Domestic Violence in the LGBTQ Community

3 Literature Review According to Calton et al. (2016), domestic violence among the LGBT creates a lot of challenges to victims in reporting the violence of seeking help. Violent partners threaten their victims with more violence in case of reporting the incident. Despite the growing acceptability of LGBT in then society, group members fear reporting or divulging domestic violence information. The security authorities are also not used to handling violence in LGBT groups, which hinders their reporting (Calton et al., 2016). Lack of proper support in the security system and the community leaves them with much fear of reporting, especially when they know that such an action will expose them to much ridicule. However, the study does not indicate how barriers to reporting affect the health of victims and their relationship with healthcare service providers. The quality of healthcare a person receives from healthcare facilities is influenced by a proper diagnosis of the problem and its source. In the LGBT community, a person is likely to hide sources of injuries or stress if he or she knows that it will negatively expose the partner. The LGBT also prefer secrecy, in which case the publicity of their relationships would attract public or family disapproval and discrimination (Calton et al., 2016). In such cases, a person would be reluctant to reveal if his or her injuries and general suffering were inflicted by a partner out of fear that such a move would result in exposing his or her true sexual orientation.

Strickler and Drew (2015) establishes that lack of attention to Violence in LGBT has contributed to too many cases going unreported or punished, which has served as a catalyst to the problem. Reporting and punishing domestic violence are handy in managing the vice and helping the victims access quality health service. The mainstream society is largely blind to violence in the LGBT community; instead, much attention is put on women battering and general violence in what is considered straight relationships (Strickler & Drew, 2015). However, this study does not