Across UK 75,000 young people are bullied every year for being gay
ACROSS the UK, 75,000 of our young people are bullied every year just for being gay.
The figures above come from a study of LGBT young people by Stonewall and Cambridge University.
The numbers are shocking enough, but think of the people behind them – teenagers made to feel so much guilt and despair about who they are and who they love that they’d rather end their life than live it.
It is not just in our classrooms and playgrounds where hate words can be thrown around like confetti.
More than half the LGBT young people who said they’d experienced homophobia said they were bullied online. Cowards use the anonymity of Twitter and Facebook to hurl around horrendous slurs.
We can help young people by calling out this abuse when we see it. We’d never let casual racism go unchallenged, so why is casual homophobia given a free pass?
As a politician, I get online abuse all the time. It goes with the territory.
But as an openly gay politician, I also get a significant amount of homophobic abuse, and I feel a responsibility to challenge that.
I don’t want young LGBT people reading my timeline and thinking that that sort of language is OK. I don’t want them believing that the only response is to just sit passively and take it.
It is important to me that I retweet, highlight or challenge a cross-section of homophobic abuse I receive so young people feel able to do the same. We are allowed to say, ‘No, this is not acceptable.’
But it has to be more than LGBT people rejecting the insults. Others need to help.
Around 21 ,000 young people will attempt suicide this year because they are bullied for their sexuality.
Watching people being called ‘gay’ ‘p**f’ ‘dyke’ or ‘lesbo’online is not fun, it’s not banter and it ruins young lives. You can help it to stop.
Comments