Catie Byrne
Features Editor

As October is domestic violence awareness month, it is important to recognize that among the stories and faces of survivors which pervade mainstream media and domestic violence awareness organizations, not all survivors are straight.

The idea that domestic and sexual abuse survivors are anything but straight is, more often than not, an unquestioned and troubling narrative rooted in heteronormativity.

Although some argue that prioritizing LGBT survivors who have experienced domestic and sexual abuse obscures a range of systematic dynamics at play which contributes to the prevalence of domestic violence as a whole, abuse is not a competition.

It is important to note that LGBT survivors of domestic and sexual abuse can have multiple intersecting systematic disadvantages working against them, particularly transgender, lesbian and multisexual women of color.

As a result, the prioritization of discussion around the domestic and sexual violence which centers straight, cisgender, white women, silences the voices and erases the lived experiences of LGBT domestic violence survivors.

To elaborate, said silencing and erasure does not necessarily have to be malicious or intentional to harm LGBT survivors, but can be embedded in rhetorical misconceptions that can trivialize the degree of violence facing LGBT women, and who primarily perpetrates that violence.

For example, a common tactic used to silence the abuse LGBT women face, is the argument that because women are capable of assaulting other women, the focus of domestic violence advocacy should remain on women in relationships with men, because men are more violent.

The intent of this statement, more often than not, translates to presume that only straight women are harmed by men, that only straight women could be affected by male violence and that only straight women could potentially be in a relationship with a man.

The idea that lesbian and multisexual women are incapable of being sexually and physically assaulted by men simply because of the perception that they could never be in a relationship with one, reveals a startling amount of ignorance.

Lesbian survivors are especially harmed by this misconception, as they can be coerced into relationships with abusive men, as well as the possibility that lesbians do not realize they are lesbians until they are already in abusive relationships with men.

A particularly insidious form of violence inflicted on lesbians is corrective rape, an act of sexual assault with the intent of changing a lesbian’s sexual orientation to heterosexuality.

However, the violence against women loving women within the LGBT community does not end with sexual assault.

This is especially significant for non-white and transgender women loving women, who experience a myriad of specific forms of systematic violence which intersect to increase the risk domestic and sexual violence.

Essentially, the violence women loving women face is inextricably tied to their status as women, as well as non-straight.

While this is a well-documented and discussed problem within the LGBT community, it is important to critically consider how homophobic cultural misconceptions arise and divert discussion of how different individuals face different degrees of domestic and sexual violence.

For people outside of the LGBT community, the notion that domestic violence affects women loving women differently, if at all, is probably an afterthought, because mainstream media does not highlight the specific abuse that affects women loving women. This is not an accident.

In 2013, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released the results of 2010 study with The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) examining domestic abuse affecting the LGBT community.

Of the CDC and NISVS’ findings, it was revealed that over 75 percent of bisexual women had experienced partner violence, 46 percent of lesbians experienced partner violence; numbers above that of the 43 percent of straight women who have experienced partner violence.

This trend followed similarly between bisexual, gay and straight men, as bisexual men experienced the highest rate of partner violence at 47 percent, 40 percent of gay men experienced partner violence, while straight men experienced the lowest amount of partner violence at 21 percent.

As much as these findings suggest that domestic violence and intimate partner violence disproportionately affects LGBT people, the CDC and NISVS admitted that there was a large possibility that these numbers are even higher.

“Little is known about the national prevalence of intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and stalking among lesbian, gay and bisexual women and men in the United States,” the CDC and NISVS stated in their report.

If the Center of Disease Control can’t produce a thorough statistical examination of domestic and sexual abuse facing LGBT people, then this raises an even broader issue of the prevalence of violence LGBT people face being minimized and delegitimized.

As many LGBT survivors feel as though they cannot safely report their abuse, they don’t, and as a result, inaccurate mishandling of statistics can be used to frame the abuse LGBT survivors face as a non-issue.

Intentional or not, the potentially substantial amount of unrepresented LGBT domestic and sexual abuse survivors not accounted for in studies and research have and continue to harm LGBT survivors who face an intersection of marginality.

This intersection is not typically captured through a superficial analysis of documented domestic and sexual violence against the LGBT community.

One of the ways many statistics and research fails in regards to capturing the degree of domestic and sexual violence LGBT people face is that it does not examine external forces which lead to a lack of official abuse documentation, such as fear of police retribution.

When considering the homophobic physical and sexual violence perpetrated against LGBT people by the police, particularly during the Stonewall riots, it is not shocking that this fear of police abuse and brutality persists for LGBT abuse survivors.

A report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence, (NCAVP) reflected that of LGBT survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), transgender women of color were particularly at risk in reporting their abuse to police for fear of encountering police assault and further violence.

“Transgender survivors were more likely to face threats/intimidation, harassment, and police violence within IPV. Transgender survivors were two times as likely (2.0) to face threats/intimidation, 1.8 times more likely to experience harassment, and over four times (4.4) more likely to face police violence than people who did not identify as transgender. Moreover, transgender people of color and transgender women experienced this violence at even higher rates and were more likely to face the above abuses as part of IPV,” the NCAVP found.

However, as previously stated, the true amount of homophobic and transphobic domestic and sexual violence perpetrated against women loving women continues to be undocumented.

In order to give due respect to these survivors, domestic and sexual violence advocacy groups must begin to recognize that survivors of domestic violence are not all straight women.