Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT AND ARTICLE INFORMATION
Few studies have examined the barriers that lesbian and gay male IPV victims face when attempting to access social services which has resulted in an area of theorizing that remains underdeveloped. The paucity of research on this topic is problematic, as extant inquiry indicates that these victims encounter several barriers when engaging in help-seeking. Moreover, a small number of studies have used intersectional thinking to guide analyses of IPV help-seeking behavior in the lesbian and gay community. The current theoretical paper identifies the barriers that lesbian and gay IPV victims encounter when attempting to access social services because prior work has failed to synthesize what is known about their experiences using an intersectional approach. We identify help-seeking obstacles that are specific-and often unique-to lesbian and gay IPV victims with the goal of providing synthesized information useful for future research and theory development. In the first section, we discuss relationship barriers (e.g. threats of outing). Section II describes structural and institutional barriers (e.g., gender norms, minority stress). In Section III we examine legal barriers (e.g., iustice system, anti-homosexual beliefs). The last section offers recommendations for practitioners and future research based on prior literature.
Article History:
Received 13 October 2014
Received in revised form 27 January 2015
Accepted 2 February 2015
Keywords:
intersectionality, intimate partner violence, barriers to service, same-sex, gay, lesbian
© 2015 Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society and The Western Society of Criminology Hosting by Scholastica. All rights reserved.
Research on intimate partner violence (IPV) victims has historically focused on the experiences of heterosexual women. Considerable progress has been made by feminist scholars in examining the social support, intervention, prevalence, risk factors, consequences, and justice responses associated with opposite-sex IPV (i.e., men battering women; see Belknap, Hartman, & Lippen, 2010; Kimmel, 2010; Tellis, 2010; Tjaden & Thoennes, 2009). An underdeveloped area of inquiry, however, includes the IPV experiences of victims in same-sex relationships (see Ard & Makadon, 2011; Chan, 2005; Merrill & Wolfe, 2000; Simpson & Helfrich, 2007; for review, see Ball & Hayes, 2010). This oversight is problematic because research indicates that IPV between same-sex partners occurs at higher rates when compared to similarly situated oppositesex couples (Strasser, Smith, Pendrick-Denney, Boos-Beddington, Chen, & McCarty, 2012). Overall, prevalence estimates...