LGBT Victims of Sexual Assault

Same-Sex assault:

• Includes forced vaginal or anal penetration, forced oral sex, or other forced sexual activity.
• As with opposite sex assaults, the assault may occur within the context of an otherwise consensual relationship.
• It may include a penis, fist, finger, dildo, or other object.
• Victims are even less likely than opposite-sex survivors to report the assault.
• There is often a tendency to blame their victimization on their sexual orientation.
• Reporting is deterred by concerns about being “outed”, perceptions of police and care-givers as homophobic, being seen as a “traitor” to the gay community, and lack of “queer-friendly” services.
• Victims experience the same emotional reactions, and are in need of the same support and intervention services, as opposite sex assault survivors.

Woman to Woman Assault:

• Survivors often experience a sense of betrayal and disbelief that a woman could assault another woman
• Woman-to-woman assaults are often trivialized or viewed as harmless “cat fights” with no real victim and no injury. This is an inaccurate misperception.
• Woman-to-woman assaults are rarely perpetrated by strangers, or by heterosexual women.
• Although there is typically no concern for pregnancy, there is the possibility of internal injuries and sexually transmitted infections.

Male to Male Assault:

• The most common male-to-male assault is the rape of a man who is perceived to be gay by a heterosexual man.
• An assault of a heterosexual man leads him to question his sexual orientation.
• Male-to-male assaults also occur between gay men.
• Male victims often react with more overt anger than women do.
• Male victims may be afraid to seek services as they perceive sexual assault services to be “for women only”.

Barriers to services:

• Reporting process which “outs” the survivor.
• Stereotypes that violence in a LGBT relationship is “mutual”; a similar assumption is not made in heterosexual relationships.
• Feel that they are betraying their LGBT community, which is already under attack, by ‘accusing’ another LGBT person of sexual assault.
• LGBT community may not be supportive of victims as they may want to maintain the myth that there are no problems of relationship violence within LGBT relationships.
• Feel that they have nowhere to turn for help and fear hostile responses from the police, courts, service providers, and therapists, because of homophobia and anti-LGBT bias.