From Hate Crimes to Human Rights

A Tribute to Matthew Shepard

Mary E Swigonski, Robin Mama, Kelly Ward, Attn:Matthew Shepard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317992660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Familienrecht

Fight for the human rights of LGBT individuals with strategies from this powerful book! From the intimate horror of domestic violence to the institutionalized heterosexism of marriage laws, this volume takes an unsparing look at the interconnections of prejudice and hate crimes in the lives of LGBT individuals. Bringing together original research and solidly grounded theory, From Hate Crimes to Human Rights: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard also offers fresh strategies so you can work effectively for social change. This moving, thoughtful volume begins with a friend's memoir of the murdered Matthew Shepard; this intimate glimpse is powerful testimony that hate crimes affect individuals, not just symbolic martyrs. From Hate Crimes to Human Rights drags hidden homophobia from the closet and examines it with clean, incisive intelligence. It tackles taboo topics, including:

• what the Bible really says about homosexuality
• how minority cultures sometimes foster hatred against the LGBT individuals in their midst
• why child welfare services don't protect LGBT youth from peer violence
• how internalized LGBT self-hatred can be expressed as domestic violence Hate crimes do not occur in a cultural vacuum. From Hate Crimes to Human Rights searches out the roots of hatred and suggests ways to eradicate them, drawing on economics, theology, and linguistics as well as sociology, history, and political science. Specific suggestions include:
• how to use language as a social and cultural change strategy
• what individuals and universities can do to promote human rights
• how to make use of the intersection of difference and tolerance to prevent hate crimes
• why equal treatment for LGBT individuals is a human rights issue, not a special-interest advantage From Hate Crimes to Human Rights provides powerful explanations of the ways hatred generates hate crimes and proposes positive action you can take to validate human rights. A Statement from the Authors One of the premises of this book is that if we want to progress from hate crimes to human rights, we must learn to respect, honor, and celebrate diversity. The chapter authors exemplify a rainbow of ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Each of us is committed to advocate for human rights and to work to end hate crime. Toward those ends, the royalties from the sale of this book will go directly to a memorial fund that has been established at Monmouth University in Matthew Shepard's honor. The proceeds from that fund will be used to support students in their preparation for human rights advocacy.

Realities of Hate Crimes

Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones: Verbal Harassment and Physical Violence in the Lives of Gay and Lesbian Youths in Child Welfare Settings

Gerald P. Mallon

SUMMARY. Utilizing the narratives of 54 youths and 88 child welfare professionals, this article explores the experiences and lives of gay and lesbian youths in child welfare agencies in three cities-New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto-who have been subject to verbal harassment and physical violence within those systems. The author additionally explores the multiple layers of verbal harassment and violence in both the youths' families and in the foster care system, offering recommendations to social work practitioners interested in creating gay and lesbian affirming environments. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Violence, verbal harassment, gay and lesbian youths, child welfare settings

One need not look to rural Wyoming for examples of brutality towards gay and lesbian youths. Those young persons, and particularly the youths whom I have studied (Mallon, 1998), adolescents in child welfare settings, have always been at very high risk for verbal harassment and physical violence. Constantly negotiating life in an environment where the threat of violence is an ever-present reality, the gay and lesbian young people I interviewed reported never feeling completely secure or confident about their existence. Their sense of safety in child welfare settings (group homes, foster homes, and large congregate care centers) was tenuous and fragile.

This article explores the experiences and lives of gay and lesbian youths in child welfare agencies in three cities-New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto-that have been subjected to verbal harassment and physical violence within those systems. The author additionally explores the multiple layers of verbal harassment and violence in both the youths' families and in the foster care system, offering recommendations to social work practitioners interested in creating gay and lesbian affirming environments.

Many young people enter the foster care system because it offers sanctuary from abusive family relationships and violence that occurs in their homes. Rindfleisch (1993, p. 265) writes, "Once in placement, children and youths are presumed to be in an environment superior to that from which they were removed. So they are not thought to need protection beyond that provided by state licensing activities." For too many youngsters, the brutality they experienced prior to coming into a child welfare placement did not stop once they entered the system.

Lesbian and gay young people are targeted for attack specifically because of their sexual orientation (Comstock, 1991; Garnets et al., 1992; Herek, 1990; Herek & Berrill, 1992). North American culture, pervaded by a heterocentric ideological system that denies, denigrates, and stigmatizes gays and lesbians, simultaneously makes lesbians and gay men invisible and legitimizes hostility, discrimination, and even violence against them. Gay men and lesbians must assess issues of safety in their lives on an everyday basis. When gay or lesbian people engage in behaviors allowed for heterosexuals (such as same-gendered individuals walking down a street holding hands or kissing a same-gendered partner), they make public what Western society has prescribed as private. They are accused of flaunting their sexuality and are, thereby, perceived as deserving of or even asking for retribution, harassment, or assault.

The children in my study reported that verbal harassment was often inaugurated at home within their own family systems. Many of these young people reported that relatives and others in their community helped to increase the momentum of this violence by joining in the harassment. The extent to which gay and lesbian young people experienced verbal harassment and physical violence in foster care placements, by their peers and by staff charged with caring for them, was astounding to me. The stigma attached to being gay or lesbian often prevented them from reporting their victimization (Goffman, 1963). Many young people reported that when the abuse was acknowledged, the victims themselves were blamed. Consequently, at times, more than half of the informants in this study choose the apparent safety of the streets over the foster care system.

Tirades from family members, peers, and, in some cases, staff members that began with taunts such as "you fucking faggot," "bull dyke," "homo," and "queer" in some cases escalated into punches, beatings, burnings, and rape. Gay and lesbian young people deemed as disposable individuals, deserving of being jostled into line or kept in the closet, frequently found environments which were so poor, where the fit was so bad, that many felt as though they literally had to flee for their lives. Some of those who migrated to a safer environment found the safety and fit that they were searching for. Others found even less favorable complementarity (Meyer, 1996).

Fear for One’s Personal Safety Led to Hiding

Seventy-eight percent of young people and 88% of Child Welfare professionals interviewed for this study reported that it was not safe for gay and lesbian adolescents in group homes or congregate care settings to self-identify as gay or lesbian. One professional from New York interviewed for this study linked the issue of safety with the phenomenon of hiding:

In most agencies, it's just not safe for a gay or lesbian young person to be identified. If the other kids know that they are gay or lesbian ... they harass them, or worse. Sometimes when the staff find out they either treat the young person differently or close their eyes to some of the situations, which occur after-hours. It's just not safe for them to be out and because they are not out, then the staff believe that they don't exist.

Young people in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, where the Study was conducted, concurred that they perceived a sense of real fear on the part of gay and lesbian young people. Several noted that, although some of their peers were open about their sexual orientation in social settings away from their group homes, they were closeted in their group home. Steven, a 17-year-old from New York, commented:

People are afraid to tell people that they are gay. I mean I used to hang out in the Village with boys from my group home, but we never talked about being gay. The staff didn't know that we were gay. You made sure some of them didn't know because then they would make your life miserable. I tell you, sometimes the staff people were worse than the kids were.

In Los Angeles, Angelo made similar comments about his peers with respect to their fears:

I knew people in my foster home and group home who were gay but they went out of their way to make it look like they were not gay. They were hiding it. They were afraid of getting heat up or discriminated against. There was a guy in my group home-he had a girl but we dated secretively.

Verbal Harassment at Home

Many gay and lesbian young people perceive that they are different even as young children. This difference separates them from their own families. In response to their perceived difference, families, who prescribe conformity amongst their members, frequently engage in verbal harassment as a means to keep them in line (D'Augelli & Hershberger, 1993; Pharr, 1988; Savin-Williams, 1994). Gayle, a 19-year-old young woman from New York, was warned to remain closeted:

I told my grandmother that I was gonna come out of the closet and she said-Girl, you better get right back in!

Young people recalled, with vivid and often painful exactness, the experience of verbal antilocutions made against them by their immediate family members. Sharte recalled his mother's bitterness toward his behavior, which he perceived as normal:

I was eight when I entered foster care. It was the relationship between me and my mother that was the primary reason for me coming into fostering care. We never talked about me being gay or anything, but there were certain things that my mother would say to me, that let me know, she knew. She would say things like: stop being a little girl, you know. Things like, you little sissy, I'm not raising a little girl, I'm not raising no punk.

The experience seemed to be standard for young men as well as for young women. Maura told a comparable story of parental rejection:

My mother couldn't deal with the fact that I was a dyke, that's why I came into placement. She kept saying-why can't you act like a girl, I mean, she was always trying to get me to wear dresses and stuff, I mean, I just didn't feel comfortable. Every time I wore a dress I felt like a guy in drag. I just wished she could have let me be myself.

Although the majority of gay and lesbian young people interviewed for this study did not enter placement because they were thrown out of their homes, the threat that their disclosure might prompt such a reaction from their families was always a fear that kept many "in line" and in the closet. Coming out or being found out by family members in most cases precipitated a crisis (Fraser et al., 1991).

The “Garbage” Metaphor

The metaphor of the "throw away child" was common withm the narratives of several young people who used "garbage" metaphors to describe their treatment by their families. Recalling the experience of feeling "dumped on," Tracey, a New York young person, said:

My relationship with my family was not the greatest. I guess the best way to describe my relationship with my family was, they were the dump truck and I was where they dumped all of their garbage. No one ever paid any attention to me, unless they were mad and then they would scream at me and dump on me. It wasn't that great.

Raul, a Puerto Rican young man, recalled the verbal abusiveness of his mother when he came out to her:

I have known that I am gay all of my life, but when I came out to my mother, she was not able to accept that fact, she went wild, screaming maricon, pendejo, all of these really terrible curses, I was her only son and all. She threw all of my clothes out in a big plastic garbage bag and threw me out. I had nowhere to live.

Verbal Harassment from Foster and Adoptive Parents

verbal harassment was so commonplace in group homes, roster homes, and congregate care settings that most young people almost forgot to mention it. All but one of the young people interviewed noted that they had been the victims of verbal harassment because of their sexual orientation. Foster parents and even adopted parents were not immune from engaging in verbal harassment.

A Child Welfare professional from New York acknowledged that some foster parents asked to have some young people removed from their homes because they perceived them to be gay or lesbian. And Remee, a young person from Los Angeles, corroborated this acknowledgment with her own real life experience; she recalled:

There was only one foster home that I was in that it was bad. They found out I was gay cause I was talking on the phone to my girlfriend. The foster mother heard our conversation and immediately told my roommate to move out of our room. She said she thought I might get into a mood and want to have sex with her. I mean we had been roommates for two years. I wasn't attracted to her. But to make matters worse, then she called the agency to ask to have me removed because she said she didn't have a license to have gay people in her home.

Verbal Harassment from Peers

Being different from your peers is hard when you are an adolescent; adolescents do not always tolerate difference. Overwhelmingly (93%), gay and lesbian adolescents interviewed experienced a great deal of verbal harassment from peers in their group homes, congregate care settings, or foster homes. James, an African-American young person from Los Angeles, conceptualized his ability to adapt to constant verbal abuse by describing it as a "protective shield":

Kids noticed that I was not like other kids, they thought I was weird, then came all of those negative words: Faggot, homosexual, you know this and that. In every group home I have been in there has been harassment, but I learned to put up a shield and ignore it. But inside I remember it.

Child Welfare staff members corroborated these accounts of peers' verbal abusiveness, as illustrated by this statement:

That's why in this particular program that they don't admit being gay, because this particular population would definitely be rough on them. When we bring it up, they laugh at the subject and make little cracks and things like that and you can tell the kids in the room who are kind of dealing with the subject, but they are so denigrated by the other kids that they would never come forth.

Another Child Welfare professional suggested that the jokes helped to deteriorate the young person's sense of self-esteem; he commented:

There's jokes, sometimes there are intolerable jokes, both practical jokes and verbal jokes. It's really rough for gay kids. The other kids really torture them. It really gets to them. I have had kids who come back to their rooms after a weekend home visit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• A Tribute to Matthew Shepard
• Human Rights in the 20th Century: Weren't Gays and Lesbians Human?
• Human Rights, Hate Crimes, and Hebrew-Christian Scripture
• Language, Violence, and Queer People: Social and Cultural Change Strategies
• Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones: Verbal Harassment and Physical Violence in the Lives of Gay and Lesbian Youths in Child Welfare Settings
• Domestic Violence: The Ultimate Betrayal of Human Rights
• Economic Rights, Economic Myths, and Economic Realities
• Who Gets to Drink from the Fountain of Freedom?: Homophobia in Communities of Color
• Sexual Orientation Bias Experiences and Service Needs of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Two-Spirited American Indians
• Older Gays and Lesbians: Surviving a Generation of Hate and Violence
• The University's Role in Promoting Human Rights Through Nurturing Human Diversities
• Social Justice Advocacy Readiness Questionnaire
• Competencies at the Intersection of Difference, Tolerance, and Prevention of Hate Crimes
• Index