About 8 percent of high school students are lesbian, gay or bisexual, according to the first nationwide survey asking teens about their sexuality.
The survey results released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month found that these teenagers face a shockingly high level of violence compared with their straight peers.
The report is a call to action for adults who care about youth, said Debra Hauser, president ofAdvocates for Youth, a nonprofit focusing on the health of young people.
A great deal of progress has been made in LGBT rights, “and yet we see such incredibly alarming disparities,” she said.
According to the survey, LGB teens were three times as likely as straight students to have been raped. They were twice as likely to have been threatened or injured at school. And nearly 30 percent had made a suicide attempt in the year before the survey.
Many LGBT youth feel hopeless and sad, Hauser said. It is devastating to see the level of bullying and violence against them, she said.
[For more of this story, written by Stell Simonton, go to http://youthtoday.org/2016/08/...ce-many-other-risks/]
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