Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People

By Lacey M. Sloan and Nora Gustavsson

Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People helps you look past the stereotypical picture of violence against sexual minorities--the public physical assaults on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth by hypermasculine male thugs--and directs you toward the many daily acts of quiet violence that go on, unhindered, in the workaday settings of our legal, social, educational, and law-enforcement institutions. You'll learn about the frightening prevelance of complacency, homophobic ignorance, and apathy that pervades our police departments, courts, high schools, and churches. Also, armed with this critical insight and statistical research, you'll be better equipped to wage a non-violent war of fairness and mutual respect against the daily, senseless violence of policy and practice that threatens to render gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people unwelcome and battered citizens in their own communities. You'll find that Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People is ideal for aiding social workers, counselors, teachers, and criminal justice officials in removing the unseen acts of violence from the policies and practices of the public sector. These and other specific areas will give you the information and the fortitude necessary to evoke positive change in your community: legal issues relating to same-sex marriage the connection between social injustice and violence violence against sexual minority youth sexual identity and ethnic minorities practice and policy recommendations As this book shows, violence against sexual minorities can be subtly woven into the very fabric of some of our most long-standing, respected social institutions. For too long, the sexual minorities of color, for example, and the lesbian who suffers physical assault at the hands of a partner, have had little or no help from social workers, law enforcement, or education for fear of receiving either complete negligence or increased antagonism. But now, in Violence and Social Injustice Against Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People, you'll find the facts and tools necessary for turning the ugliness of communal violence into social justice for people of all sexual orientations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0789006502
• ISBN13: 9780789006509
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 148 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Of societal and institutional discrimination

The homophobic-charged murder of Matthew Shepherd on a cold Wyoming prairie cystalized public awareness and outrage at such an unspeakable act of violence. But the national shame limited its focus on the violence of individuals at the expense of calling attention to the prejudice and discrimination that very much exists on both a societal and institutional basis. This body of work compiled by editors Lacey Sloan and Nora Gustavsson is a wake-up call to redress the socially accepted prejudice that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people encounter every day in laws that single them out, workplace harrassment and what is little less than unequal protection under the law. Edited as a scholarly work with a slant toward social and legal policymakers, "Violence and Social Injustice ..." nonetheless speaks to the larger social order in identifying the daily rituals of social and institutional (government agenices, police, workplace, courts) violence that, though so routine that they go virtually unnoticed, cries for social and legal redress. For the lay person and researcher alike, this book may well be the definitive research on the prevalence of social injustice for yet another group of people that social etiquette and public policy have done worse than totally ignore. Both have endorsed and promoted prejudice that, in any society, serves nothing more than to make it weaker.