Responsible Together 2024: Love is normal. Violence is not.

Domestic abuse in LGBTQ+ relationships is shaped by discrimination and inequality, just like in heterosexual relationships. Societal prejudice against LGBTQ+ people, including homo-, bi-, and transphobia, allows abusers to use sexuality and gender as tools to control and isolate their partners. While awareness of LGBTQ+ victims is growing, LGBTQ+ abusers are often overlooked. This invisibility is tied to society's focus on traditional, cis-heteronormative views of domestic abuse and ongoing prejudice against LGBTQ+ communities. To address this, it's important to work with local LGBTQ+ groups through community engagement, education, and outreach. These efforts can help more LGBTQ+ individuals seek support, whether they are victims of abusers who want to change. WWP EN supports organisations that are trying to become more inclusive and responsive to the unique needs of the LGBTQ+ community in addressing domestic abuse.

Research by Professor Catherine Donovan’s condensed in the expert paper on ‘LGBT+ Perpetrators: Visibility, Recognition, and Interventions’ shows that: 

• The common view of domestic abuse often focuses on cisgender, heterosexual men as abusers and cisgender, heterosexual women as victims. This makes it harder for LGBTQ+ individuals facing abuse to access support.
• Rigid ideas about gender roles, like victim versus abuser or weak versus strong, make abuse in LGBT+ relationships seem less serious or even invisible compared to heterosexual relationships. This leaves many LGBT+ people, and even some cisgender heterosexual individuals, feeling like their experiences don’t fit the usual story. This leads to fewer reports and a lack of support services designed for LGBT+ abuse survivors.
• Abuse between women is often dismissed because of stereotypes that women are non-violent, while abuse between men is viewed as “equal fighting” due to assumptions about male aggression. Non-binary and genderqueer individuals are also misunderstood in abuse situations, as people rely on appearance or assumptions rather than recognizing the complexities of their experiences.
• Perpetrators of domestic abuse can also use intersectional and identity-based tactics to harm their victims. For example, they may exploit societal prejudices like racism, ableism, or transphobia to isolate or control their partner, making the abuse even more harmful and difficult to address.
• To better support the LGBT+ community, we need a more inclusive understanding of domestic abuse that reflects diverse relationships and identities.

The COHSAR Power and Control Wheel is an adapted model of the Duluth Power and Control Wheel, designed to reflect dynamics of power and control in all intimate partner relationships, regardless of gender or sexuality. Unlike the Duluth model, physical and sexual violence are shown as spokes, while power and control form an inner circle around two core “relationship rules.”