Earlier this week, the Victorian Pride Lobby launched its report “Upholding our rights: LGBTIQA+ attitudes towards and experiences of policing in Victoria” which summarised the results of a survey of “over 1,500 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, intersex, queer and asexual (LGBTIQA+) Victorians”.
The findings of the survey were eye-catching:
4 in 5 LGBTIQA+ Victorians do not think the police understand the issues that impact them.
2 in 3 LGBTIQA+ Victorians do not think the police are generally helpful and supportive.
1 in 2 LGBTIQA+ Victorians do not trust the police with their personal information.
2 in 3 LGBTIQA+ Victorians believe LGBTIQA+ people are treated unfairly by police.
3 in 5 believe the police show an inherent lack of respect toward LGBTIQA+ people.
This led to headlines such as “Most LGBTIQ+ Victorians don’t trust police”. However, there are a number of glaring issues with this survey (and similar surveys) which deserve scrutiny.
Queering Samples
The Pride survey was launched in August 2020. In the first 11 hours of the survey opening over 670 responses were received.
Searching the survey link on social media, there appears to be very little engagement with the survey except for a handful of accounts.
The report itself notes that online surveys come with pitfalls. LGBTIQA+ research is heavily reliant on “convenience sampling” - that is drawing on a sample that is close to hand, rather than trying to select at random.
The obvious downside of a convenience sample, particularly in the context of the internet, is that it risks sampling from a non-representative subset of the population.
This is a huge risk with LGBTIQA+ people, who are a widely heterogenous group - likely to vary widely in their engagement with LGBT media, events and organisations online.
Despite these issues, the report notes:
[W]hile recognising that it is not possible to know how accurate or truthful respondents are in answering the questions of an online survey, the strong engagement in the Police Attitudes Survey, and the ability to follow up with those who left their contact details, provides a high level of confidence in the integrity of the responses presented in this report.
Whilst collecting contact details may help in deterring spambots using online surveys - it doesn’t account for the way survey links are funnelled towards certain groups.
I’ve tried my best to check how widely spread the survey link was posted on social media, finding very little posts and almost no clear engagement across Facebook and Twitter.
My bias radar went off when I discovered that one of the few survey links posts to gain traction online was made by queer activist Joshua Badge, who shared the link with their over 13,000 Twitter followers.
Badge is a police and prison abolitionist, who subsequently wrote a piece for The Pedestrian on the findings of the Pride Lobby report, writing: “None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who isn’t a cop”.
It’s therefore not too much of a leap to suspect that many of the survey respondents to the Pride survey were a convenience sample of politically engaged queer activists.
As the survey itself notes, it was undertaken in the year of widespread Black Lives Matter protests, and would likely attract attention of activist groups given some politically charged questions (which we will get to).
Some further indicators this survey has a tilt towards politically active queers:
27% of survey respondents described their gender as either “non-binary” or “other”.
The overwhelming majority of survey respondents (~49%) described their sexuality as bisexual, pansexual or queer (compared to 24.6% describing themselves as gay and 13.7% described themselves as lesbian)
Just under 7% of survey respondents described their sexuality in a way that wasn’t encompassed by bisexual, gay, queer, lesbian, pansexual, asexual or preferred not to stay.
The overwhelming majority of survey respondents were under the age of 35 (75% of respondents).
“Shifting demographics” have added an extra layer of difficulty to LGBTIQA+ research. Researchers will often cast a “wide net” in framing research of sexual and gender minorities in order to get an adequate sample, however this ignores significant differences between groups.
The demographics change of this survey appear to be the result of a sample being shared amongst a relatively small network of politically engaged individuals.
A Slight Tangent
As a slight left turn from talking about the Pride survey, it’s worth speaking a little about the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA+ and its impact on research.
Gays, lesbians and binary transgender people are continuing to make up a smaller and smaller slice of the pie in LGBTIQA+ research. It is not at all unusual for the vast majority of a LGBTIQA+ research sample to consist of bisexual or pansexual women (who differ significantly from lesbians across various indicators).
The latest Writing Themselves In report, a research project originally set up to document the changes in experiences of gay and lesbian youth, had the awkward situation this year of mostly consisting of young people other than gays and lesbians .
This report also saw a similar bump in newer sexual and gender identifications, with 19.5% of the sample selecting their gender as “non-binary”, with only a very small number of binary trans responses.
This led to a number of misrepresentations when the report was released.
Many people (including many journalists) honestly believed that the negative experiences of gays and lesbians remain unchanged (or have even been gotten worse) since the 1990s.
The “L” “G” “B” “T” “Q” “A” and increasingly growing “+” deserve the respect of not being lumped together under the assumption that their experiences and needs are similiar.
Contact is not abuse
Back to the Pride survey, and ignoring the demographics issue for a second, the findings of the Upholding our rights report have a number of puzzlingly features.
A significant proportion of respondents (86.39%) indicated they “had contact with police” constituting 1,212 respondents. However, the report goes on to say:
Those who had contact with police rated their experience poorly. When asked to indicate on a scale of 1 (very poor) to 5 (very good), the weighted average of 270 respondents was 1.88.
We’ve jumped from 1,212 respondents having contact with police to 270 respondents rating their experiences without explanation.
The report then says:
We further analysed the sentiment related to these experiences in order to gain understanding of the tone of respondents' interactions.
However, it’s not clear whether this is ‘analysis of the sentiment’ occurred using the 1,212 responses or the much smaller 270 responses - or how this was done. Nevertheless, a number of further stats are listed:
47.20% of respondents who made contact with police said that the officer was disrespectful;
53.93% of those who had contact with the police reported that the officer was hostile or aggressive.
43.07% agreed that the officer was homophobic or transphobic.
That last statistic is pretty important, and it’s unclear whether that constitutes ~521 respondents saying that (from 1,212) or ~116 respondents (from 270).
The Pride lobby wouldn’t send me the raw data or more comprehensive version of the report (calling it an ‘internal document’). However, after asking a few questions, I was told ‘contact with police’ was broken down like so (I’m assuming via multi-selection):
29.43% of respondents were victims of a non-LGBTIQA+ related crime;
26.32% of respondents were asking for help with a problem;
24.56% were involved in a public protest;
23.21% witnessed a crime;
21.53% at a festival/nightclub/going out.
This complicates the nature of the “contact with police” many respondents had, and also raises questions about how poor interaction with police relates to LGBTQ+ status.
For example, is it any surprise that attendees at public protests or those being searched at music festivals find law enforcement “disrespectful” or “hostile or aggressive”? This reflects broader issues with policing, but LGBTQ+ status is only tangentially related to these issues.
It’s also not clear whether perceptions of police officers as “homophobic or transphobic” are because of things said or done by officers, or a perception of the institution of Victoria Police generally.
The Victorian Pride Lobby has more directly asked LGBTQ+ Victorians about experiences of harassment, discrimination or abuse by police in a seperate 2020 survey, their 2020 Community Survey (which isn’t on their website for some reason). Here’s what they found:
This survey found just over 10% of respondents had experienced police discrimination, harassment or violence in the last 12 months (a measure which is declining over time).
This is a much more concrete measure of poor experiences with police by LGBTIQA+ people, however even this requires the caveat that there may be multiple reasons for discrimination, violence or harassment by police. This includes more well documented police biases including racial discrimination or harassment of sex workers.
A common misstep in LGBTQ+ research is attributing any and all negative findings in a survey to identity without sufficient evidence.
This is very clear in the few instances where researchers have followed up quantitative surveys with qualititative responses.
Bryan and Maycock (2016) undertook a large-scale mixed-methods study exploring the mental health and well-being of LGBT people, which incorporated a series of qualitative interviews to understand the relationship between poor mental health and LGBT identity.
They found that drawing on raw statistics to say that LGBT status was directly correlative to poor mental health and suicide was simplistic:
The survey data revealed that less than half (46.7%) of those who had attempted suicide on at least one occasion felt that their first suicide attempt was related directly or primarily (‘very related’ or ‘very much related’) to their LGBT identification (n1⁄492), suggesting that a complex con- stellation of factors were involved, which often included, but was not limited to, one’s LGBT identification. In other words, while some of these experiences were associated with the stress of identifying as LGBT in a range of homophobic and transphobic settings and environments, others were wholly unrelated to LGBT identification. As stated earlier, almost one fifth of the overall survey sample had attempted suicide on at least one occasion but only 8% of all survey par- ticipants had made a first suicide attempt which they deemed to be ‘very much related’ or ‘very related’ to their LGBT identification.
Putting the Pride Lobby’s results within context we find that: (i) very few LGBTIQA+ Victorians have direct negative experiences with police; and (ii) it’s unclear whether this direct negative experience is attributable to LGBTIQA+ status.
Perceptions Of Perceptions
The bulk of the Victorian Pride survey is not about experiences with police, but about perceptions of police impacted by current events.
The report justifies this approach like so:
People often draw on vicariously obtained information to evaluate the police generally, in addition to using this information to interpret their specific experiences if or when they come into contact with an officer.
For minority groups in particular, the collective experience is part of the individual experience and vice versa. It is important to understand that one anti-LGBTIQA+ direct experience can often affect the perceptions of the police by the LGBTIQA+ community as a whole.
In particular, the survey wished to measure the impact of two instances of police misconduct on perceptions of police by the “LGBTIQA+ community”:
The 2019 Hares and Hyenas queer bookstore raid, which resulted in the serious injury of Nik Dimopolous. Officers were subsequently cleared by IBAC.
The 2020 breach of privacy of former North Melbourne football coach Dani Laidley (a trans woman) by St Kilda officers.
Both instances severely impacted the trust of respondents in police. Here’s how one respondent put it:
I think it's safe to say that the IBAC report on Hares & Hyenas has only made the community less trusting and more positive of corruption. We're all still hurting. It's also really important to remember that whilst I myself haven't had horrific experiences, the community in general has traumer [sic] and seeing cops at events can be a trigger.
To be absolutely clear, the actions of police during both the Hares and Hyenas raid and their treatment of Laidley are serious instances of misconduct (no matter what IBAC says). However, how highly publicised cases of misconduct are reported and framed has a major impact on individual perceptions of risk.
LGBT organisations and media rarely take responsibility for their role in perpetuating fears of discrimination and abuse through selective reporting and framing.
One particularly egregious example is the Human Rights Watch tally of “Fatal Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community” which collects global reports of homicides involving trans people.
The tally - which is frequently reported at face by mainstream media outlets - does not distinguish between hate-related and non hate-related homicides: lumping together mass shooting deaths and domestic violence incidents under a broader tally of violence against trans people. This leads to false perceptions by trans people that they are at a disproportionate risk of homicide (which is not the case).
Similarly, the reporting of police misconduct can lead to perceptions that Victoria Police are targeting LGBTIQA+ people when there is no evidence of this.
When you read the sequence of events, the Hares and Hyenas raid is best described as an incident of racial profiling, not LGBTIQA+ hatred. Similarly, the lurid sharing of photos of Dani Laidley was largely motivated by her celebrity status (although clearly, a juvenile perception of trans people was present).
It’s important that LGBTIQA+ organisations don’t just take perceptions at face value, but consider the way media reporting and activist framing of current events can unnecessarily increase fears amongst vulnerable groups.
The Real Reason The Survey Was Done
Given the potential bias in sampling, confused reporting of findings and over-reliance on perceptions, you may ask why the Victorian Pride Lobby would put out this report in its current state?
Well, it’s pretty clear they were only interested in one particular finding:
From the results of our survey, three quarters of LGBTIQA+ Victorians (75.27%) believe that Victoria Police should not march in uniform at Pride March. For participants that identified as trans and gender diverse, the figure was higher (89.24%).
“Cops at Pride” discourse has become something of a virtue signal for queer activism over the last few years. It signals a distinction between conformist, assimilationist LGBTIQA+ people and more radical (“liberated”) queer people with a progressive bent.
As I’ve expressed before, I’m not entirely sure how many LGBTIQA+ people actually care about Pride in its modern, corporatised form. Nor do I think most LGBTIQA+ people have a firm view on the attendance of police at these events.
However, it seems pretty clear that this policing survey was designed as a source for advocacy internally at the Victorian Pride Lobby and externally to event organisers to remove police marching in uniforms at LGBTIQA+ events.
The Victorian Pride Lobby announced back in May, that it would actively oppose police presence at Pride events - an action that received a lukewarm response.
Whilst I don’t mind either way about this advocacy, I do object to the construction of a general policing survey for the purposes of advancing a fairly niche cause.
Police actions against gays, lesbians and binary transgender people throughout Australia’s history have been abhorrent.
This violence was facilitated not (as identity politics would have it) merely because of personal prejudice but the criminalisation of gay sex, public sex, sex work and illicit drugs. Aspects of this over criminalisation of sexual and gender minorities are still present.
I’m not comfortable (and others shouldn’t be) that surveys are being constructed, composed of groups not historically marginalised by police, to serve the whims of niche activists.
If this is a sign of things to come, journalists and commentators need to approach LGBTIQA+ surveys with a greater degree of scrutiny.