incidents perpetrated by organized hate groups, incidents against LGTB organizations, violence by multiple offenders at once, and severity of injuries sustained by victims. Bias crimes are becoming more violent. “Unfortunately, these crimes are all too common. Any person that is LGTB has experienced at least one or more incidents of bias, hate, or violence,” says Diane R. Dolan-Soto, CSW, director of clinical programs at the AVP. “Bias-motivated hate violence is generally a tool used to intimidate, to control, [and] to keep people down to achieve some sort of perceived advantage.” Crimes motivated by hate are based on the perception of the attacker and there is often no reason one person is targeted over another, says Dolan-Soto. “The effect of hate crimes is to harass and intimidate not only the immediate victim(s), but also others in the community who may fear being targeted for who they are,” she notes. Although bias crimes against LGTB individuals are common, reporting them is much less common, according to the AVP and NCAVP. Female, transgender, and individuals of certain ethnic backgrounds are less likely to report hate crimes, says Dolan-Soto. “Women are less likely to report a hate crime because they are more accustomed to dealing with sexist language, put-downs in the street, and have learned to just deal with it. It may not occur to them to report an LGTB-bias crime,” she notes. Likeliness to report a hate crime also varies with ethnicity and depends on the victim’s level of comfort and past experience with ‘the system’ and his or her belief that he or she will actually get a response. Bias crimes against transgender individuals are generally underreported. Transgender individuals experience even more discrimination than gay and lesbian individuals and tolerate much more abuse. “The violence tends to be more extreme against transgender individuals,” says Jeannette Kossuth, LMSW, associate director of client services at the AVP. “The bias and the hate and the violence are too often viewed as something that just has to be lived with, particularly for transgender individuals,” Dolan-Soto adds. Another reason for hate crime underreporting by the LGTB community
is past indifference, or even bias-related behavior, from law enforcement. “LGTB
hate crime victims often experience a second trauma in the biased response of
police and other service providers to whom they may turn for help,” Kossuth
says. “In fact, many have experienced enough prior bias incidents with
service providers that they hesitate to seek any type of help or support for
fear that they will only bring more suffering on themselves,” she adds.
The AVP must often intervene with law enforcement to make sure a hate crime
is designated as such and that the victim is treated without discrimination. Gerald P. Mallon, DSW, a professor at Hunter College School of Social Work in New York, has 30 years of experience working with LGTB youth and their families. Eighteen of those years were spent as a director for Green Chimneys Children’s Services, where he helped create and improve access to youth services for LGTB children and adolescents. “Anti-LGTB violence is not just coming from strangers or classmates. Harassment and violence often begins at home for LGTB adolescents,” Mallon observes. “Although by and large, families are generally becoming more affirming to their LGTB family members, there is still a level of verbal harassment or physical violence that can happen within families, depending on a number of factors.” Intra-familial harassment and bias crimes are often linked to the family’s religious and/or cultural background, which may be strongly opposed to homosexuality. “When harassment and violence come from within your own family, it is incredibly painful and debilitating,” Mallon asserts. Growing Up Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or
Transgender According to Mallon, the average age for an adolescent to realize sexual identity is 16 or 17. However, he has seen a child as young as 11 clearly identify himself as gay. The impact of anti-LGTB bias is tremendous for adolescents, who may be exposed in all aspects of their life. “Violence and bias occurs in families, schools, and communities for adolescents. In urban school settings, harassment from peers is very common. In the child welfare setting, group homes have also been unsafe for LGTB adolescents,” Mallon says. Adolescents who perceive their environment to be anti-LGTB devote time and energy to hiding their sexual orientation and trying to pass as heterosexual to fit in with their peers. “Some kids are better at hiding their sexual orientation than others,” says Mallon. He calls the ability to hide sexual identity issues “a privilege” because that individual can determine whether the environment is safe before disclosing sexual orientation. While these adolescents may avoid harassment and violence, hiding their sexual orientation can also take its toll. Being the victim of violence or harassment, witnessing it, or just worrying about the threat of it, can significantly alter the personality and behavior of LGTB adolescents—alterations that may have a lifelong impact, according to Mallon. “These kids put all their energy into hiding their sexual orientation and protecting themselves against potential violence. Just surviving as an LGTB adolescent at school and at home is exhausting,” says Mallon. “The psychosocial consequences of always armoring yourself against the threat of violence really wears them down, and they don’t even realize it.” This exhaustion, coupled with constant stress, leaves little energy and motivation to focus on everyday teenage activities, such as hanging out with friends and having fun, and often leads to academic problems, depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. LGTB adolescents are also often excluded from “normal” social teenage experiences, such as dating and attending their school prom, for fear of humiliation and harassment. Even more serious ramifications of living as an LGTB adolescent are the effects of dehumanizing treatment by others and the development of violent behavior in response to bias. LGTB teens who have come out live with harassment and the threat of violence every day. Such constant verbal harassment can be dehumanizing. Mallon has heard teens say, “No one even calls me by my name anymore. I’m just ‘that homo.’” One gay teen who had been living in a group home told Mallon that other residents would chant “homo” over and over again as he walked down the hallway. “He told me that, after awhile, he just wanted to become invisible or even kill himself because it was so hard to endure this type of verbal harassment on a daily basis,” Mallon says. Some LGTB adolescents who are frequently verbally and physically harassed may respond to violence with violence. A typical pattern is to endure verbal harassment until it escalates to physical violence, says Mallon. Repeated name-calling while walking through school hallways can quickly turn into a fight or an attack after school. “Many LGTB kids become expert fighters,” Mallon has observed. While LGTB adults faced with violent harassment will fight to protect themselves, they do not usually engage in a violent confrontation with another adult because they are aware of the consequences. For LGTB teens, Mallon says, initiating a physical confrontation is more common as retaliation for verbal or physical harassment. When Mallon worked in a group home, he saw this frequently with transgender adolescents who were regularly harassed for their feminine looks, and in response became “ferocious fighters.” Mallon has counseled LGTB adolescents involved in harassment escalating to violence who have said, “I just couldn’t take it anymore.” Mallon says, “This is usually the point where harassment enters the physical realm.” For LGTB adolescents who develop violent behavior, counseling is necessary to help them avoid the consequences of such violence, including injury and possible arrest. Living With the Aftermath Along with these emotional and physical reactions, LGTB hate crime victims may respond by completely isolating themselves, changing their appearance and lifestyle, and altering how they interact with others. “LGTB victims who are traumatized by hate violence often respond by dramatically changing their appearance and their behavior patterns and even alter the way they communicate in an effort to keep themselves safe and to prevent the violence from happening again,” Kossuth notes. These changes may be consciously or subconsciously made, and may involve hairstyle, clothing choices, personal expression, and recreational activities, Dolan-Soto adds. Many victims have feelings of shame, believing they did something to provoke the violence, says Dolan-Soto. “The victim of anti-LGTB violence may also develop a fear of being seen with others who they perceive to be more identifiable as LGTB,” she adds. This fear and shame can lead to self-isolation from the LGTB community—and the support and resources they could have used to help with recovery, according to Kossuth. “Anyone who has been the victim of such trauma will generally pull away from others, but it is particularly dramatic in LGTB individuals, whose identity may be vulnerable in the first place because of societal views and constraints,” she explains. Dolan-Soto says, “This self-isolation can leave victims feeling abandoned by their own community, further confirming and compounding their feelings of shame and self-blame.” To prevent such self-isolation, LGTB hate crime victims can turn to organizations such as the AVP for counseling and support. “Individual counseling around the specifics of the hate language and personal threat directed toward the LGTB hate crime survivor can help with the feelings of helplessness and isolation experienced when they have been attacked for who they are as a human being,” says Kossuth. In most cases, she says, LGTB victims of bias and hate need to work through feelings of self-blame, guilt, and diminished self-esteem as an internalization of the social message that they are less than other people. Group counseling and support is also available but may prove difficult for some LGTB hate crime victims. “Victims of anti-LGTB bias are often reluctant to discuss their experiences with others. As they recover and rebuild their lives, they tend to avoid group support because of the fear of having to relive the pain and humiliation,” says Dolan-Soto. For these cases, individual counseling is generally the most effective way to address the trauma of bias victimization, she says. “Building new social supports, or reengaging with the LGTB community can help victims move beyond the lingering impact of bias and hate violence. Some survivors choose to channel the experience into action and find it empowering and healing to become involved with community efforts to address rights for LGTB individuals,” Dolan-Soto explains. The Social Worker: Advocate …
and Victim? “For LGTB adolescents, social workers can help mediate family tension through family counseling, providing reading material and information on LGTB issues, and facilitating communication with other parents of LGTB children,” says Mallon. LGTB adolescents experiencing bias and violence in school may need to transfer to another school. “In my clinical experience, frequently, young people in the city would have to get a safety transfer to get away from peer harassment and violence in their school. Although schools may have been sympathetic to what happened and tried to protect the adolescent, they couldn’t necessarily guarantee future safety,” he adds. Social workers can help LGTB adolescents and their families facilitate a safety transfer and locate a better school environment in an LGTB-friendly school or all-LGTB school. Advocating for the LGTB population can sometimes result in secondary victimization for the social worker. Dolan-Soto says, “Bias crimes definitely affect social workers and anyone who is serving victims of any hate-motivated violence. The social worker can be secondarily traumatized. If the social worker is also LGTB, they too may become hyper-aware and view themselves as a potential target of violence. It may make them question what they wear, how they speak, or how they express themselves in their own life, at the same time they are trying to help their clients recover. It can bring a sense of vulnerability to the professional themselves.” According to Mallon, social workers with LGTB clients may experience bias too. “Families might harass social workers who try to help them with LGTB issues related to a family member,” says Mallon. Should the potential for such discrimination and harassment deter social workers from working with the LGTB population? Definitely not, says Kossuth, who believes her personal and professional lives have been enriched through her work at the AVP. “Working with the LGTB community has really expanded my understanding of what it means to be human. There is tremendous diversity in our ability to express our love, sexuality, and personal identity. My appreciation and respect for this diversity continues to grow as I do this work. I continue to feel challenges in opening my mind and heart in helping those who have been hurt by the limits in vision of our culture.” — Jennifer Sisk, MA, is a suburban Philadelphia-based freelance writer with 15 years of experience as a writer and research analyst in the healthcare field. She has written on depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, mental wellness, and aging. Resources 2004 National Hate Crimes Report. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs. 2005. Available online at: http://www.avp.org
However, he believes the overall field of social work still handles LGTB issues in a superficial way. “As a profession, we’re not quite there yet, but we are becoming more attuned to these issues.” He thinks many social workers may still operate from a “heterosexual perspective” when working with clients. For example, it may be assumed that the client who is married is heterosexual, that the 17-year-old boy with problems at home and at school is straight. “As a profession, we are just beginning to consider that sexual and gender orientation are legitimate issues for clients who come to us for services,” Mallon observes. “We still have a long way to go as a profession, with regard to training. I have met students and faculty who are certainly well-intentioned but are ‘homo-ignorant.’” Faculty development is necessary to improve the comfort level in dealing with LGTB issues and to provide more opportunities for social work students to learn about working with LGTB populations, he believes. — JS
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Fear
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