Through the Cracks
With the constant barrage of violence that faces the LGBTIQ community from the outside, Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a subject that is left unaddressed within the community.
On the basis of gender identity and or expression and sexual orientation by families and broader society results in victims suffering in silence within these relationships. The focus of broad-based campaigns to quell intimate partner violence by government and non-governmental organizations is often directed at cis gendered heterosexual persons, which leaves LGBTIQ individuals falling through the cracks due to inadequate messaging.
This means that members of the community do not always accurately identify their experiences as being abusive and requiring intervention.
The possibility of access to services for support and shelter is further limited due to fears of secondary victimization by the same service providers that are meant to safeguard groups that are vulnerable to violence. However, in societies with high rates of homophobia and transphobia, victims who do not fit the norm, struggle in isolation with a perpetrator that does not fit the mould of who the world sees and reports as the culprit in incidences of intimate partner violence; a man. The global coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown brought about an increase in incidences of domestic violence, including within queer domestic spaces.
The limitations brought about by the pandemic in terms of commercial enterprise and movement meant that many people did not have much of a choice, but to stay with their abusers to wait the lockdown out.
Living on the margins for LGBTIQ individuals means that systems of protection become new battlefields. As a victim myself, having gone through an intense amount of violence, both emotional and physical, I intend to surface and reflect on these muted journeys through the sharing of real life stories without being shamed, erased, silenced, invalidated or cancelled for ones truth, because a human that you love(d) and trusted became a site of violence leaving you scrambling through the cracks.
