Research: Romney's anti-gay assault fits typical pattern [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

http://forensicpsychologist.blogspot.com/2012/05/research-romneys-anti-gay-assault-fits.html

Outed for physical and verbal abuse of gay classmates during high school, U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is trivializing the incidents as "pranks" and "dumb things," and claiming not to know the boy he assaulted was gay.

To me, his response came as no surprise. This is precisely what most gay-bashers think and say, according to my groundbreaking research on the motivations of perpetrators.

In the first empirical research into prevalence rates of and motivations for antigay harassment
and violence by noncriminal young adults, I found antigay behaviors like Romney's to be alarmingly commonplace. One in 10 young adults in the politically liberal San Francisco Bay Area admitted to physical violence or threats against presumed homosexuals, and another 24 percent acknowledged name-calling. The percentages were even higher among young men. The frequency of self-acknowledged antigay behaviors among a general population sample was consistent with victim studies in which large proportions of lesbians and gay men report sexuality-related victimization.

Like Mitt Romney, most gay-bashers with whom I conducted followup interviews insisted that they were not motivated by hatred of homosexuals. This despite the fact that many of their assaults fell within legal definitions of a hate crime. Many, like Romney, were instead acting as self-appointed enforcers of gender norms for male and female behavior.