Day: February 12, 2013

Hull & East Riding Labour LGBT+ Network, a group that campaigns  on LGBT issues, have launched a petition to end conversion therapy.

Petitioners are encouraged to sign if they believe that being LGBT is not a disease, disorder or illness and cannot be ‘cured’ or changed, which will hopefully encourage politicians to finally start talking about conversion theerapy and work to bring in regulations to stop it ruining people’s lives.

The group has opted for a paper-based petition, which will have a more visible impact when submitted to Parliament in May by Diana Johnson MP.

To download a copy of the pdf, click here:

Once signed, return the completed form to:

Hull and East Riding Labour LGBT+ Network, c/o Sycamore Suite, Community Enterprise Centre, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU5 2DH.

For more information about Hull & East Riding Labour LGBT+Network click here: 

The surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XV1 has been welcomed by the UK gay Humanist charity the Pink Triangle.

The PTT secretary George Broadhead, said:

“I hope that all rational-thinking LGBT people will welcome the resignation. This pope has shown himself to be completely paranoid about homosexuality and his opposition to LGBT rights has known no bounds.

“Referring to the UK’s commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society before his visit to the UK in 2010, the Pope said: ‘The effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.’ At the time I described this as a thinly veiled attack on the anti-discrimination legislation concerning LGBT people. His claim that our equality laws undermine religious freedom suggests that he supports the right of churches to discriminate in accordance with their religious ethos. He seems to be defending discrimination by religious institutions and demanding that they should be above the law.

”He has frequently spoken out strongly against gay marriage, making his first attack in 2005 when he told a meeting of the Diocese of Rome that same-sex unions are only ‘pseudo-marriage’ born of ‘an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man’. In his 2008 Christmas message he declared bizarrely that saving humanity from homosexual behaviour was as important as saving the rainforest from destruction. In an address to the faithful in Portugal, he described gay marriage as an insidious and dangerous threat to the common good.

“In his message for World Day of Peace in January 2013, he said same-sex marriage is unnatural and poses a threat to ‘justice and peace’. He said: ‘There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union. Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.

“He has acquired a well-deserved reputation as one of the nastiest homophobic world leaders on a par with Mahmoud Ahmadinejadd of Iran and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, himself a Roman Catholic.”

Following the banning by Brighton and Hove Council of Vince Laws iconic living poem This Pope is Pants from the Jubilee Library last week, a Vatican spokesperson refused to comment when asked if this was the reason for the Popes resignation.

Sussex based charity Mankind are runnning a new online survey to uncover the extent and effects of sexual violation on LGBT people.

Mankind is a specialist agency that provides counselling to men who have experienced sexual abuse and is concerned by the lack of research and knowledge around the experience of LGBT people.

Mankind CEO, Martyn Sullivan, said:

“We are aware that individuals from LGBT communities face unique difficulties and challenges in disclosing sexual abuse. We want to address this by giving them a safe way to tell us about their experiences.”

The survey is called ‘With Consent?’ and aims to go beyond clearly defined instances of sexual abuse, assault and rape.

Martyn  added:

“Sometimes, it is not that clear.

“Sex can be used in many different ways and we sometimes find that we’ve been involved in something that later on we are not entirely happy or comfortable about.”
 

This is especially true for people first becoming aware of their sexuality and beginning to experiment with different sexual experiences, or when sex is used as payment for shelter, food and drugs etc. In these circumstances it can be very confusing about how consensual the sex was, and how much control the person actually felt they had.

This is why the survey is described as ‘Discovering how sex is abused, used and confused in LGBT communities.

Martyn concluded:

“We want this survey to cover the whole spectrum of negative sexual experiences in order to give a true account of the sexual lives of LGBT people.” 

“This is the first survey of its kind – we’ve put it online to make sure it’s 100% confidential and enable as many people as possible to take part.”

To participate in the UK LGBT Survey, view:

SURVEY

To find out more about Mankind, view:

MANKIND

The most wide-ranging survey of hate crime victims ever to be undertaken is being launched this month in Leicester by a specialist research team based at the Department of Criminology, University of Leicester.

The survey is part of the Leicester Hate Crime Project – a two year study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, designed to examine the nature and impact of hate crime and victims’ expectations of the criminal justice system and other local support agencies.

The survey is being administered to the widest range of victim groups ever covered by a single hate crime study. This includes people who have been victimised specifically because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or their gender identity, as well as those who belong to the kinds of more marginalised groups which are often overlooked within hate crime research and policy – such as Gypsies and Travellers, asylum seekers, refugees, the homeless and those belonging to alternative subcultures, to name just several examples.

Dr Neil Chakraborti, the project’s Principal Investigator, said:

“This survey will help us to uncover a range of victim experiences never previously documented. We want to capture the experiences of anyone, from any background, who feels that they have been victimised specifically because of who they are, and since the start of the project we have been engaging with all sections of Leicester’s diverse population to access potential respondents. As well as identifying violent acts of hate crime, we want the survey to help us understand the everyday forms of harassment, intimidation and bullying that often go unpublicised and unreported despite the damaging long-term consequences for victims, their families and broader communities”.

The Leicester Hate Crime Project is just a few months old but is already uncovering some fascinating new aspects of hate crime victimisation through its other major research strand, face-to-face interviews. Through this method the team has heard from Leicester’s more ‘hidden’ communities whose experience of hate crime has not been recorded before. The questionnaire survey is a crucial way of hearing more of these ‘lost voices’, and further interviews and focus groups will be held in the coming months to supplement the survey findings.

Mr Jon Garland, Co-Investigator, said:

“The strength of the questionnaire is that it allows victims to describe their experience of hate crime, and of the service they received when they reported it to the police and other agencies. It has been specifically designed to be flexible enough so that victims from any background will be able to use it easily. Those whose first language is not English will also be able to fill it in as it has been translated into a variety of languages spoken by communities within Leicester. Help with completing the survey is also available for those who need it”.

For more information about the Leicester Hate Crime Project, click here: