Abstract 1rst European Symposium on Violence against lesbians (2000)

Source:

Lesbian Information and Counselling Service, Frankfurt am Main

In November 1999 the Lesbian Information and Counselling Service e.V. in Frankfurt am Main started a project which aims at creating a structural plan for lesbian anti-violence programs on a European level. This project is to serve as a basis for a prevention concept which may be adapted to the different socio-cultural conditions within Europe. The project is supported by the European Commission in the framework of Daphne Initiative and by the Federal Ministry for Families, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. When developing the concept, the Lesbian Information and Counselling Agency e.V. co-operated with the Anti-discrimination Department for Homosexual Lifestyles of the City of Vienna, the Lesbian Counselling Service, Berlin, and the Women’s Department of the City of Frankfurt.

As a first step, the realisation of the concept requires a definition of the basic socio-cultural conditions for a comprehensive prevention programme. In a second step, the kind and extent of violence against lesbians have to be analysed, i.e. research work of the European states involved will not merely be promoted, but also be linked. Moreover, common standards for data collection should be defined to allow comparisons on an international level. Currently, these standards are, however, not even reached on a national level. In a third step, strategies to prevent violence against lesbians may be developed.

Jeanette Nijboer: The power of a diverse city, the policy of diversity of the city of Amsterdam

For the past twenty years the city of Amsterdam has been conducting an active policy for the emancipation of the different groups of inhabitants (homosexuals, women, ethnic minorities, elderly, youth, handicapped). After the city council elections in March 1998 the ‘old’ target group policies was followed by a more general view called diversity policy. Diversity in general means gender, ethnicity and sexual preference will be mainstreamed in every policy of the local government. With this new policy the council of Amsterdam wants to adapt to the new developments in the community of Amsterdam. People don’t identify themselves anymore as a representative of one group. Most of the time they belong to different groups. And de differences in the groups are also very diverse. You can’t take for instance one homosexual as a representative for the whole group. It has been valuable in the past to make the needs visible and to create political action and policies. But nowadays the target group policy stigmatizes and gives negative image forming.

The policy of diversity also brought the issues of women and homosexuals back on the political agenda. Since 1997 there were evaluations on the policy of women’s emancipation and the emancipation of the homosexuals. In new notes new actions were formulated. But there was no money or political attention.

The policy of diversity focuses on issues instead of groups. It faces the differences in social-economical position, religion, lifestyle, education, health care, discrimination etc. but also faces the similarities in social needs and desires. Its a policy that targets on creating chances and not only on problems. It aims to address Amsterdam society as a whole and to draw from its great and varied potential. Of course there are still too many disadvantages in the city. The policy of diversity surely does want to tackle the problems of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. One of the main goals is the empowerment and participation of the citizens.

Constance Ohms and Klaus Stehling: Violence towards Lesbians - Violence towards Gays: Differences and Similarities

Lesbians and Gays

  • experience different forms of anti-homosexual violence,
  • experience anti-homosexual violence in difference ways,
  • develop different ways of coping,
  • have in the past hardly had seen the necessity for co-operation in their anti-violence work.

Because of the differences given, different prevention approaches must be developed, which cover different areas, namely:

  1. Structural prevention: action strategies of the movement and political concepts on behalf of the government.
  2. Personalised prevention:
  3. Primary prevention: prevention and avoidance of being subject to violence
  4. Secondary prevention: victim aid and care (short and longer-term intervention)
  5. Tertiary prevention: long-term measures to decrease violence towards lesbians and gays and the long-term psychosocial care of victims.

The question of why lesbians and gays have hardly found any points in common in the area of violence has been discussed according to the following lines of argument:

  • The relationship between lesbians and gays is influenced by the relationship between the sexes, gays are not accepted by lesbians as equal dialogue partners as they represent the potential aggressor through their male socialisation.
  • Gay men ignore and deny violence towards lesbians, and also other differences between lesbian and gay lifestyles, and only see their own threatened and victim status.

As a result of these thoughts, a three-pronged synopsis was developed in which we have tried to contrast similarities and differences in lesbian and gay views with regard to the following and, for us, particularly relevant aspects:

  • experience of violence (forms/expressions of violence)
  • experience of violence (subjective experience)
  • structural positioning of violence
  • consequences of actions
  • approaches for prevention

We also thought it was necessary to make a differentiation between the social relationships in the following individual areas:

  • public arenas (= anonymous public / not anonymous public)
  • natural family (including extended family)
  • family of choice (circles of friends and acquaintances, partnerships)
  • job/training

Sue Sanders/Jeane L. Nadeau: The scene in Britain, some initiatives tackling homophobic incidences

The National Advisory Group did the most recent national study on the rates of lesbians, gays and bisexuals who have ever experienced one or more Homophobic Incidents and it is 66%. In the year previous to responding to the questionnaire, 38 % were victims of Homophobic Incidents. This tells us that the rate of Homophobic Incidents is rising. (National Advisory Group, 1999)

If we are Black, Asian, Disabled and/or young lesbians, gay and bisexual people we were more likely to have suffered a violent Homophobic Incident than the overall LGB population. (Stonewall, 1996)

Lesbian Research

There is only one research project that looks exclusively at how Homophobic Incidents affect lesbians. It was based in Manchester in 98 and was done by a participant of this Conference Ros Brett in conjugation with others. They found that:

76% of their sample of 146 lesbians had experienced Homophobic Incidents.

45% of these incidents had occurred in the street,

18% in the home,

14% at work,

18% at LGB venues and

6% at other venues.

Of the Homophobic Incidents suffered by this sample, only 10% were reported to the police, a significantly lower number compared to the overall research, (18% to 31%). This indicates that lesbians have even less trust of the system than gay men.

Martina Puschke: Violence against Lesbians with disabilities

Even though we look back onto 20 years of History of the disabled women's movement, where women tirelessly fought for better life's situations, still countless disabled girls are raised as sexless/ genderless beings. The focus is on their damages, which need to be improved, to be treated, to be operated on, to be trained. Just on a byline these girls are also female. In countless therapy-hours, physiotherapy-hours, when orthopaedic aids are fitted, in the frames of assessments and 'valuations' of their performances, the limits of these girls permanently are violated. Beside the feeling "Everybody is allowed to fumble around with me" (Zemp 1993,10) there is conveyed to them, that they are not OK as they are and that they must take big efforts, to satisfy the experts. What happens here is elemental in their further development as woman.

  • First there is conveyed: "You are disabled, and just beside of that, maybe someday you'll be a woman."
  • Furthermore is conveyed: "You do not fit the norm. You are not sufficient, as you are."
  • In many therapy-hours it will become clear to her, that Others have the right to invade her private life.
  • She will be full of guilt when the objection "to be as normal as possible" is not met.
  • It is not believed, she could handle the role of a lover, a partner, a mother.

Sabine Voelker: Secrets: Coming out-processes of lesbian girls and young women on the background of experienced sexualized violence in the past.

Another secret, which from the beginning played a roll in the feminist debate and is also of importance in the work with girls, is the secret of a lesbian existence.

During the last years this situation has changed, many lesbians have retrieved their HerStory, important women's relationships, from the dark and created public spaces for themselves and other women.

Because of this groundbreaking work, girls and young women have a different start today, than girls and young women had centuries ago. Young women now are able to gain from the knowledge and experience of older lesbians (see Bass 1999).

[…]

Against this background my practical work is based on two hypothesis:

  1. Both societal inflicted taboos force the young women, to keep and protect two secrets. How this first secret – the experience of sexualized violence – is creatively resolved by keeping it and protecting it, has an huge impact to the dealing with the second secret – to be a lesbian – when, like I told before, the lesbian existence becomes of importance later than the experience of sexualized violence.3
  2. When the young women tell about their second secret, all the experiences of the first secret will return. Many psychological processes, which accompanied the expression of the experience of sexualized violence, are repeated again . The young women carry a double burden.

Michéle Atanasoff: Experiences of lesbian-hostile violence as an issue of psychotherapy.

My understanding of violence is such, that the term violence encompasses physical, psychological/mental, emotional and sexual abuse, which have different effects on those persons affected. Experiences of violence do not have to lead inevitably to the development of psychological/mental symptoms. Nevertheless, the to date most comprehensive interview about the psychological health of lesbians – carried out in 1987 by the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States – shows, that not only a few of the 1917 interviewed persons showed impairments of their mental health as a result of discrimination and experience of violence (Falco, pg. 91).

When effects of lesbian-hostile violence lead to the development of mental problems, one has to ask, whether and, if so, what psychotherapy can contribute during the process of resolving those mental impairments. In the following I first want to address the difficulties of a therapeutic intervention, and later the options of psychotherapy.

The next step was, that I spoke to several lesbians, having experiences with therapy as clients. All of them had experienced lesbian-hostile violence, even at those times, they were in therapy. Only one of them told her therapist about the experiences. The others gave the following reasons for not reporting during therapy their experience of lesbian-hostile violence:

  • They didn't think much of the experience. Especially when slander and verbal abuse by strangers or belittling and discriminations by close persons (family, friends, partners) was involved, some had the attitude, that's "normal", belonging to every day life and thus is no issue for therapy, which is reserved for more important issues.
  • Some, especially politically active lesbians, who have dealt with the issue of Violence against Lesbians, did not see it necessary, to speak about their experience during therapy, for – in their opinion – they had enough strategies for dealing with experience of violence.
  • The most often mentioned reason for not naming experience of lesbian-hostile violence as an issue of the therapy was, that there were girl friends, with whom an exchange about the experience took place. Therapy were reserved for those issues, difficult or impossible to speak about with girl friends.

One of the interviewed lesbians spoke during therapy about her mother's reaction to her Coming Out. The mother reacted to her confession of being a lesbian with disgust and abhorrence. She refused to hear any more about that issue and made it clear, that she had a loathing of her daughter. She did not hide this attitude in front of relatives and relations, to whom she spoke about the wayward behavior of her child – without her daughter's agreement. The daughter experienced the mother's reaction to her being lesbian as disappointing, as a violation of her boundaries and as humiliating. The reaction of her therapist was, to convey, that "things are never as bad as they seem" and that mother's sometimes tend to overreact, when their daughters are concerned, which she knew by own experience.

Karin Müller and Andrea Faulseit: Effects of violence and discrimination on a lesbians identity.

We start with historically looking at the terms 'identity' and 'construction of identity', to show the complexity of these terms. The question "Who am I?" is the simplest form of formulating the issue "identity". The answer to this question or to the idea of what we are and what a 'successful' identity could be, in different theories and philosophical reflections is often expressed in pictures/ images.

Otto Mock expressed it in the 1930ies as follows:

"The I is something like a tightly enclosed nut, a small hard shelled thing, the deeply hidden focal point of our nature." (Keupp et.al., 1999, pg. 22). Identity is concerned with the creation of a balance between the subjective "Inside" and the public "Outside", in other words: to create an individual fixed social place, the part-taking in societal processes (power and influence) is of decisive importance. Erikson designed (1973) a construct, formulating the subjective confidence in one's own competence to uphold continuity and coherence.

"The feeling of an I-Identity is ... the accumulated confidence, that inner unity/uniformity and continuity, one has in the eyes of Others, is corresponding to the ability to uphold an inner unity/ uniformity and continuity (the I in the sense of psychology)." (Keupp et el., 1999, pg. 29)

Thus results something like an universal necessity for an individual identity-construction. In my opinion, this points to a humane basic need for acceptance and belonging (affiliation). It becomes clear, that the term "Identity" is not and can't be something defined and static or, like Zygmunt Baumann puts it (1997):

"Identity is born as a problem" ... "Therefore Identity holds a working nature, lives by a subject, that actively has to take care of its self- and world-comprehension." /Keupp et.al., 1999, S. 27)

Sejal Parmar: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS OF LESBIANS AND GAY MEN IN EUROPE

In year following the writing of ILGA-Europe guide, Sexual Orientation and the European Union, there have been a number of significant developments in the protection of lesbian and gay rights in Europe. First, in November 1999, the Commission proposed a three-strand package of proposals that, when adopted, will add substance to Article 13 EC, the new anti-discrimination provision in the European Union (EU) treaties. Secondly, the long time debate on a Bill of Rights for the EU has finally culminated in the establishment of a ‘Charter Convention’ to examine what an EU Charter of Fundamental Rights might look like and, whether and, if so, how it might be given legal force. Both these moves are evidence of a clear shift in attitude towards a greater protection of fundamental rights in the European Union. The principal aims of this paper are to examine the advances made by the proposed package of measures, their limitations and to consider the prospect of a Charter as a means of securing equality as a fundamental right for lesbians and gay men. Although this paper is primarily concerned with the EU, there have been also proposed changes at the level of the Council of Europe that will be addressed briefly in their relevance to the EU. It is important to stress two points at the outset. First, at both the EU and Council of Europe levels there are legislative changes in the process of being negotiated and passed that will have a significant impact on the legal protection of lesbians and gays in Europe. Second, since the state of affairs remains flux at the moment, it is difficult to give a completely precise account at this time of the positions that will be reached eventually in Europe.

In 2004 the anti-violence-project will be under new guidance:

Source:

Address:

Broken Rainbow e.V.

Frankfurt

Kasseler Str. 1A

60486 Frankfurt

Contact:

phone: ++69-70794300

faximile: ++69-70794345

e-mail:

Head of project: Constance Ohms

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