Gay bashing


Gay bashing and gay bullying is an attack, abuse, or assault committed against a person who is perceived by the aggressor to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. The attack may be physical or verbal. This can also include abuse, bullying or assaults perpetrated against a heterosexual person who the attacker perceives to be LGBT.
A "bashing" may be a specific, violent incident, with the verb form being used: to bash. Physical gay bashings have involved extreme violence and murder, such as the fatal gay bashing of Matthew Shepard. A verbal gay bashing might use sexual slurs, expletives, intimidation, and threatened violence. It also might take place in a political forum and include one or more common anti-gay slogans.
Bullying of gay/LGBT people involves intentional actions toward the victim, repeated negative actions by one or more people against another person, and an imbalance of physical or psychological power. Similar terms such as gay bullying, lesbian bullying, queer bullying, and queer bashing may also be formed.

Context

and gay bashing are longstanding and current issues, and have been officially documented worldwide for as long as gay people have been documented. Homophobia in the United States was widely documented in the press in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when many gay people were forced out of government by boards set up by Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. As historian David K. Johnson explains:
Johnson concludes that Senator Joe McCarthy, notorious for his attacks on alleged communists in government, was often pressured by his allies to denounce homosexuals in government, but he resisted and did not do so. Using rumors collected by Drew Pearson, one Nevada publisher wrote in 1952 that both McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, were homosexuals. Washington Post editor Benjamin C. Bradlee said, "There was a lot of time spent investigating" these allegations, "although no one came close to proving it." No reputable McCarthy biographer has accepted it as probable.

Bullying of LGBT youth

conducted a survey of more than 3700 high school students in Canada between December 2007 and June 2009. The final report of the survey, "Every Class in Every School", published in 2011, found that 70% of all students participating heard "that's so gay" daily at school, and 48% of respondents heard "faggot", "lezbo" and "dyke" daily. 58% or about 1400 of the 2400 heterosexual students participating in EGALE's survey found homophobic comments upsetting. Further, EGALE found that students not directly affected by homophobia, biphobia or transphobia were less aware of it. This finding relates to research done in the area of empathy gaps for social pain which suggests that those not directly experiencing social pain consistently underestimate its effects and thus may not adequately respond to the needs of one experiencing social pain.
EGALE, along with previous research has found teachers and school administration may be complicit in queer bullying through their silence and/or inaction.
Graffiti found on school grounds and property, and its "relative permanence", is another form of queer bullying.
Some researchers suggest including youth questioning their sexuality in any research on queer bullying because they may be as susceptible to its effects as queer students.
A research study of 78 eleven to fourteen-year-old boys conducted in twelve schools in London, England between 1998 and 1999 revealed that respondents who used the word "gay" to label another boy in a derogatory manner intended the word as "just a joke", "just a cuss" and not as a statement of one's perceived sexual orientation. American sociologist Michael Kimmel and American psychologist Gregory Herek write that masculinity is a renunciation of the feminine and that males shore up their sense of their masculinity by denigrating the feminine and ultimately the homosexual. Building on the notion of masculinity defining itself by what it is not, some researchers suggest that in fact the renunciation of the feminine may be misogyny. These intertwining issues were examined in 2007, when American sociologist CJ Pascoe described what she calls the "fag discourse" at an American high school in her book, Dude, You're a Fag.
Gay and lesbian youth are more likely to report bullying. In one study, boys who were bullied with taunts of being gay suffered more bullying and more negative effects compared with boys who were bullied with other categories of taunting.

Stress, anxiety and depression in LGBT communities

Gay and lesbian youth can develop severe forms of depression and anxiety as they grow up. 71.4% of LGBT people experience Major Depressive Disorder. For LGBT individuals, MDD can be caused by any of the following: self-esteem, pressure to conform, minority stress, coming out, family rejection, parenting, relationship formation, and violence. Self-esteem and pressure to conform can cause anxiety for LGBT youth. When they are told what to look like and whom to love, it puts a toll on their self-esteem. When people make comments about who they are, what they look like, whom they love, etc. it begins to make them feel insecure, and as though they aren't good enough the way they are.
"Coming-out" is when an LGBT individual makes it known that they are gay, lesbian, etc. Coming out can be very stressful, and youth need family support at this time. But often they instead experience rejection, leaving them feeling unwanted and unloved. This can set them into a downward spiral of depression. Parenting and relationship formation are very closely related. It was only in March 2016, that it became legal for LGBT parents to adopt in all 50 states. Not being able to conceive their own child can already cause depression, but being denied the right to adopt has caused LGBT people additional pain and stress. Minority stress is defined as a stress experienced by LGBT individuals due to their sexual orientation/gender identity. Violence can slip anybody into a depressed state whether the violence is a type of physical abuse, mental abuse, or verbal abuse. A person can be harassed to the point where their depression becomes too much and they no longer experience any happiness. These factors all work together and make it extremely hard to avoid MDD.

Effect of bullying on LGBT youth

Being bullied can make victims feel chronically sad and unsafe in the world. Bullying will affect a student's experience of school. Some victims might feel paralyzed and withdraw socially as a coping mechanism. Other victims of queer bullying may begin to live the effects of learned helplessness. Queer or questioning students may try to pass as heterosexual in order to avoid queer bullying. Passing isolates the student from other queer or questioning students, potential allies, and support. Adults who try to pass also may feel the effects emotionally and psychologically, of this effort to conceal their true identities. Queer and questioning youth who experience bullying have a higher incidence of substance abuse and STI and HIV infection, which may carry through to adulthood. Queer bullying may also be seen as a manifestation of what American academic Ilan Meyer calls minority stress, which may affect sexual and ethno-racial minorities attempting to exist within a challenging broader society.

Educational settings

Homophobic and transphobic violence in educational settings can be categorized as explicit and implicit. Explicit homophobic and transphobic violence consists of overt acts that make subjects feel uncomfortable, hurt, humiliated or intimidated. Peers and educational staff are unlikely to intervene when witnessing these incidents. This contributes to normalizing such acts that become accepted as either a routine disciplinary measure or a means to resolve conflicts among students. Homophobic and transphobic violence – as with all school-related gender-based violence – is acutely underreported due to subjects’ fear of retribution, combined with inadequate or non-existent reporting, support and redress systems. The absence of effective policies, protection or remedies contributes to a vicious cycle where incidents become increasingly normal.
Implicit homophobic and transphobic violence, sometimes called ‘symbolic violence’ or ‘institutional’ violence, is subtler than explicit violence. It consists of pervasive representations or attitudes that sometimes feel harmless or natural to the school community, but that allow or encourage homophobia and transphobia, including perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Policies and guidelines can reinforce or embed these representations or attitudes, whether in an individual institution or across an entire education sector. This way, they can become part of everyday practices and rules guiding school behaviour. Examples of implicit homophobic and transphobic violence include:
Teens face harassment, threats, and violence. A 1998 study in the US by Mental Health America found that students heard anti-gay slurs such as "homo", "faggot" and "sissy" about 26 times a day on average, or once every 14 minutes. In a study conducted by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, a union for UK professionals, the word "gay" was reported to be the most popular term of abuse heard by teachers on a regular basis.
About two-thirds of gay and lesbian students in British schools have suffered from gay bullying in 2007, according to a study done by the Schools Education Unit for LGBT activist group Stonewall. Almost all that had been bullied had experienced verbal attacks, 41 percent had been physically attacked, and 17 percent had received death threats. It also showed that over 50% of teachers did not respond to homophobic language which they had explicitly heard in the classroom, and only 25% of schools had told their students that homophobic bullying was wrong, showing "a shocking picture of the extent of homophobic bullying undertaken by fellow pupils and, alarmingly, school staff", with further studies conducted by the same charity in 2012 stated that 90% of teachers had had no training on the prevention of homophobic bullying. However, Ofsted's new 2012 framework did ask schools what they would be doing in order to combat the issue.
The rate of suicide is higher among LGBT people. According to a 1979 Jay and Young study, 40 percent of gay men and 39 percent of gay women in the US had attempted or seriously thought about suicide. In the same study conducted by the Schools Education Unit for LGB activist group Stonewall, an online survey reported that 71 percent of the girl participants who identified as LGBTQ, and 57 percent of the boy participants who identified as LGBTQ had seriously considered suicide. In 1985, F. Paris estimated that suicides by gay youth may comprise up to 30 percent of all youth suicides in the US. This contributes to suicide being the third leading cause for death among youth aged 10–24, reported by the CDC. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has found that gay, lesbian and bisexual youth attempt suicide at a rate three to six times that of similar-age heterosexual youth. The Schools Education Unit also reports that in the same online survey, 25 percent of the people who identified as LGBTQ, have attempted to commit suicide.

Cases

The state of Illinois passed a law in June 2010 that prohibits gay bullying and other forms of bullying in schools.
In the Philippines, legislators implemented Republic Act No. 10627, otherwise known as the Anti-Bullying Act of 2013, in schools. According to the said law, gender-based bullying is defined as ˮany act that humiliates or excludes a person on the basis of perceived or actual sexual orientation and gender identity ˮ.

Support

In Europe Stonewall UK, and Anti-Bullying Network are active in the UK, while Russia has the Russian LGBT Network.
Notable in the United States is the It Gets Better Project, for which celebrities and ordinary LGBT people make YouTube videos and share messages of hope for gay teens. The organization works with USA, The Trevor Project and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. The Safe Schools Coalition provides resources for teachers and students where bullying is a problem. Egale Canada works with LGBT Canadian citizens. In Brazil, the Gay Group of Bahia provides support. LGBT South Africans can turn to the South African Human Rights Commission.