An international day celebrating the diversity of Illawarra's community included a tough lesson on the impacts of COVID-19.
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While activities celebrated International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) at the University of Wollongong, a report launched on Tuesday revealed even more about attitudes.
UOW and Advance Diversity Services (ADS) launched the report which examined the knowledge, skills and attitudes of diversity service workers when servicing culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) queer communities.
By 'queer', the project refers to gender, sex and sexuality diverse from dominant gender, sex and sexuality binary systems and norms, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, intersex, trans, non-binary and gender queer.
The community-based research project Understanding diversity services workers' knowledge and skills gap in servicing CALD queer communities in the context of COVID19 aims to better understand and equip community service workers with skills to provide more appropriate, effective and timely services to CALD gender, sex and sexuality diverse communities.
Dr Quah Ee Ling Sharon, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry and Chair of the UOW Ally Network, is the chief investigator of the project which was awarded a 2020 UOW Community Engagement Grant.
The grant allowed non-profit multicultural community organisation ADS to commission the research required.
"There was evidence to suggest that gender, sex and sexuality diverse people were being left behind in the way the government responded to the COVID-19 pandemic," ADS CEO Antoinette Chow said.
"Simultaneously, we had observed that CALD queer people hesitated to approach multicultural community organisations for support due to uncertainty about the level of acceptance towards them among CALD local and migrant communities, and whether the services they'd receive would be queer sensitive and friendly."
Dr Quah and her team surveyed respondents, conducted one-on-one in-depth interviews and facilitated focus group discussions on ADS staff and volunteers' knowledge of gender, sex and sexuality, their attitudes and behaviours towards queer people.
"The sincerity and eagerness of multicultural organisations, like ADS, to extend mainstream services to gender, sex and sexuality diverse individuals, particularly CALD queer people is exciting to see," Dr Quah said.
"Through this project we found that it's really important not to insist on mainstream understanding of gender, sex and sexuality diversity - like the notion of coming out or the use of pronouns on CALD communities or even CALD gender, sex and sexuality diverse people."
Dr Quah hopes this pilot project can be developed into a broader study to investigate the specific care needs and practices of CALD gender, sex and sexuality diverse people and how receptive they would be to access services from mainstream CALD organisations.
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