A report released Tuesday by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) shows that Jacob, whose story is detailed in the report, was hardly alone in his struggle to find help. Surveying 1,976 instances of LGBTQ intimate partner abuse from 2015, NCAVP found that nearly half of survivors (44 percent) had been turned away from shelters. Of those, 71 percent reported that they were denied services due to their gender identity, because women-only shelters would not accept gay men or trans women, for example. Transgender women had a particularly tough time finding services that wouldn't slam the door in their faces, but gay, bisexual, and transgender men also reported that domestic violence shelters for men rarely even exist. [...]
For male domestic violence victims of all backgrounds, services are still woefully sparse—one of the country's first shelters for male victims of domestic violence just opened this February in Arkansas. And for women in same-sex relationships, fleeing to the seeming safety of a domestic violence shelter presents a unique problem. As a survivor named Sylvia described in the NCAVP report, she was afraid to enter a shelter once learning there was no way to guarantee her abusive girlfriend would be barred from entering. For lesbian and bisexual women, the threat of an abuser following them into a shelter is a very real prospect. [...]
Statistics show that the LGBTQ community is impacted by intimate partner violence at rates higher than those of heterosexuals. According to the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey published by the Centers for Disease Control, the most recent report available, bisexual women and men suffer from domestic violence more than any other group in terms of sexual orientation: 37.3 percent of bisexual men (compared to 29 percent of straight men) and 61.1 percent of bisexual women (at nearly double the 35 percent of straight women) reported physical violence, rape, or stalking at the hands of a partner. Lesbians were the second-highest group at 43.8 percent, and 26 percent of gay men reported domestic abuse as well.
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