Gay Teens Are More Likely to get Harsher Punishments

This New York Times Article  really surprised me. It was about how gay teens are more likely to get harsher punishments in the legal system.  The study started with a New York City teacher who spent time doing work within the juvenile justice system.  According to the New York Times, 

"she noticed a disproportionate number of gay and lesbian teens in juvenile court but could find no studies in the scientific literature evaluating whether gay teens were more likely to be involved in criminal activity or to be more severely punished"

The article continues with more disturbing statistics about how gay teens are profiled by the legal system. According to this article, 

"teens who said they had experienced feelings of same-sex attraction were more likely to have been expelled from school than other teens"

And....

"Girls who labeled themselves as lesbian or bisexual appeared to be at highest risk for punishment, experiencing 50 percent more police stops and about twice the risk of arrest and conviction as heterosexual girls who reported similar levels of misconduct"

These statistics were really shocking to me, because I have never heard of gay teens getting harassed or stopped by the police or that they were more likely to get harsher punishments.  What I thought was most interesting was that, "these teens were less likely to engage in serious crimes and violence than their straight peers".  It reminds me a lot about the way in which African Americans are harassed by the police and the legal system. Blacks are stopped and frisked by the police at extremely disproportional rates even though statistically they are less likely to carry drugs compared to whites.  There are lot of similarities between the way in which the court/legal system abuses their power to disempower certain groups of people. 

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I already have a link above but incase you missed it, here it is again!