How We Make Abuse In LGBTQ Relationships Invisible

We need to start acknowledging it more openly

Photo by Dewang Gupta on Unsplash

Two years ago I was in an abusive relationship that ended in fairly dramatic circumstances that included her stealing my car.

Two years before that, I had ended a very different kind of a relationship in a very different way. She is the co-parent of my child, a decent person who I consider a good friend.

I’ve written about the abusive relationship before but it’s always felt like I’m skirting around it, never quite getting to the crux of it. This was partly to do with not being far enough removed from it, still submerged in its unprocessed murkiness.

But there’s another reason: I haven’t really found a space to talk about my experience of LGBTQ intimate partner violence within the mainstream narrative based on a male perpetrator and female victim.

There is no doubting that domestic abuse is a gendered phenomenon brought about by patriarchal social structures, gender inequality and traditional gender roles and attitudes. It’s consistently borne out in the statistics so it makes sense that this is where attention and resources are applied.

But the dominance of a cisgender male-female model of intimate partner violence shouldn’t mean blindness to the…