“I was just so confused, like does this even count as sexual assault?”: understanding LGBTQA+ sexual victimization, help-seeking, and mental health outcomes

ABSTRACT

Most research on sexual victimization centres on cisgender, heterosexual experiences and pushes LGBTQA+ experiences to the margins. The current study focuses on queer experiences of sexual victimization and subsequent help-seeking behaviours and mental health outcomes. Fifteen in-depth interviews with queer identifying individuals who experienced sexual violence were conducted and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. A total of 32 incidents of sexual violence were discussed across the 15 participants. Findings indicate that negative disclosure responses from others, as well as normalizing and rationalizing experiences of sexual violence, are detrimental to help-seeking behaviour. Incidents that involved sexually minoritized women and heterosexual men were met with more positive disclosure responses than incidents that occurred between two sexually minoritized women. Additionally, lesbians experienced more supportive reactions to disclosure than bisexual and queer women. Mental health professionals who were knowledgeable and experienced in both trauma and LGBTQA+ related issues had the most impact on improved health and well-being for queer survivors of sexual violence.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQA+ sexual victimization
• queer sexual violence
• LGBTQA+ help-seeking
• LGBTQA+ health outcomes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sexual violence is a broad term used to describe any unwanted sexual contact that involves coercion, manipulation, or force, including harassment, image-based abuse, touching, rubbing, sexual assault, or rape or threat of these acts.

2. The term minoritized is used over minority to emphasize that social and structural forces marginalize certain groups and create systemic discrimination and stigma (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017; Smith, 2016)

3. We use the term LGBTQA+ to describe individuals who identify as homosexual, bisexual, asexual, transgender or any nonconforming sexual orientation and/or identity. We want to highlight differences in social identity (similar to work by Schulze & Koon-Magnin, 2017) because it is important to understand how different identities within the LGBTQ+ community experience consent and sexual violence. We also utilize the term queer as an inclusive representation of this diverse group.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [U54MD012388.].

Notes on contributors

Brooke A. de Heer

Brooke de Heer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. Her research agenda focuses on issues of gender and power in sexual violence, with an emphasis on health disparities and inequitable treatment of marginalized victims involved in the criminal justice (CJ) system. Her work seeks to investigate and validate marginalized peoples’ experiences with sexual violence and work to dismantle systems of oppression that create disparate health outcomes for minoritized populations. She has been published in Feminist Criminology, Violence Against Women, Sociology Compass, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Violence and Victims, Journal of school Violence, and American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research.

Siréne Lipschutz

Siréne Lipschutz is a Ph.D candidate in the Interdisciplinary Health program at Northern Arizona University. Her research interests focus on decreasing transmission of Multigenerational Trauma between parents and children ages 0-5, in urban Native American families.

Sydney Shevat

Sydney Shevat is a Ph.D candidate in the Sociology at University of Tennessee. She received her M.S. from the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. Her primary research interests include green criminology and environmental injustice, displacement, political crime, and gendered violence.