High rates of HIV infection among men who have sex with men is only one of the reasons that sexual orientation information should be collected through the Census, says NZAF Senior Researcher Peter Saxton. Speaking yesterday at the Pan Pacific AIDS Conference, Saxton pointed out that sexual orientation minorities were the only group protected under the Human Rights Act that didn't have a related question in the Census, denying researchers access to quality data. “There's a Catch-22 situation with glbt health, with inaction resulting from a lack of quality data. We need large-scale general population probability surveys, and all roads lead to the Census,” he said. “The Census is the benchmark for determining demographic data.” Statistics New Zealand investigated the possibility of including a question on sexual orientation in the 2006 Census but abandoned the idea for a number of reasons, including privacy concerns, public backlash, and difficulty in defining how the question should be worded. But Saxton says none of these problems are unique to questions on sexual orientation, and hasn't prevented other contentious areas such as income being surveyed. "Sexual orientation data should not be treated differently to other data."
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Thursday, 27th October 2005 - 12:00pm