Adults need to be supportive of youth who identify as LGBT

Ado­les­cence can be one of the most dif­fi­cult peri­ods of time in a youth’s life. It can be even more dif­fi­cult if he or she is expe­ri­enc­ing an attrac­tion to some­one of the same gen­der. Even when a youth who iden­ti­fies as les­bian, gay, bisex­ual and trans­gen­der (LGBT) has the sup­port of his or her imme­di­ate fam­ily, the youth will cer­tainly have to deal with the strug­gles of being accepted by soci­ety. A recent sur­vey indi­cates youth who iden­tify as LGBT are more likely to engage in risky behav­ior than those who iden­tify as heterosexual.

The gov­ern­ment study asked about dozens of risky behav­iors, rang­ing from wear­ing a bicy­cle hel­met, to drug usage and attempt­ing sui­cide. The sur­veys were com­pleted by the Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC) between 2001 and 2009 in five states and in four of the largest city schools systems.

Some results, which vary by sur­vey site:

• Eight to 19 per­cent of het­ero­sex­ual stu­dents said they cur­rently smoke, com­pared to 20–48 per­cent of LGBT students.

• Four to 10 per­cent of het­ero­sex­ual stu­dents said they attempted sui­cide in the pre­vi­ous year and about 15–34 per­cent of les­bian and gay stu­dents reported attempted sui­cide, while 21–32 per­cent of bisex­ual stu­dents reported attempted suicide.

• Three to six per­cent of het­ero­sex­ual stu­dents said they threw up or used lax­a­tives to help con­trol their weight, com­pared to 12–20 per­cent of LGBT students.

The sur­vey did not ask the stu­dents why they engaged in riskier behav­iors but LGBT stu­dents deal with stigma, dis­ap­proval, social rejec­tion and abuse regard­ing their sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. The CDC report did note, how­ever, that risk behav­iors can be related to how peo­ple feel about them­selves and their environment.

Recent wide­spread media atten­tion on sui­cides com­mit­ted by LGBT youth has focused on those youth being bul­lied and harassed about their sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. Another study indi­cates LGBT youth who report being bul­lied were 5.6 times more likely to attempt sui­cide, twice as likely to report being clin­i­cally depressed and more than twice as likely to report being diag­nosed with a sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted infec­tion than those who were not bullied.

Adults need to be sup­port­ive of youth who iden­tify as LGBT. They will need some­one they can talk to with­out feel­ing embar­rassed. When a youth con­fides in you about his or her sex­u­al­ity, be non-judgmental, empa­thetic and trust­wor­thy. Show sup­port by not allow­ing homo­pho­bic jokes to be told and not allow­ing words and phrases to be used that put down LGBT. Let the youth and oth­ers know you sup­port peo­ple who are LGBT and help keep our kids safe.

Keep­ing Our Kids Safe is brought to you by the Delaware Police Depart­ment and School Resource Offi­cer Rod Glazer.

Posted by Andrew Tobias on Jul 8 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.