So many dead kids over the last couple of months put the realities of our lives into perspective, and bring the drab numbers of statistics into the sharp focus that we rarely see.
These last few weeks have been a tumultuous time for the LGBT community with all those dead kids over in the States. For a while it seemed like there wasn’t a day without a report on another young life ended by persecution and harassment.
Justin Aaberg, Seth Walsh, Billie Lucas, Asher Brown, Tyler Clementi, Zach Harrington and Corey Jackson are just a few of the names in the list who saw no other chance for relief than to end their own lives.
But the list is a bitter one because LGBT youth have sought the penultimate relief for years before this, and will most like continue to choose death at a much higher rate than straight teens.
Suicide (i.e., taking one’s own life) is a serious public health problem that affects even young people. For youth between the ages of 10 and 24, suicide is the third leading cause of death. It results in approximately 4500 lives lost each year. The top three methods used in suicides of young people include firearm (46%), suffocation (39%), and poisoning (8%).
That number puts things in perspective and shows that in the United States twelve youth per day choose to end their lives, and a fair portion of those are LGBT youth. In a study in 2009 a CDC survey estimated that 19.9% of youth were bullied in American high schools, grades 9 to 12.
A survey by the organisation GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) showed the levels of homophobic bullying in US schools for LGBT youth.
The 2009 survey of 7,261 middle and high school students found that at school nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT students experienced harassment at school in the past year and nearly two-thirds felt unsafe because of their sexual orientation. Nearly a third of LGBT students skipped at least one day of school in the past month because of safety concerns.
Now, here in England we might adopt an air of condescension about that, but we certainly don’t have it better.
There are no identifiable statistics for youth per se that I can find, but in 2008 there were 3006 suicides in the age band 15-44 years old, according to the Office of National Statistics. This does not include younger teens or children.
In the early 1990s the highest suicide rates in the UK were among men aged 75 years and over. Rates in this age group have since decreased from 25.1 per 100,000 in 1991 to 14.0 per 100,000 in 2008, now the lowest rate across the three male age bands. Since 1997, the highest rates have been in men aged 15-44, peaking in 1998 at 24.0 per 100,000 and then steadily decreasing. In 2008, the rate for this age group increased to 18.6 per 100,000 from 17.6 per 100,000 in 2007. Suicide rates among men aged 45-74 have fluctuated less throughout the period and increased from 16.0 in 2007 to 17.0 per 100,000 in 2008.
A fair number of these would be LGBT persons due to the pressures that British school children face, and in particular LGBT children and youth. Homophobic bullying is endemic in our schools as well.
In Stonewall’s School Report the charity also gives more solid numbers about the levels of homophobic bullying in UK schools.
Sixty-five percent of the LGBT kids reports that they’ve experienced bullying first hand, and that homophobic slurs are near universal. Ninety eight percent report hearing negative attitudes toward gays in their school environment.
So, we may have better laws in the UK, but our children and our youth face the same relentless persecution as the kids in America, with the difference that our dead and bullied kids aren’t news. They still die, and they still suffer, but their misery is still swept under the rug.
Trying to figure out why things are as they are is both easy and hard. It is easy to say that the reason LGBT youth commit suicide at a higher rate than others is the homophobic environment they live in. But it is harder to explain why there is such a homophobic environment in this day and age.
Zach Harrington’s death can serve as an illustration, as his suicide is a bit of an anomaly in the crop that’s been. So let’s go back to the States, to young Zach’s death.
Zach killed himself after attending a City Council meeting in Norman City, Oklahoma. A week after the meeting he hanged himself. Why did he do this? We can never know for certain since he is no longer with us to explain his actions, but according to his father the City council meeting was one of the causes.
Now, a meeting like that isn’t enough to convince someone to kill himself, seen in isolation. But the meeting shows the toxic environment around Zach.
It was an environment where his very nature was up for debate and where a rejection of his nature was a valid part of the democratic discussion, whereas the same debate about black people or Jews would never have taken place at all.
While racism have not disappeared from our society, it has become taboo for the majority of people, and its expression has become very difficult in schools and in polite discourse. This is not the case for homophobia, which is still an acceptable posture if you frame it in particular ways, for instance as an aspect of religious discourse.
In that milieu Zach’s nature’s status was accepted as an atrocity by a large minority, and debating that nature with that minority was a perfectly normal part of the political conversation. Knowing that, we begin to see how Zach could come to the conclusion that suicide was the only option, as well as the only perceivable choice for the other boys.
When Justin Aaberg, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas and Asher Brown killed themselves, they were not doing so in a vacuum. Just like with Harrington, the environment drove the boys to suicide, and that environment was the same that we glimpsed in the open in the Norman City council meeting.
What we saw was that the boys’ natures were a legitimate subject for debate, and for condemnation. It was a point of order in the regular political discourse, although quite a few was bothered by the arguments. And if the points were raised in the meeting, the airing of them was legitimised by civil society in the form of the churches and the associations in the city, something the churches are asking themselves now.
In reflection, I wonder whether we are somehow complicit in creating an environment of alienation and despair. In the Church’s attempt to assert it’s commitment to heterosexual marriage and to maintain that homosexuality is a moral disorder, does it help to create a cultural climate that tacitly legitimizes the stigmatization of gay young people?
— Russell Powell, an associate law professor at Seattle University School of Law
An answer to Powell’s question of this is the acceptance and even encouragement of that environment by the US newspaper Washington Post who after the string of suicides requested a counter-piece from Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council, a virulently anti-gay organisation, who promptly blamed the LGBT community and the victims for the suicides.
Both in the UK and the US the LGBT population live under various kinds of separate but equal provision at best, and I can point to the Civil partnership and marriage laws here in the UK. The CP-law is a separate provision for us in the LGBT-community, and is supposed to be equal, but all it does is slice our community out from the main to identify it as being apart.
In United States you additionally have directly discriminatory practices such as DOMA and DADT that tells us that we don’t qualify for equal protection under the laws, and that laws in fact must be enacted to stop our influence, which by definition is a pernicious one.
This as a result of compromises with a socially conservative movement that hates us, and the result of compromises with a movement in which pulpits are used as a weapon in a “culture war” aimed squarely at the “radical homosexual agenda” of school kids wanting to feel safe.
Some Christians have, as I’ve already mentioned, started to question this order, but for many kids hurting out there today it isn’t enough to have old men lock themselves in seminary debates in which the outcomes are doubtful in any event, and therefore people like Dan Savage started the “It gets better”-project partly in order to evade the timid bureaucrats in the school districts that even prevent fairly timid organisations like GLSEN from entering schools.
Tags: bullying, christianity, dan savage, education, england, gay, hate crime, homophobia, homosexuality, lgbt, lgbt rights, politics, religion, schools, uk, united kingdom, usa
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