More thoughts prompted by It Gets Better

The message of the It Gets Better project is largely, "hang on until you're all grown up, and then things will be better because you won't have to be around the people who are shitty to you."

Great. Except. It's not always true.

Not everyone can leave abusive environments. Some people can't, because they don't have the resources, the support from a community, the money to pick up and move (which generally requires up-front-cash, not the ability to earn cash), or because of fear of extreme violence if they attempt these things.

When someone is in this kind of situation, they are being failed by their community. We, as a community, ought to provide the resources or reduce the need for them. We ought to provide safe places for people from all kinds of backgrounds, for free. We ought to provide money and resources for people who don't have access to enough themselves. We ought to provide psychoemotional support for those who need it. And we ought not to tolerate abuse in the first place -- in schools or universities or families or anywhere else.

Renee Martin has an excellent piece up at Womanist Musings on bullying not being specific to LGBT kids. It's not just queer kids who desperately need to be told something more than "wait it out", it's also disabled kids, girls, poor kids, children of colour, and any child or teenage who is Othered or abused by their community or family.

Which brings me to another trend I'm noting. Desperation, depression, and suicidality are being framed as a very specific problem which will go away as soon as you get away from the bullies. That's lots of people's experience. But for some people, desperation and related mental health issues are longer-term. That does not mean that things don't get better and become manageable. It does mean that the message of hope needs to be more than "you can get away from the bullies" (even in cases where that message is true). It needs to be something about accessible support that will continue, for as long as you need it. Living with a long term mental-health condition does not have to mean that your life is unmanageable, that your life is tragic, etc. It does mean that you deserve support from the people around you.

But it's also true that my response to the It Gets Better project is not everyone's response, nor should it be. AnnaJCook has a great post up on the importance of context and the diversity of narratives, in which she also discusses a number of the critiques that have been made of the It Gets Better project.

There are a great many times that what I want to see is people marching and shouting "WE WILL NOT LIVE IN FEAR, AND WE WILL NOT TOLERATE ABUSE OR A LACK OF SUPPORT FOR PEOPLE WHO LIVE WITH ABUSE!" and not hear "just wait it out, and maybe the abuse will stop". But that's my reaction, because of my context, it's not everyone's. And of course, a message of hope, any message of hope, can be helpful too, sometimes. And as J Wallace notes, one advantage of the It Gets Better Project is that an awful lot of people are talking openly about feeling or having felt desperate and suicidal and how to address that, and the importance of that alone can't be underestimated. We do need, urgently, to talk about the prevalence of mental ill health and suicidal feelings among queer people, and how to best offer support, and how to promote social change. These are not orthogonal projects.


I admire what the It Gets Better project is trying to do, I really do, and a great many people have said a great many loving things from the bottom of their hearts, and more power to them. And I think we need to focus on making sure that everyone, whether queer or not, whether a child or not, has good support, and that the world keeps changing for the better.

We have our work cut out for us.


--IP