Bullying Experiences and Resilience in Lgbtq Youth

Background and purpose:

Many young LGBTQ people are experiencing bullying which can lead to increased risk of suicide, drug abuse, and depression, as well as an increased risk of out-of-home placements in either foster care or homeless shelters. As a result of this, LGBTQ young adults are often framed as being at risk. Although this has been helpful in the past in order to raise awareness of the challenges experienced by LGBTQ young people, there is also evidence that they show resilience in response to those challenges. In order to advance the social work value of being strengths-based, this research looked for examples of resilience in the lives of these young people. Research was undertaken to determine what types of bullying these young people have experienced, how the bullying impacted them, and how they were able to cope with the bullying they experienced.

Methods:

LGBTQ young adults aged 18-29 were recruited through LGBTQ service agencies, LGBTQ publication advertising and through social media in southern Michigan for individual interviews regarding their experiences of bullying. Additional participants were found through snowball sampling. Twenty-four young adults of multiple gender and sexual identities participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews that were audio-recorded. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed for themes.

Findings:

Much of the bullying described by participants is consistent with the School Climate data collected by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, or GLSEN. In addition, several participants reported physical assaults, as well as sexual assaults on or near school property. One unanticipated finding was that several of the respondents (9/24, or 37.5%) identified that their worst bullying had come from their parents, who objected to their children’s identities based upon their religious beliefs. Although research exists which addresses family acceptance or rejection, it is not normally found in bullying literature. The second major finding was that many of the participants identified that they had grown from having been bullied, and they showed signs of having experienced post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is a psychological concept that has not been studied much in social work to date. PTG is a very strengths-based concept that explains the resilience shown by the LGBTQ young adults in this study.

Conclusions and implications:

Although they do experience bullying due to their sexual and gender minority status, the participants also showed growth through those experiences, in many cases in ways that they identified as empowering. Further, many have used their experiences to attempt to help others. The growth they experienced can be described as post-traumatic growth. Although social work has been recently focused upon the impacts of trauma, PTG is rarely explored in social work literature, and it may hold implications for future responses to trauma in social work practice.