What happens when your same-sex partner controls, beats, or abuses you? BuzzFeed News spoke to survivors and the only national charity trying to help others like them.

Rebecca Hendin

Sam was three months pregnant when her girlfriend Lynn raped her. They were at home. Sensing that Lynn wanted sex, Sam decided to tell her that she did not. “She suddenly got nasty,” says Sam, flatly. “She was physically a lot bigger than me. She pinned me against a doorway and said, ‘I’ll have what I fucking like if I fucking want it.’ She assaulted me.” Sam is in her early thirties. It is only in the last few months she has felt able to talk about the events of her early twenties. She looks up briefly, as we sit talking in a half-empty restaurant, and asks, “How do you say to your friends, ‘My girlfriend rapes me’ when their only mental definition of rape is a man forcing his penis inside a woman’s vagina? How do you say you were assaulted when it comes back to the idea of ‘that doesn’t count’? Well, it does count.” Their relationship did not begin like this. The story of how it blackened into abuse emerges over an afternoon – a patchwork account told in anecdotes, as if the whole tale from start to finish is too much to convey in one go. It is a story that not only Sam finds difficult to tell, but one that many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people struggle to disclose. BuzzFeed News spoke to both LGBT survivors of domestic abuse and an organisation trying to help them – amid a backdrop of cuts to funding. As the accounts of violence, rape, bullying, coercion, and control surfaced, sometimes for the first time, two questions began to form: What prevents LGBT people in particular from speaking out? And, what external forces are stopping them from finding safety? For Jo Harvey Barringer, CEO of Broken Rainbow, the only national LGBT domestic abuse charity, coming out is a key issue. How, she said, do you tell anyone you are living in fear from your partner if no one knows you're gay? As Mark, who wasn't out during his abuse, told BuzzFeed News: “I had nobody to talk to, so I thought maybe this is what I’ve got to put up with.” It wasn’t long before he was hospitalised. “About 85% of callers to our helpline have a partner that will use the threat of ‘outing’ them – to colleagues, family or kids – as a form of control," said Harvey Barringer. They received 10,000 calls last year. She described the 85% figure as just the starting point for what they do. The wider picture – how the police react, how crimes go unrecorded, how hospitals, social services, and housing officers respond – only compounds the danger facing victims. Harvey Barringer revealed something else: If the charity doesn’t find £20,000 in the next few weeks, it could close. This, said Sam, would put lives at risk.

Rebecca Hendin

Sam recalls another incident, this time from near the end of her time with Lynn, when she tried to seek help. “I went on the Women’s Refuge website and it’s all about, ‘If he does… If he…’ It uses male terminology so it’s an instant barrier. You go on that website in the middle of the night when she’s in the loo, you’re under your duvet on your mobile, and it hits you in the face: This doesn’t happen to you, this is a heterosexual thing: ‘If he’s doing this…’ And so you turn it off. And that’s what I did.” A few weeks later, Lynn tied Sam up. “It was for ‘a bit of fun’,” says Sam, darkly quoting Lynn. “She then produced what she told me was a knife and held it to my throat.” On that occasion, Sam managed to get away. It wouldn’t be long, however, before everything escalated into the final incident, one Sam says is so “specific and extreme” she does not feel she can talk about it without identifying those involved. The police were called, but it did not lead to a conviction, and years later, she remains afraid. In the beginning, she says, Lynn wooed her, lavishing her with attention: endless messages and emails, even poetry. “I was grateful that someone was interested in me,” she says. At the time, Lynn seemed to her “wonderful, exciting, but I remember always being slightly afraid of her.” Sam thinks for a moment, trying to describe her ex-girlfriend carefully. “She’s very intimidating, bolshie, physically intimidating, a very intense character, but mysterious – talks in riddles.” As a result, even at the start, Sam says she had doubts: “I thought I can’t possibly get involved in anything being pregnant, but people win you over. She took an interest and I responded to that.” After Sam became pregnant, she grew isolated from her friends – either, she says, because they were busy going out clubbing, or because some deemed her not a “real” lesbian because of the pregnancy. They did not know that Sam had previously, briefly, worked as a prostitute to try and survive financially. But Lynn knew. “She used that as a stick to beat me with, calling me a ‘slut’ and a ‘whore’,” says Sam. After the early charm offensive, verbal abuse, along with increasingly controlling behaviour, began to emerge.

Rebecca Hendin

“There was so much about the relationships that wasn’t normal,” says Sam, before explaining how. “She gave me a contract – a sexual contract: ‘Tick these boxes if you’d let me do… If you’d consider… If you’ve ever done…’ It was like a horrible version of 50 Shades of Grey. I didn’t sign it.” Regardless, she says, Lynn pushed her into doing things she did not want to. Later in the conversation, Sam says something in passing so quickly that it is only when the recording of the interview is replayed that the words resonate properly: “She stuck needles in me.” Sam couldn’t wear the clothes she wanted. “She changed the way I dressed, told me I wasn’t allowed to use the perfume I like because she claimed to be allergic to it. She wanted me to be very feminine and girlie and I’m naturally not.” Indeed, for most of her twenties, Sam had been binding her breasts, and came out to her friends as transgender. (Sam has agreed for BuzzFeed News to use female pronouns as at the time it was a lesbian relationship.) When Sam tried to wear shirts and ties, Lynn would respond with “constant negative comments: ‘Are you trying to be butch? You’re not a fucking butch, I’m butch, look at me, what the fuck are you trying to do?’” Sam stops for a moment. “When someone does that to you day in, day out, you just erode.” When Sam tried to challenge Lynn – who was significantly older – or tell her that her behaviour was upsetting. “She would generally laugh or belittle or say I was being a baby.” Many of their friends were mutual and so when Sam finally escaped after several months, she lost them too. She says they did not believe her. It was a singularly lonely time, she says, but it wasn’t her last experience of abuse. Although nothing since then has been as violent, any hints of bullying trigger past events, and push her to flee. Now single, Sam finally feels able to begin healing the internal scars. “My self-esteem has been shot to pieces,” she says. “It’s taken years to rebuild, to get me back to a place where I realise I’m worthy of love that isn’t transactional or conditional. I’m so pleased I don’t have to worry now about anybody else’s reactions, or run anything by anyone or worry about my boundaries being pushed around.” “My self-esteem has been shot to pieces – it’s taken years to rebuild." Sam does worry about the lack of discussion, both publicly and privately, about LGBT domestic abuse. “A lot of that silence is about shame,” she says. “And about community – we are a close-knit community and when I admitted to a few close friends what was happening, I lost them because everybody knows everybody.” She adds: “It feels like a conspiracy of silence.” Compounding this, says Sam, is the fact that many LGBT people are so used to being bullied at school, and so used to the male-female notion of domestic abuse, that often they do not recognise what is happening.

Rebecca Hendin

It is something that Jo Harvey Barringer frequently finds in the work Broken Rainbow does. But, she says, this is far from the only barrier for those in need. “For anyone to get any help [from mainstream services] they have to ‘out’ themselves,” explains Harvey Barringer. “Whereas one of the things we offer, especially on the helpline, is the guarantee that the person you speak to will identify as LGBT, which takes away the anxiety of having to say, 'My partner is another woman' or 'I’m trans.'” Some employees at mainstream services, she adds, are also not sufficiently aware of issues specific to LGBT victims, such as female-to-female rape and sexual assault, in part because of received heterosexual ideas about what constitutes abuse. “We’re also seeing a real trend of gay men who are HIV-positive and their HIV status being used as a form of control,” says Harvey Barringer. “Either through threatening to reveal their HIV status or their partner withholding medication. This also occurs with partners of trans people withholding their hormone treatment.” Even when LGBT people seek help from agencies that are supposed to support and protect those in need, she adds, many face further problematic assumptions. “People’s experiences of the police, health service, and housing services is one of coming up against a very stereotypical view of what domestic violence looks like,” says Harvey Barringer. “There was a lesbian who went to A&E with broken bones and reported to A&E that her same-sex partner had pushed her down the stairs. A&E did everything they should have done to ensure her safety except that when her partner turned up to the hospital and said she was a friend they gave her immediate access to her.” Harvey Barringer adds: “That woman ended up going home to her partner that night and not ringing another service until she rang us. Some police forces are really good, some are really bad; it depends where you live. We’ve had stories of police officers saying to a trans woman, ‘You used to be a bloke once; why didn’t you give him a slap back?’” "We’ve had stories of police officers saying to a trans woman, ‘You used to be a bloke once; why didn’t you give him a slap back?’” There is only one police force in the UK that specifically documents domestic abuse within LGBT relationships: Manchester police. The true scale of the problem, therefore, remains unknown. It is here, as Harvey Barringer continues to fill in the blanks, that a catch-22 situation emerges: No one knows how prevalent the problem is, so mainstream services and agencies don’t offer specialist help for LGBT people, so LGBT people don’t come forward. And the one organisation – Broken Rainbow – that does offer LGBT-specific support is under threat, in part because the government does not know how big the need is, because there aren’t the crime figures from the police. Last month several news outlets reported that Broken Rainbow faced closure by the end of the financial year. But although the Home Office has now indicated that it will fund the helpline for another year, Harvey Barringer tells BuzzFeed News they have not received official confirmation of this, or indeed how much the funding will be. “We have lost other funding due to the delay in the Home Office decision and will now struggle to make it through to the end of the month and through April whilst we wait for any new contract with the Home Office to be signed,” she says. “We don't have enough cash flow to get us through to the first Home Office grant. The whole organisation will close if we do not bring in £20,000.” One of the problems has been a switch from funding over several years, to governments grants on a yearly basis. “We’re not able to plan,” she says, adding that this is despite having a three- to four-year strategy. “And it’s really hard to get other funders on board because they like to see commitment from existing funders. Year-on-year funding is not sustainable for small organisations like us.” With no guarantees, and a team of 17, she says they will have to give out redundancy notices. “It has a domino effect on the whole organisation.” With the only LGBT domestic abuse service struggling to survive amid wider mainstream agencies not always able to deal with LGBT-specific cases, it is perhaps not surprising that many who wish to flee simply stay with their partner. Or, in some instances, return to them. Mark was 20 when he first met Ralph in a local pub. The power imbalance was evident immediately, he says. Mark describes himself then as “chubby” and “insecure”. He was also still wasn't out. By contrast, Ralph was openly gay and much admired for his looks, a lust figure among the regulars at the bar. “He was the most charming person in the world,” says Mark. “He couldn’t do enough for people. Everyone was taken in.”

Rebecca Hendin