Half of All LGBT Youths Cyberbullied According To New Iowa State Study

03/12/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
Iowa State Researchers Warren Blumenfeld and Robyn Cooper have found something that many in the LGBT Community are fairly well aware of. In a study that they have recently released, they discovered that many gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and allied youths are the targets of cyberbullying. According to them, roughly half of all “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and allied youths are regular victims of cyberbullying, which causes psychological and emotional distress to victims — producing thoughts of suicide in some who are repeatedly victimized.”

Of course, it is not just LGBT youth and our allies who are the victims of cyberbullying, as anyone who visits LGBT websites can attest. Unfortunately, it is often the teenage victims of cyberbullying who have the hardest time with it.

The survey of 444 high school and college students, including 350 LGBT youths) reported that fifty-four percent of them had experienced cyberbullying within the thirty day period prior to the study being conducted. Forty-five percent of them replied that they had been made to feel depressed because of the bullying. Thirty-eight percent felt embarrassed by the harassment, and twenty-eight percent felt anxious about going to school. Twenty-six percent, just over one in four, responded that they had suicidal thoughts because of the bullying.

According to Blumentfeld, “one of the biggest things that the participants are talking about is that this is a youth leadership issue. [Young people] want to see more training developed so that the peer leaders in the schools can be the ones who can act as positive role models to interrupt this kind of behavior in the schools and within the communities and to show in terms of ‘norms theory’ that this is not acceptable and this is not proper behavior and for the youths themselves to take more responsibility. . .[There] are a lot of actors in the drama of bullying … the perpetrators, those who erk on the perpetrators and those who are the bystanders who know what’s going on and do nothing. There also are those who are the “potential allies, those who for one reason or another don’t feel comfortable yet to interrupt the behavior.” He added that ‘there are the actual allies who interrupt the abuse and there are the targets of the abuse.”

Larry Magid, who wrote this up for Huffington Post noted “On a personal note, Blumenfeld was a childhood friend of mine. We were both bullied in school for, among other things, our last names. Kids called him ‘Warren Blubberfeld’ and me ‘Larry Faggot.’ Ironically, he was the one who was gay and I was the one who was overweight.”

On my own personal note, I was bullied in school almost all the time largely due to my being overweight, having red hair, being too smart, and behaving outside my societally assigned gender norms. Many of those who bullied me attacked me for being, they though, gay. They were only slightly wrong.