A new analysis of a survey in suburban Cook County has found that LGB high school students outside of Chicago face violence, depression and substance abuse at rates that far exceed their straight peers, sometimes by up to four times.
Windy City Times reported last month that findings on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), administered nationally but issued for the first time for suburban Cook County alone last year, found that 10 percent of students were bullied for being perceived as gay.
The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which advocates for LGBT youth in schools, requested a special analysis of the data and released the findings exclusively to Windy City Times.
The new analysis shows that 39 percent of LGB suburban youth have been teased because of their sexual orientation, while more than 45 percent had been in a physical fight (transgender is not included on YRBS surveys).
At 25 percent, queer youth were also more than four times as likely to have been forced to have unwanted sex than straight students.
The study further suggests that 41 percent of LGB youth thought about attempting suicide, while over 31 percent of queer youth reported actually attempting suicide compared with 7.3 percent for straight students.
LGB students also reported using marijuana at more than double the rate of straight peers and four times more reported using ecstasy (16 percent).
“These are young people screaming at us to do something,” said Shannon Sullivan, executive director of the Alliance. Sullivan said that such numbers suggest that queer youth could be using drugs as coping mechanisms to deal with depression and anxiety.
However, she said, the numbers are not surprising, given similar findings by the Illinois YRBS as well as the Chicago Public Schools version. Both of those surveys showed that LGB youth in the city and throughout the state experience depression, violence and drug and alcohol use at rates far greater than their straight peers.
Further, Sullivan believes that the findings point to a larger trend. Despite attempts by LGBT youth advocates to talk to young people, statistics remain relatively bleak. If anything, Sullivan said, risk behaviors for straight students are on the rise.
“You don’t have to gay to be called with anti-gay language,” she said. “The non-gay peers are unfortunately catching up.”
Nearly 9 percent of straight students reported being teased for being perceived as LGB. Heterosexual students have also reported higher rates of other risk behaviors in recent years.
Other areas where LGB students differ less drastically from straight students point to more complicated trends. While nearly 27 percent of LGB students reported going 24 hours without eating to lose weight (compared to 10 percent for straight youth), just 42 percent reported engaging in physical activity for at least an hour a day. Fifty percent of heterosexual students reported exercising for an hour daily.
The difference in exercise statistics might be small, Sullivan said, but it could suggest that some LGB students feel less comfortable joining school sports teams.
The suburban Cook County findings should dispel some misconceptions that suburban queer youth face different challenges than their city peers, especially in communities where LGB youth issues have yet to be prioritized.
“It’s a lot harder for, particularly adults, to say ‘not in my school, not in my home, not in my neighborhood,'” said Sullivan. “It’s going to be huge in terms of advocacy to say that we have this data.”