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November 16, 2010
Adolescents raised in lesbian-headed households are less likely to endure physical or sexual abuse by a parent or caregiver, suggests a new report from a long-term U.S. study of lesbian families.
Out of 39 sons and 39 daughters of lesbian mothers, all aged 17, who completed an online questionnaire, none reported ever being physically or sexually abused by a parent or caregiver, the report says.
“For many decades now, the opponents of same-sex parenting have alleged that same-sex parents are more likely to abuse their children and therefore shouldn’t be given custody or be allowed to adopt or foster children,” says the study’s lead researcher Nanette Gartrell, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Francisco. “And, those allegations have made their way into legislation . . . it’s important that allegations of abuse can be countered with scientific data.”
The findings, published last week in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, are part of the US National Longtitudinal Lesbian Family Study, now in its 24th year.
The report compares the zero-per-cent abuse rate in lesbian-headed households to the 26 per cent of American adolescents who report being physically abused by a parent or caregiver, and the 8.3 per cent who report sexual abuse.
The latter numbers are taken from the US Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence.
Women are generally less likely to initiate violence, Gartrell says, which contributed to the zero rate of abuse in this report.
Mothers of the 78 adolescents — all conceived through donor insemination — volunteered for the study between 1986 and 1992 while pregnant or being inseminated.
Because many lesbian and gay people were still closeted in 1986, it was necessary to ask for volunteers instead of obtaining a random sample of the population, Gartrell says.
Rachel Epstein, a queer parenting activist in Toronto, says same-sex parent families are often forced to prove their families are safe and healthy places to raise children.
“For decades, we’ve been put in this defensive position of having to prove all the time that our families are just as good as this non-existent heterosexual norm,” says Epstein, coordinator of the LGBTQ Parenting Network at the Sherbourne Health Centre. “Our families have been demonized in a certain way.”
A report like this helps shift the way the public views same-sex parent families, she says.
The volunteer sample on which the study is based makes it somewhat flawed, says the University of Toronto’s David Rayside, but he still considers its findings significant.
“In a sense, this simply builds on already existing evidence that kids with same-sex parents are pretty well-adjusted,” says Rayside, a political science professor and former director of the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. “But one can never assume that there aren’t dysfunctions in any kind of relationship.”
However, same-sex couples are different from other couples because of the extra effort they must put into having a child in the first place, Rayside says. “They really have to want to parent. For same-sex male couples, that’s even more dramatically true. It can be hugely more expensive. At the very least, if you want some biological connection (to the child), you need the intervention of a third party or of a clinic.”
A similar study of households led by gay men could help dispel myths about them as sexual predators, Rayside says. “There are still these antique stereotypes about homosexuals as predatory on young people,” he says. “They are mostly associated with men.”
There’s also a damaging stereotype in Canada and the U.S. that gay men raising children won’t provide their kids with appropriate role models, Rayside says.
Michael Saini says the study emphasizes what many academics and social workers already know: that children raised in same-sex relationships are no more at risk than children raised in heterosexual relationships.
“I think more information like this needs to come out because we still find discrimination and prejudice within our courts about presumptions of the level of care that children receive in same-sex relationship families,” says Saini, an assistant social work professor at the University of Toronto. “Socially, there’s still a lot of stigma about same-sex parents, but I think that’s changing over time.”
More foster children in Canada are starting to be placed in same-sex parent households, he says. “It’s breaking down those myths that same-sex parents are somehow unfit based on solely their sexual orientation. So, any research that supports the notion that these children will not be more at risk if they are placed with same-sex foster parents, I think helps to break down those barriers.”
by Alison Cross
This story is available online at thestar.com.