Introduction

Research investigating healthcare service provision has repeatedly demonstrated how experiences of stigma and discrimination detracts from the overall quality of care rendered to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ) victim-survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) (Ayhan et al., 2020; Mccrone, 2018; Ruben et al., 2019). In contrast, little attention is afforded to how LGBTQ persons respond to and navigate these contexts (see Rees et al., 2021; Lacombe-Duncan et al., 2020). This inadvertently propagates a narrative of victim-survivors as “passive, weak, and non-agentic” (Taylor et al., 2019, p. 1100), and forecloses on the possibility of service providers gaining a self-awareness of interpersonal and societal prejudices towards LGBTQ individuals to improve service provision (see Rees et al., 2021). At the time of writing, the help-seeking experiences of LGBTQ victim-survivors remains understudied and under-theorized. The current article addresses this gap, and reports on a subsection of the findings from a multi-phase project that investigated the provision of LGBTQ-inclusive family, domestic and sexual violenceFootnote 1 (FDSV) services from the perspectives of mainstream and LGBTQ community FDSV service providers and LGBTQ people who have experienced violence. This paper reports on a subset of participant experiences pertaining to IPV and/or to services utilized by victim-survivors.

IPV in LGBTQ Relationships

IPV is a significant public health concern in Australia (Dawson et al., 2019), where it is typically conceptualized as abuse perpetrated by cisgender, heterosexual men against their cisgender, heterosexual female partners (Mortimer et al., 2019). IPV occurring outside this heteronormative context is consequently critically under-researched, and the cumulative and insidious ways that abuse can be perpetrated often eludes scholarly attention (Mortimer et al., 2019). While IPV occurs at similar, or higher rates within LGBTQ relationships (Victorian Agency for Health Information), these victim-survivors are often overlooked in IPV policy and service provision (Cannon & Buttell, 2016; Donovan & Barnes, 2020). Most support services are designed, implemented, and delivered without consideration to the unique needs of LGBTQ victim-survivors (Cannon, 2015). To many LGBTQ victim-survivors, seeking help from formalFootnote 2 IPV support services is often weighed up against the possibility of re-traumatization (Hatzenbuehler & Pachankis, 2016; Scheer & Baams, 2021) and discrimination (incidental or otherwise) experienced from IPV service providers themselves (Möller et al., 2006).

Previous research has established that sociodemographic characteristics and social variations such as gender, sexuality and ethnicity can profoundly influence service accessibility, help-seeking behaviors, and service interactions (Ghafournia & Easteal, 2019). For LGBTQ victim-survivors, heterosexism and cissexism are commonly cited as barriers which impede access to formal services (Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023; Scheer & Baams, 2021; Calton et al., 2016), and engender an anticipation of discrimination from service providers (Kcomt et al., 2020). Heterosexism and cissexism are often commonplace within service and policy ecosystems (Cannon, 2015), leading both scholars and stakeholders to reasonably conclude that LGBTQ victim-survivors are likely to avoid these services, and prioritize ‘informal’Footnote 3 sources of support (see Miles-Johnson, 2020; Freeland et al., 2018). However, an emergent body of both gray (Gray et al., 2020; Lay et al., 2018; O'Halloran, 2015) and scholarly research (Barros et al., 2019) contradicts this assumption and suggests that LGBTQ victim-survivors instead navigate these service environments while strategically managing experiences of discrimination.

The Role of Services in LGBTQ Victim-Survivors’ Recovery

The social factors underpinning IPV within LGBTQ relationships both predispose LGBTQ individuals to many negative outcomes, and undermines recovery by obstructing access toappropriate care (Scheer & Baams, 2021; Calton et al., 2016). However, little is known about LGBTQ individuals’ help-seeking behaviors and experiences within formal services (Donovan & Barnes, 2020). Given the premise that heterosexism and cissexismFootnote 4 are embedded “at all levels of interaction, from the state through to communities, relationships and individuals” (Donovan & Barnes, 2020, p. 555), LGBTQ victim-survivors likely contend with some amount of discrimination in navigating formal services (Harden et al., 2020). While LGBTQ individuals often develop a baseline tolerance to homophobic, biphobic or transphobic slights and employ strategies to avoid discrimination in day-to-day life (Choi & Oh, 2021), victim-survivors are likely in a state of psychological decompensation when presenting to support services (Riggs & Treharne, 2017) which amplifies the impact of ordinarily minor slights (Lim et al., 2021, 2022).

The potential for harm within service settings is substantial. Miller et al. (2017, p. 16), argue that where oppressive dynamics relating to “racism, colonialism, ableism, heterosexism, sexism, and transphobia” are not sufficiently addressed, service interactions can become a source of minority stress. LGBTQ victim-survivors may delay or even eschew the utilization formal services altogether (Jaffee et al., 2016),opting instead to draw on informal social support networks (Harden et al., 2020). While these networks are undoubtedly crucial sources of support, their use is often complicated by the fact that (i) LGBTQ victim-survivors share the same support networks as their abusive partners (Scheer & Baams, 2021; Harden et al., 2020), and (ii) individuals comprising these networks may only be able to provide limited support (Ollen et al., 2017). Moreover, as social isolation is an exceedingly common abuse tactic, victim-survivors may be unable to access these networks (Woulfe & Goodman, 2020).

This points to the key role that formal services can play in LGBTQ victim-survivors’ recovery (Scheer & Baams, 2021). However, as service accessibility and victim-survivors’ help-seeking behaviors are complicated by interpersonal and systemic discriminations (Russell, 2020), the prevailing assumption is that: (i) LGBTQ populations pre-dominantly utilize population-specific services, where sexuality- or gender identity-related discrimination is less common, and (ii) avoid general-population support services (Barnes & Donovan, 2018; Bornstein et al., 2013; Head, 2020; Turell & Herrmann, 2013). Recent findings have destabilized this assumption and suggest that LGBTQ victim-survivors do utilize ‘mainstream’ formal services due to immediate necessity, or a simple lack of population-specific options (Donovan & Barnes, 2020; Gray et al., 2020; Lay et al., 2018; O'Halloran, 2015). This alludes to a critical tension – while ‘mainstream’ formal support services can play a crucial role in recovery (Scheer & Baams, 2021), using them comes with considerable risk of discrimination for LGBTQ persons. Logically, this suggests that LGBTQ victim-survivors are forced to contend with and privately manage service provider discrimination whilst utilizing these services. While these experiences of discrimination do not technically impede access to support, they may diminish the benefit victim-survivors derive from accessing these services (see: Scheer & Baams, 2021).

The Current Study

The experiences of LGBTQ victim-survivors within services are understudied. While interpolations from across other service domains like healthcare settings (see: Ayhan et al., 2020) can offer some insight, the profound distress which many victim-survivors experience while having to negotiate service provider discrimination confounds any inference drawn from this body of scholarship. The ways the service provider discrimination manifests within service interactions, and the subsequent strategies that LGBTQ victim-survivors deploy to access support despite experiences of discrimination remains opaque. The current study therefore examines LGBTQ victim-survivors experiences of navigating formal service environments and draws on life history interviews with (N = 29) LGBTQ victim-survivors currently residing in Australia. These interviews focused on both recent and ongoing instances of FDSV (< 2 years) and examined participant experiences of accessing both formal and informal sources of support. This was done with the view to inform future improvements to service provision, delivery, and quality for LGBTQ victim-survivors (see: Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023).

Research Methods and Study Design

Methodology

The study used qualitative methods to tease apart the nuances and specificity of victim-survivors’ experiences. Qualitative studies comprise the numerical minority in IPV-related research (Barnes & Donovan, 2018), and the popularity of quantitative methodologies reflects predominant notions of IPV as a public health issue (Donovan & Hester, 2011). However, the nuances of individual, lived experience are often inadequately captured through the broad brush of quantitative methodologies (Bergin, 2018). This is particularly true as these experiences relate to deeply rooted structures of oppression and disadvantage, which typically defy empirical measurement (Garcia et al., 2018).

Recruitment

Participants were recruited from an extensive database of Private Lives 3 participants (Hill et al., 2020), a nation-wide survey investigating the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ adults in Australia. Participants had consented to be contacted about future studies. An email explaining: (i) the goals of the project, (ii) what participation in the project entailed, and (iii) eligibility criteria was sent to an email address nominated by individuals in this database. Interested parties were directed to complete an online screening questionnaire designed to determine the respondent’s eligibility; this captured basic demographic information such as (a) race/ethnicity, (b) age, (c) sexuality, (d) gender identity, (e) state of residence, (f) recency of last IPV-related incident, and (g) use/non-use of formal support services. To ensure the equitable representation of various sexual, gender and racial identities within the study, purposive sampling was used to obtain a participant sample from among the eligible respondents with an even distribution of these demographic characteristics.

Data Collection

Eligible respondents were informed of their selection via e-mail, and asked to nominate a preferred time, date, and interview format. A total of (N = 29) semi-structured interviews spanning 45 – 120 min were recorded over video-conferencing software or phone from late-2020 to mid-2021. This was necessitated by COVID-19-related restrictions instated in Melbourne, where the authors are based. This interview format is popular for conducting synchronous qualitative interviews and a viable alternative to in-person interviews (Irani, 2018; Drabble et al., 2016). Remote interviewing also allows participants to select a comfortable and familiar environment for what may be a potentially re-traumatizing discussion, and therefore facilitates participants’ emotional safety (Irani, 2018; Drabble et al., 2016).

Twenty-eight of these interviews were conducted by the second author, a heterosexual cisgender woman, while one interview was conducted by the last author, a gay cisgender man.. As both interviewers are of Anglo-Celtic ancestry, it is possible that racially-minoritized participants were less comfortable and/or willing to discuss issues of racial discrimination and culturally specific needs within these interviews (Holbrook et al., 2019). While past research strongly corroborates these effects within the context of face-to-face interviewing, more recent evidence suggests that interviewer effects tied to racial identity and presentation may be largely attenuated within the context of video conferencing interviews.

Data Analysis

Audio recordings were first transcribed into text through a paid transcription service. Transcripts were subsequently uploaded onto NVivo12.0 and manually coded by the first and second authors. A preliminary coding framework was developed through the second and third authors’ (i) field notes and reflections on the collected data, (ii) insights from previous study phases involving interviews with FDSV service providers and stakeholders, and (iii) an extensive review of existing literature. This preliminary framework comprised a mixture of a priori codes from IPV literature (e.g., identity abuse, anti-transgender discrimination, etc.) and semantic codes within the data (e.g., financial barriers to support, COVID-related barriers to support, etc.).

Analyses were primarily conducted between the first author, a bisexual cisgender man and the second author. The first and second authors first used this framework in line-by-line coding (Linneberg & Korsgaard, 2019; Vollstedt & Rezat, 2019). As more transcripts were coded, this initial framework gradually expanded in both scope and complexity. When all transcripts had been coded once, both first and second authors then reconvened to refine the expanded coding framework, ensure adequate code application, and resolve discrepancies in code assignments. Inter-rater consensus in code-assignments was achieved for 95% of code assignments. The finalized coding framework contained 6 parent codes and 30 sub-codes, combining both semantic and latent themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Axial coding was subsequently conducted to establish both dominant codes and linkages between code. Each transcript was then individually analyzed using a framework analysis approach (Flynn & Graham, 2010) that was attentive to the thematic commonalities across the dataset. The contrasting sexual identities and racial positionalities of both first and second authors (Han Chinese and Anglo-Celtic, respectively) generated a composite analytical perspective. Through this, the role of sociodemographic factors in participants’ help-seeking experiences was able to be precisely enunciated, and differentiated from more generalized, identity-agnostic factors.

Participant Characteristics

Participant ages ranged from 19—79 years old. An even distribution of transgender (N = 14) and cisgender (N = 15) participants was noted. Participants identifying as Queer (N = 12) comprised most of the sample, while comparable numbers of participants identified as Gay (N = 9), Lesbian (N = 7) and Bisexual and/or other Plurisexual (N = 6). Most participants were of Anglo-Celtic ancestry (N = 22), with individuals of Pan-African (N = 2), Ashkenazi Jewish ethnicity (N = 2) and Han Chinese (N = 2) comprising the next largest racial groups. Only one Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander participant was included in these analyses.

Ethics

Institutional ethics approval was granted for this study by the La Trobe University Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) (Project ID: 202111). All participants are referred to hereafter using pseudonyms in the interest of maintaining confidentiality.

Findings

Victim-survivors within Australia access support via a bricolage of formal services in either a simultaneous or sequential manner. Given contrasting levels of investment in improving LGBTQ-appropriate service expertise across the plurality of domains accessed by participants (Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023), participant experiences of help-seeking tended to expose them to stigma and discrimination at some point across their help-seeking journey. However, both the frequency and precise expression of service workers’ discriminatory attitudes were highly specific to the service context in question – as were the strategies of negotiation employed by participants to manage discrimination. Hence, while the data was analyzed thematically, the following discussion is organized by service domains in order to accurately capture the extant gaps in service provision within each domain.

Courts and Legal Professionals

Legal discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in Australia is both historic fact and an ongoing reality, persisting despite significant advances towards securing the rights of LGBTQ groups (Riseman, 2019; Thornton, 2021). Participants demonstrated keen awareness of the anti-LGBTQ biases ingrained within these institutions and described their efforts to find legal assistance to mediate their engagement with these systems. Though most individuals residing in urban areas were nominally able to access population-specific legal support, the receipt of these services was constrained by several factors. Most commonly, (i) a lack of recognition or knowledge about available population-specific service options and (ii) low service availability due to disproportionately high demand for said services often prevented timely access to culturally competent support. Participants therefore reported long wait-times, but crucially also noted the potential for conflicts of interest to arise due to both victim-survivor and perpetrator attempting to access the same limited pool of services. Most participants therefore engaged non-population-specific legal services, seeking assistance from general duties police officers or family violence officers rather than LGBT liaison officers, or, for cisgendered women, court supports that were focused on assisting cisgendered, heterosexual women experiencing violence.

Participant statements demonstrated an expectation of discrimination from service providers, even in instances where both parties involved in the court proceedings were LGBTQ individuals. In these instances, participants felt that the party that most successfully approximated preconceived notions of heteronormativity held by legal actors received more favorable treatment. This was particularly the case for transgender participants who experienced abuse from a cisgender partner or former partner. Alicia was one participant who was acutely aware that her ‘trans-ness’ might cause her to be misperceived as deviant and predatory in juxtaposition to her cisgender ex-partner by legal actors:

I was completely terrified that the judge I might be in front might be transphobic and might go you know what this is all completely right what [my ex-partner] is saying, this person deserves to be hit and deserves to pay it all back because being trans is wrong

– Alicia, Anglo-Celtic, Trans Woman, Queer.

Alicia’s concerns reference pervasive, transphobic cultural stereotypes that situate the sexual and physical safety of cisgender women as under perennial threat from transgender women. The latter are commonly maligned as “predatory men” who masquerade as women to gain unmitigated access to cisgender women’s bodies and spaces (Sherrick, 2021; Stone, 2019). As Lenning et al. (2021) note, these stereotypes are often invoked to both stigmatize and invalidate transgender identities, and to justify the prioritization of cisgender women’s comfort and safety. Given the pervasiveness of such attitudes, Alicia states that she was lucky that the legal professionals she hired were willing to educate themselves on the discriminations she faced:

My solicitor had to educate himself, and he did a very good job, but he had to educate himself on these issues to protect me. But his advice was, and obviously you know he’s also a barrister, his advice was you know to settle because you don’t know what the judge is like.

– Alicia, Anglo-Celtic, Trans Woman, Queer.

These positive experiences are overshadowed by two crucial caveats. Firstly, that Alicia regards herself as lucky suggests she believes that most service workers are not similarly proactive in ‘skilling up’ to meet LGBTQ clients’ needs, and past research indeed suggests that many service workers often rely on clients to educate them on even rudimentary LGBTQ-related topics (Miles-Johnson, 2020). Secondly, as Alicia’s experiences more broadly suggest, the open-mindedness of a single service worker was by insufficient to counterbalance what she perceived as the entrenched prejudices of the judicial system. Alicia’s solicitor was an important advocate who even interjected himself between the participant and her ex-partner when the latter attempted to physically intimidate her. Ultimately, however, he represented a single actor within a broader judicial infrastructure that typically discriminates against transgender (see Minter, 2018).

As with Alicia’s case, other participants also reported that their experiences of abuse were not regarded with the appropriate gravity when their abuser was a cisgender woman. This was especially evident within lesbian relationships where IPV was viewed as innocuous emotional outbursts which seldom qualified as violence. Collectively, such perceptions derive from benevolently sexist beliefs about women which interpret rigid gender ideologies to mean that women are incapable of violence (Glick & Raberg, 2018).

Benevolently sexist ideologies accordingly undermined victim-survivor credibility; Justine was one participant who felt that her petite ex-partner was not considered a credible threat to her safety due to her comparatively smaller stature. Justine’s ex-partner had repeatedly threatened and attempted to harm both her and her pets. She shared that when she made a police report after her ex-partner attempted a serious assault, neither the on-going threats nor the attempted harm resulted in police protections beyond the duration stipulated by an interim protection order. Australian civil procedure designates interim orders as “short-term order(s) made by the court which can extend a provisional order or put protection(s) in place for the victim until a final Domestic Violence OrderFootnote 5 (DVO) application can be considered by the court” (Poynton et al., 2016, p. 2).

While both are qualitatively similar, a final DVO extends the length of these protections. As well as providing ongoing protections for a victim-survivor, outstanding orders against the individual using violence typically appear on standard police checks that are mandatory for many professions. Justine surmises that the decision against awarding a final order DVO was at least partially motivated by investigating officers’ unwillingness to tarnish her ex-partner’s professional standing and reputation by putting a final order in place, which was experienced as a tacit trivialization of Justine’s experiences of IPV.

Justine’s experiences also showed how this minimization of female-perpetrated IPV meant that the police she encountered seemed to treat the person accused of violence with greater courtesy than her as a victim-survivor. She recounts how her assigned police prosecutor took the initiative to negotiate a settlement with her ex-partner without her consent or input, before they had even met:

His first words [were] “Hi Justine” he says, "I've been speaking with [your ex-partner], and I think we can just sort this all out with a minimum of fuss." And I'm thinking, "You've been speaking to my abuser before you've even spoken to me. And you and she have figured out how this can all be resolved."

–Justine, Anglo-Celtic, Cisgender Woman, Lesbian.

This was particularly egregious given this occurred after her ex-partner had both threatened to lodge a formal complaint against the officers attending Justine’s domestic violence complaint and attempted to have domestic violence charges against her dismissed by repeatedly haranguing the police department filing said charges. Despite the aggressive behavior displayed towards both Justine and the officers attending the case, her ex-partner was never considered a credible threat to Justine’s safety.

Law Enforcement Officers

The current section discusses participant experiences with law enforcement officers, and offers some insight into how individual, negative experiences with these service workers may potentiate into and/or reinforce pre-existing, community-held distrust towards policing agencies. Subsequently, the discussion turns to victim-survivors' attempts to manage these experiences. Despite implementing policies intended to improve community relations with LGBTQ communities (Dwyer et al., 2021; Miles-Johnson, 2016), LGBTQ individuals often remain reluctant to engage with law enforcement (Dario et al., 2019). This may be due to an accumulation of negative experiences relating to criminalization and discriminatory policing within the Australian LGBTQ community, as well as discriminatory policing practices within contemporary contexts (Miles-Johnson, 2021).

While some commentators view anti-police sentiment among LGBTQ groups as unsubstantiated (e.g., Dwyer et al., 2021), Hill et al. (2020) found that 55.0% of victim-survivors who disclosed experiences of FDSV to police felt unsupported. Most participants who interacted with police did not report overt forms of discrimination, but instead encountered subtler and/or indirect discrimination. These were often unintentional slights that appeared indicative of poor cultural competencies rather than any malicious intent. Regardless, this undermined participants’ confidence in police officers’ ability to render support and contributed to perceptions of these services as ‘unsafe.’ As one participant recalled of the officer attending his domestic violence complaint:

He said, ‘I hear you’ve been having some trouble with you and your housemate.’ I thought to myself this guy who’s phoned up has no idea [...] I felt like ‘Okay I don’t feel like it's safe for me to tell him what's happened, he’s not understanding.’

–Lance, Anglo-Celtic & African, Cisgender Man, Pansexual.

Lance’s experiences are indicative of failures in family violence-related work processes within the local police organization. However, being in a heightened state of distress, he was unable to rule out the possibility that the attending officer might respond negatively to any disclosure of his sexual identity.

Participants who reported explicit forms of police discrimination were either persons of color or transgender, which may reflect the biased policing of both communities of color (Molla, 2021; Majavu, 2020; Murphy et al., 2018) as well as transgender individuals (Dwyer & Ball, 2020; Miles-Johnson, 2021). For example, Yazid, a participant of mixed South and Western-Asian descent, reported witnessing a thinly concealed outburst from one of the officers attending his domestic violence complaint. This officer loudly voiced his disgust towards Yazid and his partner to his co-worker:

I can hear him because he’s standing in that corridor and I’m in the room […] “I fucking can’t understand this gay relationship [stuff], I’m sick of it,” to the other police officer

–Yazid, South Asian & Middle-Eastern, Cisgender Man, Gay.

Likewise, Lance, a bi-racial participant, recounted an instance several years past where he was ‘gay bashed,’ but was pointedly ignored by a patrolling police officer whom he approached for assistance. In both instances, these participants’ multiple minority identities may contribute to police interactions where little effort is made by officers to conceal their anti-LGBTQ attitudes (Miles-Johnson & Fay, 2022). While rationally cognizant that the prejudices of individual officers were not representative of the entire force, these experiences foregrounded the anticipation of police discrimination for individuals like Lance.

Negative experiences like these were thereafter disseminated among LGBTQ peer groups and networks. This was done as a means of cautioning other LGBTQ persons against similarly risky or unsafe situations. Distrust of police authorities also underlined an unspoken expectation among some LGBTQ groups that such services should never be enlisted against other LGBTQ individuals, given the potentially harmful nature of the ensuing interaction. As one participant explained, LGBTQ individuals may see the involvement of the police as tantamount to weaponizing a legacy of discriminatory policing against another LGBTQ individual:

There is the issue of confidentiality being in a small community and you don’t want to- you don’t want to be attacking your fellow vulnerable queers, you know what I mean

– Sam, Anglo-Celtic, Gender-Diverse, Queer.

Consequently, LGBTQ victim-survivors may face social repercussions for reaching out to police, even where the nature of the abuse they are experiencing means they feel that they have limited other options. This was the case for Sam, whose ex-partner subsequently capitalized upon the anti-police sentiment within their social circle to alienate Sam from their mutual friendship group.

The misgivings of many LGBTQ people about how their IPV complaints might be handled despite their concomitant need to seek assistance from police must be viewed in tandem, even as they appear to pull in contradictory directions. Gender minority participants were keenly aware of their vulnerability to police discrimination, and so largely refrained from reaching out to police. These participants’ accounts also suggested that police discrimination manifested in specific ways for different sub-groups. For instance, transgender male participants were cognizant of being misidentified as the perpetrator of abuse by attending police officers, particularly if they ‘passed’ as cisgender men. In contrast transgender women were wary of experiencing transmisogynistic discrimination if they did not ‘pass’ as cisgender women.

For other gender-diverse participants, however, the invisibilization of their gender identities could sometimes be strategically leveraged to ‘smooth over’ service interactions with police. Sam was one participant who was able to successfully navigate police interactions by choosing not to challenge officers’ gendered assumptions. Sam recalled seeking assistance from local police after experiencing abuse from their ex-partner, who was transmasculine. Sam noticed that their partner’s male-sounding name and their own appearance allowed the attending office to mistakenly assume that Sam was a cisgender woman experiencing IPV from a male partner:

[My ex-partner] uses he/him pronouns [...] it was easier to let them assume that he was a cis dude in the process of that and I think that helped [....] They were more likely to be helping me if they assumed that I am a cis hetero woman, and he is a cis hetero man because that fits into their brain nicely and neatly

– Sam, Anglo-Celtic, Gender-Diverse, Queer.

Citing past experiences of police violence, Sam decided against challenging these assumptions. They reflected that police officers had previously reacted with defensiveness and hostility whenever corrected about their gender and decided against doing so in this interaction.

Moreover, Sam felt that these misconceptions rendered their situation recognizable to the attending officers (e.g., a male abuser perpetrating violence against his female partner), contributing significantly to the responsive and sympathetic treatment that they subsequently experienced. Sam was noticeably conflicted about benefiting from these misconceptions and articulated some regret that they had refrained from challenging the officer’s assumption about their ex-partner’s gender, but believed that their complaint would not otherwise be viewed with the same urgency or import:

That perception helped her support me the way I needed to be supported in that moment […] If she were to actually see [my ex-partner] her whole perception of the danger that I was in would have changed [...] I would have been less believable

– Sam, Anglo-Celtic, Gender-Diverse, Queer.

Conjecturing that both themselves and their ex-partner would have been misgendered as cisgender women, Sam was convinced that the intimate violence which they had experienced would have been trivialized, and that the threat which Sam’s ex-partner represented to them would have been judged to be minimal.

In other instances, these rigid preconceptions of IPV presentation were more directly detrimental to victim-survivors – particularly in instances where the persons using violence were able to capitalize on said perceptions. This was evident from the below participant’s account:

[My ex-partner] would flip between being abusive and going as if they were the victim. So, because it was, you know, coming from a place of fear and trauma themselves, but still abusive against me […] they’d start shuddering or hiding in the shadows or do this kind of fake speaking in tongues things. And [would] sort of really dial up the mental health thing when authorities came into the scene […] they were yelling out, ‘call the ambulance, I’m hurt, call the ambulance.’

– Helena, Anglo-Celtic & Other European, Non-Binary, Pansexual.

Helena’s account suggests that perpetrators of IPV may likewise account for these preconceptions. Because Helena’s ex-partner was of diminutive physique, and would oftentimes either feign injury, or exaggerate their state of mental distress when police arrived on scene, they were often ensured compassionate treatment from the attending officers. As her ex-partner was often misgendered as a cisgender woman, despite identifying as non-binary, the invisibilization of their gender identity paradoxically enabled them to leverage benevolently sexist beliefs in such a way as to diminish the severity of their abusive actions. While Helena names these behaviors as abusive towards her, this reflexive ‘performance’ of victimhood by her ex-partner was not seen as intentionally malicious. Rather, she attributed this to prior negative experiences with police, and to an expectation of punitive treatment if correctly identified as the perpetrator of abuse.

As seen from the juxtaposing accounts offered by Sam and Helena, participant experiences of police interaction were not unanimously negative, and even participants like Lance, who reported discriminatory treatment from police also reported some positive encounters—such as when an officer went out of his way to assist him:

There was a time when I was homophobically assaulted, the second time, and this police officer went out of his way to track down the group of young men who were harassing me [...]t I started to understand that you know what the police can be really helpful

–Lance, Anglo-Celtic & African, Cisgender Man, Pansexual.

Lance’s contrasting interactions with individual officers reflects a substantial heterogeneity in individual officers’ attitudes toward LGBTQ civilians (Miles-Johnson, 2016; Miles-Johnson & Pickering, 2018). While Dwyer et al. (2021) argue that the implementation of policy initiatives intended to improve LGBTQ-related cultural safety and sensitivity among the police rank-and-file have been unilaterally successful, other scholars have countered that these initiatives do little to challenge biased perceptions of minority persons within the force (Miles-Johnson, 2021; Miles-Johnson & Ball, 2022; Miles-Johnson & Fay, 2022).

Unsurprisingly, most participants exercised ample caution in these interactions, with several even actively concealing their sexual and/or gender identities to the greatest feasible extent. This selective self-disclosure was not always motivated by anticipated discrimination, but also helped participants sidestep uncomfortable or difficult conversations about one’s identities that could detract from more pressing needs:

Dealing with services or professionals, if you're there to get something the last thing you want to do is have another interaction around gender or sexuality. You’re there to try and get help for something, you don’t want to have to educate them on [your] gender

– Sam, Anglo-Celtic, Gender-Diverse, Queer.

Even where service workers were seemingly open-minded, and were eager to learn from LGBTQ clients, victim-survivors presenting to these services discussed not having the wherewithal, nor inclination to provide them guidance on the intricacies of their minority identities. This presented a conundrum to participants like Sam, who noted that concealing one’s sexual or gender identity potentially exposed them to unintentional slights from service workers:

I can walk in there and pretend that I’m not trans or just not correct them and allow them to misgender me, but you know that’s causing me harm at a time when I’m already vulnerable and hurting

– Sam, Anglo-Celtic, Gender-Diverse, Queer.

Cisgender participants reported comparable instances where service workers made assumptions about their sexual identities, but it is important to point out that misgendering is uniquely harmful to transgender persons (Howansky et al., 2021). Misgendering is often a subtle rejection and delegitimization of a transgender individual’s designations of their own gender and body. Hence, as Sam’s experiences demonstrate, transgender individuals are particularly disadvantaged within these contexts, being that they may become targets of overt anti-trans discrimination if correctly identified as trans but are otherwise subject to subtler (though still significant) indignities when attempting to strategically avoid explicit forms of prejudice by concealing their gender identities.

Mental Health Services and General Practitioners

Recent findings suggest that both mental and general health providers –comprise an important avenue through which victim-survivors report experiences of FDSV. Hill et al. (2020) report that among a sample of 4,731 LGBTQ victim-survivors, these services respectively comprised the first and third most common services that their participants disclosed their experiences of FDSV to. As further indicated by these authors, a respective 89.4% and 68.4% of these participants felt supported by these service providers, a finding that was generally reflective of our participants’ experiences with these services. In addition to being a supportive environment where victim-survivors could seek support, services crucially facilitate participants’ recognition of their experiences as IPV. This was especially salient to LGBTQ populations, whose understandings of IPV are often shaped by preconceptions of it as an intrinsically hetero-gendered phenomenon (Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023). For many participants, the validation of health providers that their experiences indeed qualified as IPV was experienced as a powerful form of affirmation that facilitated help-seeking behaviors.

Health providers were also an invaluable intermediary through which victim-survivors were referred onto services that were culturally appropriate. This was the case for Helena, whose disclosure of her experiences of IPV led her doctor to suggest referring her to a mental health professional who specialized in working with trans clients. While initially skeptical that she would benefit from this specialized support, Helena was ultimately glad that she had taken her doctor’s recommendation:

She [was] very diversity friendly, works with trans people. I almost felt a little bit patronized that my doctor put me onto her [...] but the thing is by pure chance she gave me someone who totally got where I was coming from, who had been through emotional abuse herself. So that was like the jackpot.

– Helena, Anglo-Celtic & Other European, Non-Binary, Pansexual.

While most participants experienced mental health services as inclusive and accepting toward LGBTQ clients, this did not linearly translate into appropriate occupational expertise. The below participant’s experiences further demonstrate a profound potential for harm in instances where a practitioner is confident of their LGBTQ-inclusive practices but has yet to test the limits of their assumptions or knowledge:

[Many counselors] don’t get gay relationships or they always treat it very, very weirdly and differently and very invalidating like for example one time I was really struggling with casual sex and hooking up and I really don’t want to be doing that and it was damaging the relationship but instead of getting support to deal with it - it was just sort of like well all gay people are promiscuous and you know you just need to deal with it

–Jia Hao, Han Chinese, Cisgender Man, Gay.

Contrasting Helena’s experiences, participants like Jia Hao encountered well-intentioned service workers whose lack of population-specific expertise could mean that service interactions could be a waste of time and resources or counterproductive, or in the worst-case scenario, actively harmful. Some participants responded to this perceived lack of expertise by attempting to educate service workers, and occasionally even challenge them with their unintentionally discriminatory beliefs. However, most participants felt uncomfortable or unable to do so. In those instances, victim-survivors may simply choose to quietly terminate these client-therapist relationships. Where possible, support might be sought elsewhere -however, for participants in rural and regional areas or who were low-income, alternative help was not always available.

A minority of participants reported unambiguously negative experiences with mental health service providers. Anna shared that none of the 4 counselors she went to were able to recognize her experiences as IPV, with two of these counselors even appearing minimizing the severity of the emotional abuse she had suffered:

I could never really speak up about the extent of the [abuse] that would happen, or they would speak about ‘well [my ex-partner’s] style of dealing with things is to [behave abusively]’

– Anna, Anglo-Celtic, Cisgender Woman, Bisexual.

Anna’s experiences were illustrative of how inadequate LGBTQ-specific service expertise could actively harm a victim-survivor. These counselors’ failure to affirm Anna’s intuitions that she was experiencing IPV ultimately contributed to her decision to remain in her relationship, exposing her to further instances of abuse. While this “recognition failure” (Merrill & Wolfe, 2000) is more commonly discussed in relation to LGBTQ victim-survivors’ inability to recognize their experiences as IPV, it is commonplace among service workers (see: Rollè et al., 2018). In either case, “recognition failure” is often attributed to a generalized ignorance of how IPV manifests within same-sex relationships (and of same-sex relationships, more generally), and indicates a lack of LGBTQ-specific expertise on the part of the service.

Family Domestic and Sexual Violence Support Services

Specialized support services are a critical component of community responses to FDSV, but have traditionally been either ill-prepared, and/or unwilling to accommodate LGBTQ victim-survivors’ unique needs (see Rollè et al., 2018). While significant strides have been made in ensuring the emotional safety of LGBTQ victim-survivors within these services, resourcing constraints often mean that improvements to service capabilities are unevenly made (Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023). Two subgroup which remain noticeably underserved in comparison to other groups within the LGBTQ umbrella are transgender individuals (Kurdyla et al., 2021) and queer cisgender men (Callan et al., 2021). These victim-survivors may resultantly experience either inappropriate forms of support, and/or even discriminatory treatment (Head, 2020).

Past research suggests that the prevalence of discriminatory treatment may be heightened within contexts like crisis accommodation and shelters, where the sheer presence of LGBTQ victim-survivors is thought to compromise the emotional safety of their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts (Head, 2020). In these contexts, both transgender women and cisgender gay men are often misconstrued as threats due to their presumed proximity to cisgender, heterosexual maleness (see Smith, 2021). The following participants noted that:

Women’s shelters wouldn’t take [trans women] because the other women were threatened by them, because they were men [...] and [trans women] don’t want to go to the men’s shelters, that’s if the men’s shelters would even take them. So, it was like sorry, too hard basket, no one will take you trans women

– Helena, Anglo-Celtic & Other European Non-binary, Pansexual.

Hence, while service provision in many jurisdictions has been significantly expanded to accommodate the needs of male victim-survivors (see Walker et al., 2020), LGBTQ victim-survivors remain a largely under-serviced population (Smith, 2021). This may be attributable to their uncertain positioning within the gendered dichotomy that informs these models of service provision that is where cisgender men are assumed to be perpetrators and cisgender women victims of violence. Participants also described service environments where services designated implicitly for (cisgender) women constituted most, if not all, of the available services:

A male friend of mine - at the time, he’d just come out of a relationship with someone who was quite narcissistic and there were no services accessible for gay men in domestic violence situations [...] we called up the service and they misgendered their partner, and the housing services were like well you can stay in the back packers

– Jacintha, Anglo-Celtic, Cisgender Woman, Bisexual.

Even where LGBTQ victim-survivors are not rejected by such services, much was left to be desired in terms of how these services treated gender-diverse clients. One transmasculine participant, Jaz, recounted an encounter from before his ‘transition’, when he still identified as a lesbian woman. Reaching out to multiple FDSV support services to cope with a sexual assault, Jaz recounted how his sexuality was treated as an adverse side-effect of being assaulted:

I did access a few services and I found all of them very [homophobic], like a lot of things like of course you think you’re a lesbian or you’re queer now because of what happened to you, that will probably change

– Jaz, Anglo-Celtic, Transmasculine & Non-Binary, Queer.

Jaz states that these instances of casual homophobia eventually led him to seek out services which were more affirming of sexual and gender-diversity, eventually leading him to a service which was advertised as such. However, Jaz was disappointed to realize that instead of genuinely inclusive practice, or LGBTQ-specific support expertise, the service merely employed a handful of workers who identified as LGBTQ. Further, Jaz had no interactions with any of those staff.

I was never offered any support from anyone queer identified or anyone that, even though there was visibility as there are generally in gendered services there were visibly queer women there, but I wasn’t ever offered any support that was specialized, and I disengaged quite quickly from all of it

– Jaz, Anglo-Celtic, Transmasculine & Non-Binary, Queer.

Jaz, now a service worker at an LGBTQ-specific FDSV support service, noted that while his experiences had occurred some time ago, they nevertheless remained relevant to the contemporary context. Citing his own clients’ and co-workers’ experiences with staff from other services, he related how the “subtle” kinds of identity discrimination he had previously encountered remained commonplace:

I said I’ve got a non-binary young person that’s experienced sexual assault that needs support and they’ve said ‘absolutely,’ and then when [the client has] gone there, they’ve been told ‘you can be whatever you want but while you’re here you have to identify as a woman’

– Jaz, Anglo-Celtic, Transmasculine & Non-Binary, Queer.

Accounts like these aligned with those of other participants, and collectively point to a common misconception among certain service providers that encountering gender or sexual diversity in any form was likely to constitute a source of additional trauma and psychological distress for cisgender, heterosexual victim-survivors (see: Smith, 2021).

Women’s family violence services are legally mandated to provide support to LBTQ women, and mixed gender services are similarly legally obliged not to discriminate based on gender or sexuality (Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023). However, these services were often perceived by our participants as lacking the appropriate expertise for working with trans and gender diverse clients. Indeed, findings from other Anglophone societies suggest that transgender victim-survivors are more likely to experience victimization within these service settings than their cisgender counterparts (see: Hereth, 2021).

Safety and Sexual/Gender Minority Service Workers

Participants who accessed mainstream FDSV services were sometimes paired up with LGBTQ service workers, who were positioned as ‘experts’ by virtue of their minority sexual or gender identities – despite lacking any formal capabilities for working with LGBTQ clients. Service providers and victim-survivors alike may believe that these commonalities in lived experience will foster a baseline degree of rapport and be a tacit guarantee that these service workers possessed some degree of expertise in working with sexual/gender minority victim-survivors (Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023). However, given the sheer diversity of identities and experiences encompassed within the LGBTQ umbrella, it is inevitable that these service workers will eventually encounter clients whose experiences sit outside of their own.

Perceptions of LGBTQ-identifying service workers as inherently ‘safe’ juxtaposed the experiences of victim-survivors who held multiple marginalized experiences or identities. As the following participant states, safety within service interactions – population specific or other otherwise—was more accurately thought of along continuum spanning least to greatest likelihood of experiencing discrimination:

I always conceptualize [it as] a spectrum like you get you know really overtly homophobic services all the way to you know we are cool with [LGBTQ people], but really, we are homophobic and really, really struggle with it

–Jia Hao, Han Chinese, Cisgender Man, Gay.

Participants like Jia Hao recognized the difficulties inherent to addressing ingrained anti-LGBTQ biases and expressed correspondingly little confidence in service providers’ ability to successfully counteract the biases of individual staff. This was not unique to ‘mainstream’ services, and similar occurrences were noted even in interactions with LGBTQ-identifying service workers:

We have a gay guy [at a local service] who is actually quite good at like he’s a psychologist or something he’s quite good at working with gay men. [Especially] middle aged gay men, but he’s actually known to be kind of misogynistic and transphobic

– Sam, Anglo-Celtic, Gender-Diverse, Queer.

Demonstrably, while LGBTQ groups are often collectively conceptualized under a singular category, important distinctions exist between each component identity sub-group that relate to unique needs (see Coston, 2021; Callan et al., 2021; Miles-Johnson, 2020; Bermea et al., 2018) and even intragroup animosity– as may be relevant to bisexual or transgender individuals (Nadal, 2019; Scheer et al., 2019). Sam’s example succinctly illustrates that while a service worker may demonstrate exceptional competence in working with one identity group within the LGBTQ umbrella, this does not necessarily translate into either expertise with, or acceptance towards clients from other LGBTQ subgroups. More broadly, the conflation of lived experience with service worker expertise appears to represent an intent toward allyship/safety that is not supported by knowledge and capacity development in mainstream service.

Discussion

Participant experiences elaborate upon a small body of existing research, and add to growing recognition of the gaps in formal service provision in Australia for LGBTQ victim-survivors. While past research suggests that this group eschews formal services (Jaffee et al., 2016), our participants often accessed these supports even when population-specific service options were unavailable. Participants reported interactions with general-population services that seemed absent of discriminatory intent, and occasionally experienced genuinely inclusive treatment. Despite this, an apparent dearth of LGBTQ-appropriate occupational expertise, and widespread adherence to hetero-normative and cis-normative ideologies by service-workers could render service interactions unproductive, and even traumatogenic.

LGBTQ victim-survivors therefore employ strategies of selective self-disclosure within, and elective engagement with services, to reduce the likelihood of discriminatory encounters, and to minimize the impact of such experiences when they arise. However, the extent to which skillfully navigating a service environment where LGBTQ-specific expertise is considered ‘niche’ can eventuate into the receipt of culturally appropriate care is fundamentally restricted by the availability of such expertise. Similarly, while selective self-disclosures visibly attenuate the incidence of overt discrimination, these strategies concurrently also invisibilize the unique needs of LGBTQ victim-survivors—but also exposes them to subtler forms of discrimination like misgendering, regardless.

The degree to which such strategies can be utilized, and to which they attenuate discrimination differed significantly from one service setting to another—for instance, while participants could respond to inadequate expertise, or discriminatory treatment from mental healthcare and healthcare providers by seeking out alternate service providers, this option was unviable in some service settings. While participants were able to move between various FDSV support services, several features prevalent across the service environment (e.g., sex-segregated/single-sex services, implicit optimization of services for cisgender, heterosexual victim-survivors, etc.) meant that pivoting to another service was unlikely to alleviate the challenges associated with these features. Though population-specific services are available in certain jurisdictions, these were often provided by a handful of organizations, and frequently intertwined with pre-existing community structures. Such services were therefore often overtaxed – and as our other research suggests, commonly perceived as potentiating incidental or accidental disclosures of one’s experiences of violence (see: Lusby et al., 2022; Bourne et al., 2023).

In police and court settings, these options are intermittently available to victim-survivors, and may not meaningfully attenuate discriminatory treatment. Participants emphasized the importance of hiring legal representation that was both accepting of sexual/gender-diversity, and knowledgeable of challenges unique to LGBTQ individuals. However, the efforts ofindividual advocates were often insufficient to attenuate entrenched systemic discrimination, or even the prejudices held by other legal actors. Similarly, participants reported that LGBTQ liaison officers were rarely present to mediate their interactions with police. Indeed, these oftentimes solitary officers are often unable to significantly change their colleagues’ views towards LGBTQ civilians (see Dwyer & Ball, 2020).

These findings provide some suggestions as to the improvements that can be made to service environments to better the emotional safety LGBTQ victim-survivors, and in doing so, encourage greater engagement with services. Most importantly, a robust and easily accessible range of population-specific services is imperative to ensuring that LGBTQ victim-survivor’s service preferences and needs are met adequately and timely. Simultaneously, bolstering LGBTQ-specific expertise within general population services is crucial for minimizing the kinds of unintentional slights, miscommunications, and negative service interactions ubiquitous throughout our participants’ accounts. Both approaches are required to broaden the service options available to LGBTQ victim-survivors, and thereby accommodate their individual determinations of emotional safety and appropriate support.

Research Limitations and Future Directions

These findings are circumscribed by the following limitations. Firstly, the qualitative nature of these findings precludes them from broader generalizability, as does the particular sociodemographic composition of the study’s sample. More specifically, while various LGBTQ identities were relatively evenly represented within the present study, participants of Anglo-Celtic heritage comprised the overwhelming majority of the current study’s sample. Consequently, the experiences of racially-minoritized victim-survivors are likely underrepresented within the above findings. LGBTQ and racial minority identity comprises an intersectional location that reliably denotes profound relational imbalances (Bermea & van Eeden-Moorefield, 2023). Victim-survivors who hold both identities are likely to encounter additionally forms of discrimination within help-seeking contexts which may in turn demand specific strategies of negotiation to manage – as indeed the experiences of our racially-minoritized participants appears to suggest. At present, these intersections are understudied within IPV research (Bermea & van Eeden-Moorefield, 2023), and future research should therefore set out specifically to investigate these experiences.

Conclusions

LGBTQ victim-survivors face considerable difficulty in accessing support services. This is exacerbated by prejudicial or ill-informed attitudes from service workers and generalized systemic discrimination within services. While these individuals may attempt strategies to manage their own safety, the viability of such strategies is dependent on many factors, including the context of the abuse, the service support or intervention being accessed, and the visibility of one’s sexual and gender identities. Regardless, doing so undeniably incurs a significant psychological burden. LGBTQ victim-survivors are just as reliant as their cisgender, heterosexual counterpart reliant on formal services to cope with and recover from IPV, but often derive less benefit from these service interactions. In attempting to rectify these inequalities, the reality that LGBTQ individuals comprise a non-homogenous group must be recognized through the provision of a reasonable variety of viable support service options.