A Community Response

Many of us do not feel comfortable being completely open about our relationships with our cisgender heterosexual friends and family. As such, many LGBTQ+ people tend to ask for help and advice from other LGBTQ+ friends.

Knowing how to recognise, respond to, and support people who have experienced abuse can be a practical way to support your friends and family in LGBTQ+ communities.

Visit our Friends and Family Toolkit for help.

Take safe, assertive and positive action against violence, harassment and abuse when you recognise it.

Sexual, family and intimate partner violence within LGBTQ+ communities is complicated and can be caused by internalised homophobia, adhering to rigid gender stereotypes, and the impacts of a long history of discrimination.

You can challenge these factors broadly in a number of ways, including rolling your eyes, not laughing at inappropriate jokes, backing up a person being demeaned, or speaking up in support of someone. This can be difficult, but the responsibility for a healthy and safe community belongs to everyone.

Here are some ways to address behaviour you may experience amongst your friends and community:

• Challenge someone when they make assumptions based on stereotypes or of sub-communities/”tribes” (e.g., “Do you really think that?”).
• Don’t laugh at demeaning jokes (e.g., “I don’t get it” or “I just don’t think that is funny”).
• Challenge rigid stereotypes about sexuality, gender, sub-communities, tribes or sub-cultures within broader LGBTQ+ communities (e.g., “How can you possibly think this applies to a whole community?”).
• Don’t question or enable other people to question other’s sexuality or gender identities (e.g., “Why would you say that?”).
• Call out negative and demeaning stereotypes used across LGBTQ+ communities, such as assumptions based on “tribe” or preferred sexual position (e..g., “That is a pretty simple way of thinking”).
• Challenge the common assumption of feminine and masculine roles in relationships (e.g., “personally, I’d never settle for that” or “did we go back in time to the 1950s?”).
• Prevent and express disappointment if a friend is trying to touch someone who has not consented (e.g.“I’m pretty sure that would be sexual assault” or you can physically stand in the way).
• Disapprove of inappropriate “call outs” and wolf whistling (e.g., “You know there are less obnoxious ways to get someone’s attention”).

Role modelling healthy relationships is important. In the LGBTQ+ community, our relationships are mostly filled with positive and healthy partnerships based on respect, transparency and communication. However, many people in our community did not grow up with any positive role models, especially not from LGBTQ+ relationships.

As a community, we can choose to be the healthy role models others may not have seen before. We can celebrate respectful, equal relationships, challenge stereotypes and celebrate peaceful love in all its glorious diversity. In similar ways that the community has banded together against other forms of violence and homo/bi/transphobia, we can take a zero tolerance approach to violence in our intimate relationships.

You can view our mini-series: Our Relationships here. This series looks at how other LGBTQ people role-model healthy relationships.

Don’t downplay or deny sexual, family or intimate partner violence in our community.

Unfortunately, even though it is common, it is not talked about very often. Until we start talking about abuse, little can or will change.

Without greater awareness, people who have experienced abuse and violence will continue to hide or accept the violence and abuse perpetrated against them, or not even be able to recognise that this behaviour is not acceptable.

We need to begin talking about it.

At your next social gathering talk about sexual, family and intimate partner violence in LGBTQ+ relationships and educate those around you. Share resources, tell them about this website, invite people to events, make it a topic of conversation. Keeping violence and abuse in the closet only enables abuse to continue and thrive.

Use your workplace, art or democratic powers to raise awareness in the broader community in order to include LGBTQ+ people in mainstream recognition of sexual, family and intimate partner violence.