Concluding Thoughts

Participants in this study were frank and often brutal in assessing their experiences with legal issues, regardless of the field of law/justice with which they had engaged. A handful reflected positively on their engagement, typically in contexts where they felt that they had been “heard,” regardless of whether their efforts to resolve their problems were successful. Their lawyers, or the judiciary they dealt with, were empathetic and understanding about the complexity of their challenges. Far more common, however, were participants’ difficulties at multiple points across the system. To some extent, some of the challenges faced by the 2SLGBTQI+ participants are common regardless of the identity of the parties involved. Accessibility, for example, is a commonly recognized challenge. It is reflected in high costs and long delays, along with limited public awareness of legal processes and supports (Jenkins 2017). However, even these problems are exacerbated when 2SLGBTQI+ individuals interact with the justice system.

Many members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community are economically marginalized, due, in part, to the kinds of workplace discrimination noted in this report. Many of our participants perceived the legal system as impenetrable. They could not access it because they could not afford it and long delays meant it took too much time. This was magnified by a common feeling that, as 2SLGBTQI+ people, they were “invisible.” They saw the justice system’s apparent lack of comfort and familiarity with 2SLGBTQI+ identities, and the specificity of 2SLGBTQI+ experiences as a barrier to effective services and supports within the system. Again, the difficulties are compounded by participants’ intersecting identities. Frequently, it was not just their sexuality, but also their other identities – their race and/or ethnicity and/or their disability and/or their gender identity – that factored into both the legal problem they faced and the difficulties they faced in resolving it.

Notably, many participants expressed particular discomfort with, in fact distrust of, the criminal justice system. They often felt like the justice system did not take seriously their experiences of violence – at the hands of strangers and intimate partners – and that it denied or trivialized their victimization. For many, their past experience made them reluctant to engage with the criminal justice process for fear that they would be dismissed, or, worse, be targets of bias and hostility from police.

In short, the message that permeated the interviews was that the system was “broken.” The lack of support, the difficulties of access, and participants’ perception that the system was not sensitive to the ways in which sexuality shaped the experiences of 2SLGBTQI+ communities left them feeling excluded from pursuing justice. Yet participants also shared their thoughts on how to overcome these limitations, largely through both public and practitioner education and awareness, but also through expanded supports and services at all levels of engagement.