Acrópoli, tenemos un problema.

Acrópoli is currently undertaking a survey of LGTB violence and hate crimes in the Comunidad de Madrid by surveying members of the Comunidad de Madrid, doing outreach for survey completion Twitter and Facebook.  The survey results will almost certainly be used to inform decision making by the Comunidad de Madrid as the LGTB organization is part of several groups that report such statistics in partnership with local government agencies on a regional level across Spain.

Their survey is inherently problematic, poorly written and not a document worth making decisions based on as it does not measure things in such a way that effective outreach can be done using those results.  They should have consulted someone with experience doing survey sampling, had a better disclaimer, defined their terms, etc. at the start of the survey for one thing, but no such thing was done.

One of the first questions on the survey asked about gender identity, with options of hombre, mujer, otro and you can write in the option.  There was no question about sex of the participants.  For an LGTB organization reaching out to the whole of the LGTB community, this immediately creates a problem.  Two surveys that I am aware of regarding lesbian and bisexual women in Spain suggest that these groups are not transinclusive, both in how they define potential partners and with many rejecting the concept of gender identity altogether.  This type of question then creates a situation where they are self-selecting a non-representative sample as it relates to lesbians and bisexual women.  Second, the inability to also count based on sex, instead relying on gender identity, means they are unable to differentiate between lesbians, bisexual women and trans lesbians.  These two groups face different types of discrimination based on different underlying factors, a point discussed in a large volume of class specific research.  While it is understandable that an organization that represents people with different gender identities wants to ask that, it needs to be coupled with options for those in the community that lack that.

Second, the survey does an awful job defining terms.  This ranges from lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersexed to sexual assault.  This needs to be done as people may interpret terms differently.  A man may view sexual assault one way while a woman may view that word differently. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCS) is sometimes considered an intersex condition and is sometimes not.  The survey is not clear if it is seeking to capture women with PCS, and how they will measure that.  In some countries, this includes 6 to 12% of all women.  The survey is being aimed at a broad population, where sexual consent is rarely talked about.  This adds uncertainty related to assumption of knowledge that everyone understands these terms

Third, other important demographic data is missing to contextualize people’s experiences.  There were no questions related to race, to sex, to education levels, to class, to nationality, to native language, to disability. This data was not collected about participants, nor was it collected about alleged perpetuators. This data is crucial for interpreting results and to creating effective programming to combat LGTBI violence and identifying populations more at risk. LGTB discrimination does not exist in a vacuum, and multiple studies related to bisexual women and lesbians in Spain have found that their discrimination exists at the intersection of homophobia and sexism.  Is the violence being reported by these groups a result of being LGTB, initiated because of membership in other groups and then continued because of that LGTB membership, initiated for reasons that are unclear because of membership in multiple classes like sex, immigration status, race?

Fourth, all the groupings for the question used LGTBI as a source of the potential discrimination. This requires respondents to agree that their discrimination is based on membership into a class that includes gender identity and sexual orientation.  If someone yells at you on the street, “tortillera de mierda”, is that LGTBI related hate? Or is it lesbophobic and misogynistic related hate? If you’re a black lesbian walking down the street with your Asian lesbian partner hand in hand  with the lesbian having a visible disability and a man in a puffy vest walks pasts and yells, “¡Viva España! ¡Viva Vox!”, is that LGTBI hatred or is it hatred because they are lesbians or because they are immigrants?  The survey does not allow any means to collect this data through any sort of narrative storytelling.  These stories would strengthen the data by offering context to the data.  The same thing is true of questions related to interactions related to the police and other authorities for whom offenses can be reported to.  Given cases like the manada, are lesbians, bisexual women and transmen less likely to trust the police and judiciary to handle their cases because of their LGTB status or because of their sex? The questions assume that these classes within the collective would be hesitant to report based on only on belonging to the collective and not other class membership.

Fifthly, the survey asks a lot of leading questions.  This includes, “Are you aware of this legislation that allows you to report things to the police?”  I might not have been aware of it before, but the survey makes that abundantly clear. There are better ways to have assessed the awareness of the population regarding the current legislation. Importantly, if this was a primary concern of those who are conducting the survey, the survey should have ended with a link for those who took the survey to become more informed on the current legislative protections available to members of the LGTB collective and

Sixthly, the questions do not look at a number of contemporary issues that are impacting the LGTB community, and creating additional potential for violence against members of the LGTB community, and especially specific violence targeting individual classes within the broader LGTB collective.  This includes the monkey pox situation and gay men, cotton ceiling issues and accusations of being TERFs impacting lesbians and bisexuals, potential blowback from the promotion of Ley Trans on the transgender and transexual community, the Catholic Church telling Spanish bishops in July 2022 to stop their conversion therapy targeting homosexuals for starters.

Lastly, the survey asked a number of sensitive questions about sexual abuse.  This is a topic that can be incredibly triggering for sexual abuse survivors.  It is why special precautions need to be taken when surveying victims.  This is a topic that is addressed extensively in literature around studying sexual abuse.  There was zero warnings that these questions were present.  There was no contact information for suicide hotlines or sexual abuse support hotlines. This is negligent on the part of the survey takers.  It is an absolute minimum that should have been done to insure participant well-being, and that the results would be taken seriously.  If no such numbers exist, and they do exist in the Comunidad de Madrid, then an apology should have been issued and participants who are victims of sexual abuse should have been discouraged from participating.

The survey Acropolis has open is poorly formed, poorly worded, does an active disservice to the community, and excludes segments of the collective from participating.  The results will not be reliable, and should not be used for any sort of decision making.