A growing body of research has shown that hate crimes and discrimination against people belonging to sexual minority groups, are all too common (cf. Chakraborti & Garland, 2015; Gillum and DiFulvio, 2012).Footnote 1 Research has shown that sexual minority youth (SMY; youth who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, or any other non-heterosexual identity), as a consequence of homophobia and discrimination, experience greater mental health risks than heterosexual youth (Wang et al., 2021; Luo et al., 2014). They also seem to be at a higher risk for social problems, such as substance abuse (Caputi, 2018, Rostad et al., 2020) and homelessness (Hail-Jares et al., 2021). Of particular concern are bisexual youth as they report more negative outcomes, including depression, suicidality, and substance abuse, compared to heterosexual youth (Edwards, 2018). This seems to be particularly true for young women who identify as bisexual (Caputi, 2018).

Within the field of domestic violence, youth intimate partner violence (YIPV) is an under-researched topic. This is particularly true for same-sex YIPV. Sexual minority youth have, however, been found to experience a higher prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) (Edwards, 2018; Semprevivo, 2021), including abuse facilitated through social media or smartphones (Dank et al., 2014). Newer research has differentiated between subgroups within the SMY group and has found that questioning, gender-expansive, and transgender youth, as well as bisexual young women, are at even greater risk for youth IPV relative to other sexual minority subgroups (Garthe et al., 2021; Olsen et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2019; Edwards 2018; Luo et al. 2014). A large number of studies have found an increased risk of short- and long-term behavioral and mental health problems among youth with experiences of IPV (Barter & Stanley, 2016). One example is Smith et al. (2020), who found a higher suicide risk among teens who had experienced IPV, and this risk was particularly evident for bisexual young women.

A few qualitative studies have been conducted that provide insights into the nature and dynamics of sexual minority youths exposed to IPV. Studies by Pentaraki (2017) ; Øverlien (2020) show that although violence and abuse in same-same sex relationships are similar to heterosexual relationships in many ways, there are contextual challenges that create unique conditions and vulnerabilities for young people in the LGBTQ community exposed to violence. These conditions and vulnerabilities can influence youth’s ability to define their experiences as abuse, and to seek out help and support. Gillum and DiFluvio (2012) conducted focus groups in the US with 18 sexual minority youths between 18 and 24 years old. The participants described different themes that contributed to IPV in same-sex relationships such as homophobia and stereotypical gender roles. The findings of the study underline the importance of societal issues, such as homophobia, and it’s importance in relation to young people’s exposure to IPV. Pentaraki’s (2017) study in Northern Ireland on 12 LGBT teenagers between 16 and 22 years old focused on IPV and barriers to help-seeking. In six individual and two focus group interviews, the young people identified numerous barriers, such as fear of double disclosure (i.e. disclosing the violence requires disclosing the same-sex partner).

Scandinavian countries, including Norway (were the present study is situated), are considered gay-friendly as regards to laws and policies at all levels of society (ILGA, 2016). The most recent study in Norway on attitudes towards homosexuality concluded that the number of people with negative attitudes about homosexuality has declined from 20 percent in 2008 to nine percent in 2017 (Bufdir, 2017). However, gay rights groups such as the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Rights (RFSL) argue that ignorance and prejudice remain. On June 25, 2022, two people were killed and 21 people were wounded in a mass shooting in Oslo, Norway. The target was London Bar, a well-known gay and lesbian venue.

Given the limited scholarship on sexual minority youth and IPV, and studies using qualitative methods in particular, the aim here is to investigate the process through which Philip, a 21year-old gay man, defines his sexual experiences with his former boyfriend as sexual IPVFootnote 2. I will specifically look at what barriers and enablers are apparent in Philip’s narrative that have a bearing on his process of help-seeking. The narrative analysis includes using cultural meta-narratives and contextual aspects to identify barriers and turning points to identify enablers. Specifically, I ask: How does Philip narrate his experiences of IPV? What cultural meta-narratives and contextual aspects can be seen in his narrative, and what is their role in compromising and complicating his process of identifying his sexual experiences with a male partner as sexual IPV? What are the turning points in his narrative that enable him to define them as such?

Concepts and Theoretical Framework

Meta-narratives and Turning Points

This article is framed both theoretically and methodologically by the assumption that narratives are a fundamental way of giving meaning to our experiences (cf. Riessman, 2008). As individuals, we tell narratives as a way of making sense of ourselves and our experiences, but also to present and position ourselves in relation to others. This can be particularly important, but also demanding, at various junctures in our lives, such as when we experience violence and abuse. Narratives, as defined by Riessman (2008), are a specific kind of text or talk, organized around a sequence of events with a temporal order. Meta-narratives (or grand narratives) are, in the words of Bamberg (2004) “frames according to which courses of events can easily be plotted, simply because one’s audience is taken to ‘know’ and accept these courses” (p. 360). Hence, they can be considered “collective stories”, as they are produced and shared by many in a particular culture (Bruner, 1987). An individual’s beliefs and understandings, expressed through narrative, must be understood in relation to general understandings of the specific culture and context, expressed through meta-narratives. In this article, the meta-narratives that are visible in the empirical data, the interview, are shown to complicate the informant’s process of defining his experiences as sexual abuse, as he weighs and mirrors his experiences against these frames, or meta-narratives Table (1).

Table 1 Barriers and turning-points
Full size table

Identity is formed and performed in a continuous process, Mishler (1999) argues, and our identity is expressed, among other things, through talk. Within this understanding, turning points, or discontinuities, are of central importance. Turning points are experiences or realizations that initiate desistance developments in a person’s identity formation. According to Mishler (1999), turning points are often described as “matters of chance,” the person just happened to come across something, and this changed their lives.

The Ideal Victim and Offender

In his influential theoretical work on the ideal victim, Christie (1986) describes victimhood as an interactive social process between those who are victimized and those responding to it. The ideal victim is described as a person who is most readily given the status of a victim based on five main attributes: being weak, doing something respectable, being in a respectable place, being hurt by a big and bad offender who is also unknown to the victim. In their reading of Christie’s work, Donovan & Barnes (2018) identify several blind spots in regard to what constitutes an ideal victim or offender. The ideal victim is not just female, and the perpetrator male, as Christie (1986) suggests, but also heterosexual. Furthermore, Donovan and Barnes write, “it is problematic to construct the ideal victim as defenseless and blameless and therefore, apparently necessarily, feminine. Such a construction can prevent men from identifying their need for help for fear of being emasculated” (p. 92–93). Other assumptions in the public story of IPV is that of physical violence being central in abusive relationships and that it is big ‘strong’ men that are abusive to small ‘weak’ women (Donovan & Hester, 2014). Furthermore, in their book from 2014, Donovan & Hester present two relationship rules, the second being that victims are given the responsibility for everything, and therefore may have difficulties to see themselves as passive. When the relationship is the first romantic/intimate relationship, the risk of abuse may be higher, as the young person has little experience to fall back on (Øverlien 2020; Ristock, 2002; Donovan & Hester, 2014). Applying this work to Philip’s narrative, it is possible to see that neither Philip nor Jimmy (the former boyfriend) were ideal victims or offenders, which in turn may have complicated Philip’s process of identifying his experiences as abuse and himself as a victim.

Methods and Sample

This article draws on a larger research project with 33 young people who have been subjected to violence within an intimate relationship.Footnote 3 Eighteen of the interviews were conducted in Sweden between 2016 and 2018. The additional 15 interviews were conducted in Norway in 2020–2021 as part of the research project Drawing the Line. Although all interviews focused on youth IPV, with interviewers asking questions about the intimate relationship and the different forms of violence and abuse the informants was subjected to, the Norwegian interviews had a particular focus on sexual youth IPV. A main interest in the project is how young people draw the line between abusive and non-abusive acts. As argued by Logan et al (2015), there is a need for research that focus specifically on partner sexual violence. This is partly a methodological issue, if we don’t ask for the sexual dynamics of abusive relationships, our informants will not tell us. Another reason is that we lack knowledge of what role sexual violence plays in the larger context of IPV. After conducting earlier studies on IPV (cf Øverlien et al 2019), this was also the experience of the research team, sexual violence don’t become visible if not actively made visible, but at the same time, must be seen in context of other forms of IPV.

Of the 33 informants, 29 were female youth who had experienced IPV in a heterosexual relationship, while four participants—one female youth and three male youths—had been subjected to violence by someone of the same sex in an intimate relationship. These informants were aged 17–23 at the time of the interview, living in different parts of Sweden and Norway. One interview with a 21-year-old man, Philip, who had experienced same-sex violence, was selected for in-depth analysis.

Narrative Analysis

The present article focuses on one informant, Philip. Philip’s narrative was selected for its explicit focus on how he came to define the actions to which he was subjected as sexual IPV. The analysis clearly shows that coming to that conclusion was a process for Philip, and the single case design is particularly fruitful for studying such processes (cf. Ronen, 2004; Gerring, 2004). The analysis was conducted using a set of tools for narrative analysis, i.e. meta-narratives (Bamberg, 2004) and turning-points (Mishler, 1999). As I read and re-read the transcribed interview, it became clear that a central part of Philip’s process was positioning his experiences against a set of cultural meta-narratives, and furthermore, that the process had to be understood in relation to a number of contextual aspects serving as a backdrop. While the meta-narratives and contextual aspects complicated his process, the analysis also revealed several turning points (Mishler, 1999) that enabled him to come to the conclusion that his experiences could be defined as abuse. His narrative is context-bound and situated in a specific time and culture. It is also a hard-to-reach narrative as young persons with experiences of same-sex violence and abuse can be considered a hard-to-reach population. As noted by Kirwan (2018) in a special issue of Social Work and Social Sciences Review on hard-to-reach populations, the experience of being overlooked, or not heard in society, is “closely connected to the process of ‘othering,’ whereby people find themselves unheard, disempowered, or possibly stigmatized simply because of certain personal traits they carry or social positions which they occupy” (p. 3).

Recruitment and Ethics

Information about the project was posted on social media, as well as sent out to help services for victims of IPV and/or sexual violence as a recruitment strategy. When we contacted one of these help services, the service leader replied that there was one young man who had previously received counseling with them who might be interested. After receiving the information about the project, Philip decided that he wanted to participate.

As the research project involves young people and sensitive topics, ethics has been a priority. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) in May 2021. The participants were informed about the project and its purpose before the interviews, participation was voluntary, and we had measures available (e.g., support services) to attend to participants’ emotional needs if necessary. In the case of Philip, the help service where Philip had received counselling, were willing to provide additional support if needed. Consent was viewed as an ongoing process: that is, during the interview the interviewer remained attentive to the well-being of the informants, for instance if they showed signs of wanting to end the interview or not wanting to answer questions, and to the risk of over-disclosure (Øverlien & Holt 2021). The participants were informed that they could at any time decline participation, also after the interview was conducted, and that them declining or accepting the invitation had no bearing on the support they received from services. Confidentiality was ensured by changing all names and other identifying details.

Results

To set the scene, we begin by sharing Philip’s story about how his and Jimmy’s relationship started, including how and when Philip first noticed that Jimmy demonstrated troubling behaviors. After that, we present a set of categories that compromises and complicates Philip’s process of defining the sexual experiences he had with Jimmy as sexual IPV under the headings contextual issues and cultural meta-narratives. Finally, we describe two main turning points in Philip’s narrative that enabled the process.

In the Beginning…

Falling in love

Philip was 18 when he met Jimmy, who was one year older. They were together for three years, and it was Philip’s first serious relationship. They both worked in education, a career they both decided they wanted to pursue. Two years after they met, they decided to start the same university program and shared an apartment on the university campus. When I asked Philip to describe their relationship, we had the following exchange:

Philip: In the beginning it was super nice. Really. I loved having someone that, in a way, found me attractive and good-looking.

Carolina: And how did you meet?

Philip: I think it was through a dating app or something, Yes, well it was nice for a period, but then we moved in together to continue our studies, and then things were not that good, I felt as if I got more and more controlled and isolated.

Most romantic relationships start with attraction and positive feelings, and Philip and Jimmy’s was no different. Philip was 18, and this was the first time he had been in love. For a year and a half, Philip explained, things were really good. Philip loved having met someone who found him attractive.

Realizing that things aren’t good – isolation and control

As explained by Philip, after about a year and a half, he started to feel controlled and isolated. Picking up on his use of the word controlled, I asked him if it was the control that was the first sign that things were “not that good.”

Philip: It is hard to put a finger on it, when it started, it was so gradual that I hardly noticed, until it had gone too far. Really.

Carolina: Do you remember the first time you thought to yourself, this control, what he is doing is actually not okay, [it] crosses my boundaries?

Philip: Yes, well, I remember two incidents that made me realize that this is not okay, sort of. It started with me trying to do something without him, and that was soccer. And one day I sat after soccer practice with this one guy—we just talked, had fun—I played soccer with. And I lost track of time a bit, and then he [Jimmy] called once, and I didn’t pick up, and he just kept calling and calling and calling, and I just had to answer. Hallo, it’s me. And then he chewed me out ‘cause I wasn’t home when I was supposed to be home. That was the first time.

Numerous studies have shown that control is a central component in abusive relationships (cf. Överlien et al., 2019) and that it often is the first thing the abused person registers as being different or deviating slightly from how things should be. Philip wasn’t home when he was supposed to be (he also was talking to another boy and not answering his phone) and he saw Jimmy’s response (being chewed out) as “not okay.” Most abusive behavior, including control, escalates with time (cf. Kubicek et al., 2016), and this was the case with Jimmy.

Philip: I got used to him checking my social media and checking whom I was sending messages to and what I was doing sort of. But I felt this was something different, one more step sort of, when I had my diaries…one of those suitcase-looking types, with a lock, and the locks had been cut off, and the diaries had been read. When I came home,

I was confronted with what was in them, and sort of seen as a kind of monster, ‘cause how could I feel and think that way? What was wrong with me who thought those things and felt those things?

Carolina: Do you remember what you thought then?

Philip: I got pissed, and my second thought was that I was not going to write those things anymore. I stopped writing completely.

Using social media to control one’s partner is a well-known strategy of abusive partners (Hellevik, 2019; Stonard et al., 2014; Överlien et al., 2019). Digital violence and abuse, also called technology-assisted/facilitated violence and abuse, should not be seen as a new form of abuse but as psychological/emotional abuse carried out through social media and mobile phones (Överlien et al., 2019). It has the same dynamics and patterns as face-to-face violence and abuse, but its effectiveness, and hence effects, are different. In a very short period, Jimmy managed to isolate Philip from many of his friends and family. In addition to this, Jimmy not only broke into Philip’s diaries, but read them and confronted Philip with their content. In this narrative, Philip was the monster for thinking the way he did, not Jimmy who was the one who had violated Philip’s privacy. Hence, by the time the sexual abuse started, the psychological abuse, isolation and control were frequent in Philip and Jimmy’s relationship.

In the following, a number of barriers, as well as turning-points, will be presented, that are of importance in Philip identifying his experiences as sexual abuse.

Barriers to Identifying Sexual Experiences as Abuse

Contextual issues

When analyzing Philip’s narrative, there are two experiences that can be interpreted as compromising his process of identifying his adverse sexual experiences as sexual IPV, connected to him living in a heteronormative and homophobic society. One is that he was subjected to severe homophobic bullying as a child and the other that he was forced to return to the closet when he met Jimmy. A third contextual issue is that the relationship with Jimmy is Philip’s first serious romantic relationship.

Homophobic bullying

About half an hour into the interview, I asked Philip about his childhood, and specifically whether he had had any prior experiences of violence before he met Jimmy.

Carolina: Have you had any problems with that before?

Philip: Eh, yes.

Carolina: Bullying?

Philip: Lots.

Carolina: You have, yes?

Philip: Isn’t that part of growing up in a rural area? Many of them anyhow.

Carolina: Can you tell me about it?

Philip: Well, there were degrading words, there was violence, I had my head stomped on and pushed down the toilet, thrown rocks at. And then there was the online stuff that was really hard. Because when Facebook and those social media came, home was no longer a sanctuary. All those years in high school, except the last year. And elementary school.

The Global Bullying Dataset, which includes information from 126 countries, shows that school bullying is a common problem worldwide (Richardson & Hiu, 2018). However, studies show that students who define themselves as LGBTQ face significant discrimination and are at higher risk of suffering several types of bullying in school compared to students with a heterosexual orientation (cf. Elipe et al., 2018). Philip described prolonged violence and abuse, year after year, until one day during his last year of high school, he decided to do a “really ugly tackle” at soccer practice in school when another boy shouted a homophobic slur at him. “I had had enough,” Philip explained. “It was 12 years of aggression, [directed] straight at him.”

The phenomena of revictimization, i.e., that a victim of childhood abuse has an increased risk of being victimized in adulthood, is well documented in the literature, in particular regarding child sexual abuse (Messman-Moore & Long, 2003; Noll et al. 2003). Moreover, research shows that victims are often multivictimized, i.e. that they are exposed to multiple forms of abuse at the same time. For example, Espelage et al. (2022) show how youth who are involved in bullying are at increased risk of various forms of sexual violence, also in their own intimate relationships. Reasons for the association between childhood abuse and being victimized later in life is most likely multifaceted, but one proposed mechanism can be that having had your boundaries transgressed at an early age (especially repeatedly), could make it harder to recognise subsequent transgressions as abusive. Although Philip don’t explicitly attribute his difficulties to define his experiences as sexual abuse to the bullying he endured as a child, a possible interpretation is that the bullying made him less equipped to recognize his experiences in his relationship as abuse.

Being forced to return to the closet

Closely linked to the issue of control and isolation is the fact that Philip was openly gay when he met Jimmy, but Jimmy had not yet come out. This forced Philip to return to the closet. He explained, “We had to talk things over and make some decisions sort of. We can’t hold hands there, and I have to be your cousin, and that kind of bullshit. We had a hiding period. It was really tiring.”

Coming out is not just an individual, cognitive decision but, as Donovan & Hester (2014) point out, a social and relational process. In addition to being tiring, which was Philip’s experience, remaining in the closet also isolates young couples and may allow abuse to continue without interference from the outside world. In his book of ‘narrating the closet’, Adams (2011) describe the risks and dangers of leaving the closet, but also staying there. One dynamic of ‘the closet’ is pretending to be relatives rather than a couple, which may make people even less likely to pick up on anything that may signal that the relationship is not healthy. Hence, for Philip, being forced to return to the closet could have been a barrier to recognizing Jimmy’s actions as sexual IPV, both because friends could have reacted and confronted Philip if they saw signs that made them worried if the relationship was healthy, and because the secrecy prevents Philip from confiding in others. Because their relationship was a secret, the destructive and harmful parts of their relationship were also kept in the dark. Furthermore, if they had been open about their relationship, Philip and Jimmy could have been part of the larger LGBTQ community, where Philip may have received support to address the problematic aspects of their relationship and recognize his experiences as abuse (see further Donovan & Hester, 2014).

First serious romantic relationship

The literature on YIPV addresses limited experience as a youth-specific factor that can complicate the way young people understand the abuse they are subjected to in their relationships. (Korkmaz & Øverlien, 2019), for example, discuss how their young informants “had no experience of a ‘healthy’ relationship prior to the abusive one” (p. 382) and contrast this to studies on adult women who use different coping strategies based on previous experiences (cf. López-Fuentes & Calvete, 2015). Ristock (2002) first wrote about the risk of victimization in first same sex relationships. Donovan & Barnes (2020), Donovan & Hester (2014) in their work develop this thinking, presenting the concept of ‘experiential power’, arguing that those in their first same-sex relationship can be victimized by the experiential power of partners who have been out for longer. Although Jimmy is still in the closet, he is the more experienced, and as such, is the one who sets the rules about what it is like to be in an intimate relationship, and how often one should want to have sex. This may contribute to making victims less able to recognize that their relationship is abusive.

Cultural meta-narratives regarding gender and intimate partner violence

In addition to the contextual aspects mentioned above, there are a number of cultural metanarratives evident in Philip’s narrative that complicate his process of identifying his experiences as sexual abuse. Philip describes how there are ways of talking about intimate partner violence, understood here as dominant cultural meta-narratives, that exclude his experiences or make it harder for him to see that he is being subjected to violence and abuse. One dominant discourse that is connected to gender and age is the understanding that it is adult men who subject adult women to violence (Donovan & Hester, 2014; Abbott et al., 2021). A second meta-narrative visible in Philip’s narrative is the ever-present sex drive of young males. Finally, we can identify a third metanarrative, namely that IPV is primarily about physical violence, which makes bodily size and strength decisive.

Adult men subject adult women to violence and abuse

Although the phenomenon of intimate partner violence is discussed to a large extent as a gender neutral issue at the policy level in Norway (for example, Norway has gender-neutral legislation on domestic violence shelters, the so-called Krisesenterloven), the understanding Philip has from everyday discourse is that it is primarily adult women who are at risk of being abused by adult male partners. “You have a very clear image of a woman being dragged down…when there is a same-sex relationship you don’t have a clear victim and not victim.”

The ‘public story’ of domestic violence and abuse (DVA), presenting DVA as a societal problem of heterosexual men for heterosexual women (Donovan & Hester, 2014) is an understanding that is found in several empirical studies. For example, in Gillum and DiFulvio (2012) study, the young participants shared the idea that violence and abuse are primarily a problem in heterosexual relationships. It could be argued that youths, including sexual minority youths, growing up in a heteronormative society perceive violence as gendered; that is, men are the main perpetrators of violence against women. As a result, victimized sexual minority youths may have difficulty defining their experience as violence and abuse (Donovan & Hester, 2014; Heimer et al., 2018; Holmberg et al., 2005).

The ever-present sex drive of young males

Philip had little sexual experience before he met Jimmy; he described himself as being a “late bloomer” in relation to sex. Hence, he knew very little about what having sex with someone is like, where his boundaries were, when he wanted to have sex or not, what he enjoyed or didn’t, and how consent can be expressed. In addition to having little experience, Philip is also a young man. There is a cultural preconception that young men are constantly interested in, and ready for, sexual activities. As proposed by Hollway (1998), the “male sex drive discourse” suggests that males have an urgent and ever-present need for sex. Hence, key criteria for being a “real man” include being sexually active, experienced, and skilled. The topic of sex was introduced later in the interview, after Philip talked about the extensive control he was subjected to. I then asked about “the sexual things,” and when they started to feel inappropriate. Philip explained that it started early in their relationship, happening several times each week, and then proceeded to describe what happened.

Philip: It started after I fell asleep. I woke up with him taking advantage of me. I felt it was really not okay, at the same time it was sort of my fault. ‘Cause I didn’t want the sex really. But he explained to me that it was something I just had to do, so I ended up feeling really bad, as if I had done something wrong [by not wanting to have sex].

Carolina: How often was this, that you woke up and he was on top of you? Philip: Well, like four times a week, but I sort of disappeared in my head. I tried to think about money, the interest rates for my student loan, what it would add up to after a year, it took me away from the situation.

…

After we broke up, I had difficulties being believed, as a man, almost like ‘isn’t that just nice’ kind of or ‘what are you complaining about?’ ‘It sounds like a dream situation!’

Philip described what happened to him during these nights as “really not ok,” but at the same time, he was not ready to define it as abuse. One reason for this is that he, with his limited experience, was getting the message from Jimmy that having sex several times a week is expected in a relationship and that there must be something wrong with him for not wanting it. This belief was confirmed after they broke up and he told his friends, who responded that as a man, the fact that your partner wants sex frequently isn’t something to complain about.

Physical violence and bodily size and strength

A meta-narrative (or public story, as Donovan & Hester, 2014, call it) of IPV is that it is primarily a problem of physical violence. Numerous prevalence studies on IPV, however, show that physical violence is not the most frequent form of violence. Instead, psychological abuse and control are much more frequently reported (see for example Korkmaz et al. 2020, Dank et al., 2014). For Philip, the abuse started with control; Jimmy controlled his social media, cut up and read his diary, and set curfews for him. Soon thereafter, the sexual abuse started. While Philip talked about the psychological abuse and control without being asked about specifically, he had to be prompted to talk about the sexual and physical abuse.

Carolina: Did the violence ever become physical?

Philip: Well, he tried to hit me once, but I punched him back. And it was really, really strange, ‘cause he was not stronger than me at all, physically. But psychologically he was. But he had played the piano all his life, he was really skinny, so yes, I don’t really understand how this happened. But he always had this huge psychological advantage, his psychological capacity was way, way above mine.

As explained by Philip, there was only one incident of physical violence. As this contradicts the public story of DVA, presenting DVA as a problem of physical violence (Donovan & Hester, 2014), this contributed to Philips uncertainty of how to name his experiences. In addition, the fact that he was physically stronger than Jimmy, was a concern for Philip. At the end of the interview, Philip brought up the issue of bodily strength again, suggesting that he was deeply concerned about the fact that he, a tall athletic young man with broad shoulders, could be intimidated by a physically smaller man of the same age. Philip admitted, “He [Jimmy] was not strong enough to hold me down and beat me senseless; he didn’t have the physical strength to be the classical stereotypical abuser.”

Closely connected to the issue of bodily strength and size is the understanding that there needs to be physical resistance for an action to be defined as violence or abuse.

Carolina: So what happened to you, how did you define that?

Philip: Well, it was not okay, but at that time I felt it was pushing it too far to call it sexual abuse.

Carolina: So what is sexual abuse to you then?

Philip: There has to be much more resistance.

Carolina: What kind of resistance?

Philip: Screaming and shaking him. I felt it had to be that kind of violence for it to be rape. Since I didn’t feel like I put up much resistance, that I didn’t do enough to stop it, I was in a way an accomplice, I didn’t scream out loud ‘no’ sort of.

Carolina: And what you think about this now?

Philp: Well, now I think about it differently. First of all, you can’t give consent when you are sleeping. And now I know you can be sexually abused in a relationship. But it took some years until I came to that realization.

An important aspect of IPV in heterosexual relationships is that the abusive man often is considerably stronger and has a larger body than the woman. As described by Donovan & Hester (2014), the public story of IPV is that “passive femininity and aggressive masculinity are pitched in opposition in the abusive relationship dynamic” (p.88). In homosexual relationships, partners are often more equal in terms of bodily size and strength. In Philip’s case, however, he was significantly stronger than his abusive partner Jimmy, a fact that complicated his understanding of what took place between them. Jimmy was not the “stereotypical abuser,” and Philip, as he saw it, didn’t resist in a way that would allow him to consider the acts that took place abuse. His lack of physical resistance made him feel complicit. As argued by Wade (1997), parallel to the story of victimization is a story of resistance, but Philip did not think his own actions qualified as resistance, to the point of being complicit in his own abuse. This is a position he reconsidered after a long period of counseling.

Turning points that allow people to identify sexual experiences as abuse

The analysis sheds light on several turning points, or discontinuities, in Philip’s’ narrative that have a powerful impact on his storyline and his process of defining his experiences as sexual abuse. He talked about receiving help from two professionals, who, in different ways, contributed to helping him come to define his experiences as abuse, but also about watching a movie that opened his mind to the possibility of abuse taking place between two men in an intimate relationship.

Receiving help from professionals

When I entered the room where the interview took place, Philip was waiting for me. After the necessary introductions, I told him about the research study and explained that we wanted to talk to young people who had experienced sexual abuse in an intimate relationship. Philip then replied:

I didn’t think of it as sort of abuse until she [the counselor] said so. So I said no, it’s not, and then I needed a year to process until I came back to her and like ‘you were right’…you know, I didn’t have any tools to understand what really had happened to me. There was never anyone who came to our school and told us about what was okay and not okay, and certainly nothing on LGBT [relationships]. I would really have wanted a language to explain that what was happening to me was not okay and that it is not acceptable to take advantage of someone, even if you are in a relationship.

After confirming to me that he, after a lot of resistance, defines what happened to him as a “sort of sexual abuse,” he returned to this topic at the end of the interview.

I came here because of sexual abuse by another person [not partner] but I was afraid of him [Jimmy] and she [the counselor] wanted to know why. And then I told her what had happened, and she said that it was sexual abuse. And I remember I responded with, no, it was not, because I was totally convinced that what I had experienced was not abuse; I didn’t know what it was, but it certainly wasn’t sexual abuse.

The organization that Philip turned to for help screens help-seekers for experiences of violence and abuse when they ask for support the first time. The organization can be considered an NGO and does not require a referral from a medical doctor. However, Philip also described a psychologist at a psychiatric hospital as being central in his process of leaving the abusive boyfriend and, consequently, in defining their relationship as abusive. During their last year together, Philip was struggling psychologically and tried to commit suicide. When admitted to a psychiatric hospital, he met the psychologist who “helped me to sort of believe in myself again,” and “gave me some more confidence”. Although the abuse was never addressed, the therapy provided is described by Philip as playing an important role in his decision to leave the abusive relationship later.

Mainstream media as an eye-opener

In addition to the professional help he received, which he described as a turning point in his process of defining his experiences as sexual IPV, Philip also talked about the impact of watching the movie Brokeback Mountain.

I remember watching Brokeback Mountain and being so unsure for days afterwards if it was consensual sex or if it was abuse. Now I know that it was probably consensual,

I think, but I really had to think about it…that abuse between men can exist…it was through that film that I in a way became aware that that is a possibility.

Philip speaks hesitantly, as if he is still not sure of what took place between the two men in the film. However, he knows that the film opened his eyes to the possibility of sexual abuse happening between two men in an intimate relationship. Thus, watching the film was a powerful event in Philips life, and it can be thought of as a turning point as it opened up the possibility of defining his own negative sexual experiences as abuse. At the same time, it is worth noting the considerable impact a movie, released in 2005, had on his life, as this may also say something about the limited possibilities he has to mirror his experiences in mainstream media. Hence, there is a lack of anything to compare his experiences with in cultural artefacts, in their his personal network (because of the isolated life Philip and Jimmy lived), and since this was Philip’s first romantic relationship, he has no prior personal experiences to compare with (see further Ristock 2002, Donovan & Hester, 2014, Donovan & Barnes, 2020).

As described by Mishler (1999), turning points are often “matters of chance”: the person just happened to come across something, and this changed their lives. While the movie might be seen as such a chance encounter, which changed his understanding of important events in his life, Philip’s sessions with professionals might be seen as less of a matter of chance as he willingly and strategically walked into the counselor’s office and asked the psychologist for help. He was struggling mentally and had attempted suicide when he received help from the psychologist at the psychiatric hospital. This meeting helped him take his first steps towards leaving the abusive relationship. After the breakup with Jimmy, he was victimized by an unknown man and sought support from a counselor in an organization working with victims of sexual abuse. However, he didn’t seek out help from the professionals to process the sexual abuse by Jimmy. In fact, he promptly rejected this claim, the idea that Jimmy was abusive, when the counselor suggested it.

Discussion

This research was conducted with the aim of expanding the knowledge base regarding

YIPV by interviewing and analyzing one young man’s journey to identifying his same-sex sexual experiences as sexual abuse and, consequently, himself a possible victim of sexual IPV. The analysis identifies several contextual issues that are of crucial importance in Philip’s storyline and can be understood as barriers to identifying his sexual experiences as abuse: his prior exposure to severe homophobic bullying and being forced to return to the closet because his partner had not yet come out. Another set of barriers identified were influential cultural meta-narratives regarding IPV and gender, including the belief that adult men perpetrate violence on adult women, the ever-present male sexual desire, and the decisive role of bodily size and physical strength in IPV. The analysis also identifies several turning points (Mishler, 1999) that enabled Philip to define his experiences as sexual abuse: he received help from professionals and watched a movie, Brokeback Mountain, that introduced the possibility that a male intimate relationship can be abusive.

Identities are produced and performed within personal narratives, Mishler (1999) argues. A central question then becomes whether by defining his experiences as sexual IPV Philip identifies as a victim of sexual IPV? The word victim is not mentioned in the interview, and I am not convinced that he would in fact accept that label. After all, labeling actions is not the same as attributing heavily politicized and ideologically influenced terms to you as a person. If we apply Donovan and Barnes’s (2018) critique of Christie’s (1986) ideal victim theory, Philip would have had difficulty identifying as a victim of IPV for several reasons, being neither female not heterosexual. He does not conform to traditional female gender roles, such as being weak and “whining” (cf Donovan & Barnes, 2018). Jimmy, on the other hand, is not the ideal offender as he is not big, strong, bad, or predatory (Christie, 1986). In addition, Philip feels somewhat guilty because of the belief that, as a young male, he should welcome sex at any time, whereas an ideal victim should be free from blame of any sort. Also, a victim of IPV is someone who has been physically abused, and as this only happened to Philip once, it may also have prevented recognition. Both the fact that there was so little physical violence in Philip and Jimmy’s relationship, which contradicts the public story of DVA, and, not only that there is no ‘strong man/weak woman’ dichotomy, as outlined by Donovan & Hester (2014), but that both victim and perpetrator are men and the victim is considerably physically stronger than the perpetrator, is confusing to Philip. Furthermore, in line with Donovan & Hester’s (2014) two relationship rules, Philip is given a lot of responsibility for the well-being of Jimmy, and for their relationship, and therefore may have difficulties seeing himself as a victim.

Hence, a victim status is not so readily available to Philip, nor to many others who experience victimization. Similar thinking can be found with Donovan & Hester’s (2010) informants, namely women and men in same-sex relationships who have experienced domestic violence. Kenneth, a man abused in a same-sex relationship proclaims that he “hates the word ‘victim’” (p. 285) as he associates the word with passivity. A victim is someone who allows something to happen to they, Kenneth argues, as if the situation is impossible to change. Again, we don’t know if Philip would accept the position as victim of sexual abuse, as this is not the same as defining acts done to you as sexual abuse. Although Philip is resisting the abuse, using Wade’s (1997) wide definition of resistance, Philip himself at the time felt like an accomplice, as he didn’t scream and shake Jimmy off. At the same time, referring to the work of Mishler (1999), talk, and more specifically, turning-points, are important discursive practices in our identity formation. Perhaps Philip’s use of turning-points, as a way to describe to the listener how he had come to the conclusion that the acts could be seen as sexual abuse, was a way to also present himself as a victim.

As outlined by Donovan & Barnes (2020), several factors impacts LGB and/or T victims of DVA and their help-seeking decisions and barriers, among them minimization and denial of the problem reinforced socio-culturally through their invisibility in representations of DVA. These factors can also be identified in Philip’s narrative, which may have prolonged his process of seeking out help at a specialized service. By then, Philip had struggled mentally for a long time, not connecting his struggles with the sexual abuse he was forced to endure, as living in a heteronormative and homophobic society complicated this process (for a discussion on Norway, discrimination and gender/sexual equality, see Jacobsen, 2018 ; Ummak et al., 2022).

A central principle of feminism, and in particular regarding sexual violence, has been to address the politics of naming (Kelly et al., 1996). While an argument could be made for the necessity of identifying as a victim of IPV, recognizing and naming actions such as unwanted sexual acts in an intimate romantic relationship as sexual abuse could be a life-saving and emancipatory decision (cf. Kelly & Radford, 1990). However, there is a risk that persons who experience IPV will not be identified as victims legally or culturally if they don’t label themselves as such. This, in turn, means that their status is not recognized in the criminal justice system. Granting someone victim status also clearly implies a recognition of their need for help and support. Hence, rather than changing the word victim to survivor (for a discussion on the term survivor vs victim, see Kelly et al., 1996; Flasch et al., 2017) the narrow connotations of and stigma attached to the word victim need to be replaced. In line with Donovan & Hester (2010), I argue that policy and practice, as well as research, needs to be framed so that meta-narratives of IPV can be re-shaped, thus allowing those in same-sex relationships to recognize their own experiences as abuse.

Conclusion

Studies have found that while sexual minority youth disproportionately experience violence and abuse in their intimate relationships, they seek out help to a lesser extent than their sexual majority peers, possibly because they don’t identify their experiences as abuse. For this to change, schools need to use more inclusive language and include sexual minority groups when teaching about sex and relationships. Not including this may render sexual minority youth to be vulnerable in their first intimate relationships (cf the concept of ‘experiential power’, Donovan & Barnes, 2020). Professionals working with young people need to actively ask youth about experiences of violence and abuse in their relationships, regardless of sexuality. These experiences need to be validated and taken seriously. Also, mainstream media should also include people from minority groups, when displaying sexuality, love, and abuse. Furthermore, professionals need to gain knowledge of the unique challenges of LGBTQ youths exposed to IPV, including the particular difficulty these young people might have when it comes to acknowledging and, consequently, seeking support for the difficulties they face in the aftermath of violence.