You’re a 15-year-old boy and your father notices you’ve started putting on lipstick before you go out on Saturday night. Or you’re a 16-year-old girl and your mother catches you kissing your best friend. Or you come out to your adoptive parents and they kick you out and you’re in a group home at 17. Or your foster parents die and you emancipate yourself because you’re not quite 18 and then you’re homeless. This is your story; this is our story.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) youth are estimated to comprise approximately 4% to 10% of the adolescent population of the United States but are traced to a lack of acceptance.” LGBTQ youth are the only population of young people rejected by their biological families solely because of who they are and are more likely than their heterosexual peers to suffer physical violence at home, to be forced out, or run away. A study by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund found that more than 30% of LGBTQ youth reported suffering physical violence by a family member after coming out. And according to the National Network of Runaway and Youth Services, between 20% and 40% of adolescents who become homeless each year are LGBTQ. These youth often move through a cycle of foster homes, group homes, and life on the street.
The care of these LGBTQ youth falls to child welfare services, the mission of which is to protect children from harm and to act in their best interests. The implementation of this mission becomes the responsibility of the states, which in their parens patriae role are required to establish standards to protect the civil rights of all foster children and to give all youth equal protection. Yet states struggle continually with budgets and political pressure, and social services are always among the first fiscal casualties of legislative wrangling. Too often the “parent of the nation” fails to provide a safe haven for children and youth in need. LGBTQ youth are particularly vulnerable to partisan politics and underfunded programs.
A joint task force of New York City’s Child Welfare Administration and the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies found in 1994 that “lesbian and gay adolescents have often been misunderstood, neglected and in some cases discriminated against by the child welfare system.” The failure of the child welfare system to protect the LGBTQ youth in its care is self- perpetuating in nature: LGBTQ youth correctly assume that by revealing their orientation they will be scapegoated. Having witnessed damaging comments and actions by adults or seen “out” peers harassed and victimized, these youth determine that hiding their true identity is necessary to their survival. The unintended consequence of staying closeted is that invisibility supports the assumption by child welfare system administrators that there are no LGBTQ youth in their care. Hunter College Social Work Professor Gerald P. Mallon observed this phenomenon in his landmark study We Don’t Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon: The Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Adolescents in the Child Welfare Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Mallon found that “many of the child welfare professionals whom I interviewed implied that they did not have gay or lesbian young people in their programs.”
And if there are no LGBTQ adolescents in foster care, there is no need for policies to ensure that they are protected from harm and that the system acts in their best interest. Mallon writes, “Because child welfare systems have not acknowledged the existence of these young people, policies to guide practice with them are also almost nonexistent, leaving practitioners to develop policies on their own.” Frequently, these ad hoc policies reflect the denial, homophobia, and hetereosexism of the larger culture. Since traditional theories of adolescent development assume heterosexuality, there is no acceptable way for lesbian and gay adolescents to achieve adulthood as defined by the dominant models used by most theoreticians. As Mallon observes, “Western culture’s negative myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions about gays and lesbians (rather than the orientation itself) create the major life stressor for young lesbian, gay or bisexual people.”
For example, LGBTQ youth in foster care have been told they need conversion or reparative therapy, although the American Psychiatric Association has opposed these practices since 1998. Child Welfare Consultant Rob Woronoff says, “There is no need to try to ‘change’ a child’s sexuality. Research shows that trying to do so only harms children, making them more likely to commit suicide.” Conversion therapy is often proposed in response to a youth’s coming out to family members whose religious affiliation is with a fundamentalist Christian church. In its most extreme interpretation, conversion has taken the form of exorcism, which been performed on gay and lesbian teenagers, as in the Manifested Glory Ministries exorcism posted on YouTube in 2009. As researchers Yasemen Besin and Gilbert Ziklin note in “Young Men, Religion, and Attitudes Toward Homosexuality,” “Young people have therefore come of age caught between increasing support for and acceptance of gays from secular authorities and a strong counter-mobilization from the religious right.”
LBGTQ youth in foster care have also been told they are “going through a phrase” and instructed to keep quiet about who they are. Campbell Amy Brown, a 29-year-old former foster child, describes her experience in a group home:
They don’t explicitly say you can’t be gay, but I had to sign a contract when I was 12 years old at one of my group homes that said I would not date someone of my own gender while in the group home. Seriously! I was 12 years old! Gay children are not safe in group homes. Gay children deserve foster homes too.
But if gay children and youth deserve foster homes, too many foster parents are unwillingly to provide that home. One study reported that out of 246 foster families surveyed, only 21 were willing to accept a LGBTQ youth. And when foster homes are unavailable, group homes become the alternative. According to the American Bar Association, 100% of LGBTQ youth in group homes reported verbal harassment and 70% reported suffering physical violence. Verbal harassment typically ranges from jokes and name calling to actual threats; physical violence from shoving to rape. In Mallon’s interviews, four of the 54 youth (three lesbians and one gay adolescent) had been raped by group home staff members. The lesbians reported being told by their assailants that rape was a “corrective” to their sexual orientation. In the ABA report, 78% of LGBTQ youth in group homes said they had run away from harassment or assault. On the street, life is even more dangerous for LGBTQ youth. A 2004 study published in The Journal of Sex Research by L. B. Whitbeck et al found that 58% of homeless LGBTQ youth reported sexual victimization on the street compared to 33% of homeless heterosexual youth. These LGBTQ youth are more likely than homeless heterosexual youth to report that they have been asked by someone on the street to trade sex for money, food, shelter, clothing, or drugs.
Owner/Editor - Chris Chmielewski