Salvaging ‘Safe Spaces’: Toward Model Standards for LGBTQ Youth-Serving Professionals Encountering Law Enforcement

I. INTRODUCTIONThe concept of "safe space" for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer ("LGBTQ") young people is commonly associated with the responsibility of primary and secondary school educators to create safe havens for LGBTQ students from their age peers, by establishing educator-enforced space for dialogue and accountability around name-calling, bullying, and other forms of abuse.1 The term is also applied in child welfare and juvenile justice reform efforts, particularly in the development of safer placement and housing classification protocols, as well as and in sensitizing youth-serving professionals to the needs of LGBTQ young people.2Yet "safe spaces" reform efforts have failed to advance best practice guidelines for youth-serving professionals to ensure safety for LGBTQ youth from one of the primary perpetrators of violence and harassment against them: law enforcement. The oversight is a glaring one, given the wildly disproportionate rate of police encounters, arrest, secure confinement, and institutional placement faced by LGBTQ youth. Roughly 300,000 gay and transgender youth are arrested or detained each year in the United States.3 Sixty percent of these youth are Black and/or Latino/a.4 While LGBTQ youth represent 4-8% of young people in the United States, they make up as many as 13% of those currently in detention.5The act of arrest is never just ink on a R.A.P. sheet for LGBTQ youth. It exposes youth to police encounters with a high incidence of discriminatory profiling, false arrest, illegal search, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical brutality.6 These youth are in fact much more likely to be verbally and physically assaulted by the police than their heterosexual age peers, and over twice as likely to report sexual misconduct by police in the prior six months.7 This gratuitous violence is paired with the reality that LGB and gender non-conforming youth are twice as likely to be held in secure detention for truancy, warrants, probation violations, running away, prostitution, and are more likely than heterosexual youth to face detention for non-violent offenses.8 Those young people who avoid detention face multiple court appearances, fines and surcharges, and intensive probationary supervision, often in institutional placements.9 After court supervision is lifted, youth face life-limiting collateral consequences; a single criminal conviction can result in restricted access to housing, eviction, denial of public benefits including educational loans, exclusion from professions, and even deportation.10Society's emerging awareness of LGBTQ youth homelessness has caused the proliferation of both congregate and alternative care options such as drop-in centers, transitional housing, and permanent supportive housing. As street-involved young people seek shelter and community indoors, the police have followed suit, increasingly targeting these spaces with warrant enforcement units and unannounced searches with insufficient probable cause, let alone valid warrants, in which officers sometimes threaten staff who object to the legality of the entry or arrest with arrest itself for non-compliance. The threat of conflict with local precincts combines with a scarcity of shelter options to internalize a policing mentality among social service organizations themselves. Efforts to "rightsize" congregate care are incremental at best.11 These reforms do not carry an equal emphasis on increasing permanent and independent housing options. 12This mentality effectively deputizes youth-serving professionals as enforcers of a strict regime of exclusionary and restrictive policies designed to separate the "deserving" or high-functioning youth from those youth who are deemed non-deserving. A culture of rules is built up in these programs which conditions continued receipt of services on perceived good behavior, compliance with time-based bathroom limits, curfews, restrictive guest and visitation policies, and milestones tied to income or employment that are often impossible to reach for youth who face employment discrimination, whether due to their race, gender identity, or record of convictions. …