by Matthew Sitman
Marc Ambinder laments one of the more intractable problems facing young gay kids, wondering how to help those “slipping through the safety net that the gay community is building for its most vulnerable”:
Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve met a lot of younger gay men who have been kicked out of abusive households. The most heartbreaking of the stories was told to me by a talented young clothing designer. Upon learning he was gay, he was severely beaten, given $500, driven to the airport, had a one-way plane ticket bought in his name, and was abandoned.
1980?
No: 2007.
He was 16.
The cycle of violence is merciless.
In the six years he spent here in West Hollywood, my young friend was raped twice — and lest you think that he was exaggerating to evoke sympathy, I’ve seen the medical and police records. He was also assaulted numerous times. He resorted to escorting to make ends meet. His ability to form meaningful friendships is fractured. His life is not very stable.
He concludes:
Political rights are critical. But social equality is probably more meaningful. Parents who abuse children are abominable. But parents of gay children can get away with it more, because there’s a stigma, because everyone just wants the problem to go away, because we still lack the guts to challenge some of our brother’s darker secrets.
Relatedly, Bill Gardner flags research on the abuse of LGBT children:
Mark Friedman and his colleagues have published a meta-analysis in the American Journal of Public Health that looked at whether sexual minority adolescents were more likely to experience childhood sexual abuse, parental physical abuse, and peer victimization. Again, these abuses are not matters of hurt feelings: they are often crimes, and even where they do not result in direct physical harm they are powerful risk factors for educational failure, mental illness, and physical illness.
I do not believe I have ever read a meta-analysis in which the results were so clear cut: Gay, lesbian, and bisexual kids are far more likely to be the targets of abuse than their straight peers. A meta-analyses seeks to evaluate the strength of a pattern of data by looking for consistency of results across the published literature. Friedman et al. found that 19 of 19 published results showed that sexual minority children were more likely to be the victims of parental physical abuse. 65 of 65 studies found that sexual minority children were more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse. Peer victimization was, by comparison, a bit less clear cut. Only 79 out of 81 results showed that sexual minority children are more likely than to be bullied than their straight peers.
The Dish 