Jeremy Goldbach, the Masters & Johnson Distinguished Professor in Sexual Health and Education at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a five-year $3.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project titled “Trajectories of Intimate Partner Violence Among Sexual Minority Youth.”
“Young people between the ages of 13 and 17 who are in sexual minorities experience higher rates of intimate partner violence than their heterosexual peers,” Goldbach said. “They are more likely to experience psychological and physical abuse and about four times more likely to experience rape.
“Previous studies have largely failed to look beyond victimization of intimate partner violence and have not measured how that violence is carried out among sexual minority adolescents,” he said. “This project aims to address those gaps.”
Goldbach, alongside colleagues at WashU and Rob Stephenson of the University of Michigan, will use methods refined in his previous work in this area. His research is primarily focused on measuring, understanding and intervening upon experiences of minority stress and discrimination among LGBTQ+ children and adolescents.
This research has been continuously funded since 2012 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; the NIH’s National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute on Drug Abuse; as well as by the Department of Defense and various foundations.
“This study proposes to address the limitations of previous work around intimate partner violence among sexual minority youth and to explain the prospective relationships between experiences of intimate partner violence, risk and resilience factors, and other behavioral health outcomes in a diverse group of young people.
“Our efforts are centered on identifying targets for future interventions to reduce the significant burden of intimate partner violence carried by this population.”
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