Violence against LGBTQ people


experience violence directed toward their sexuality, gender identity, or gender expression. This violence may be enacted by the state, as in laws prescribing punishment for homosexual acts, or by individuals. It may be psychological or physical and motivated by biphobia, gayphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, and transphobia. Influencing factors may be cultural, religious, or political mores and biases.
Currently, homosexual acts are legal in almost all Western countries, and in many of these countries violence against LGBTQ people is classified as a hate crime. Outside the West, many countries are deemed potentially dangerous to their LGBTQ population due to both discriminatory legislation and threats of violence. These include most African countries, most Asian countries, and some former communist countries such as Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia and Serbia. Such violence is often associated with religious condemnation of homosexuality or conservative social attitudes that portray homosexuality as an illness or a character flaw.
Historically, state-sanctioned persecution of homosexuals was mostly limited to male homosexuality, termed "sodomy". During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the penalty for sodomy was usually death. During the modern period in the Western world, the penalty was usually a fine or imprisonment. There was a drop in locations where homosexual acts remained illegal from 2009 when there were 80 countries worldwide with five carrying the death penalty to 2016 when 72 countries criminalized consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.
Brazil, a country with LGBTQ rights protections and legal same-sex marriage, is reported by Grupo Gay da Bahia to have the world's highest LGBTQ murder rate, with more than 380 murders in 2017 alone, an increase of 30% compared to 2016. Gay men experience potentially fatal violence in several places in the world, for example by ISIS, stoning by Nigeria, and others.
In some countries, 85% of LGBTQ students experience homophobic and transphobic violence in school, and 45% of transgender students drop out of school.

State-sanctioned violence

Historic

The Middle East

The Torah, which contains the basis for the law codes of Judaism, contains, among prohibtions against a variety of sexual relationships in Leviticus, with one verse of prohibtion against male-male intercourse in Leviticus 18:22. To contextualize the emphasis biblical authors had for this prohibition compare it to Leviticus 18:19's prohibition against a man having intercourse with a menstruous woman or the eight versus of Numbers 35:1-8 spent on describing city planning. A violent criminal penal code regarding same-sex intercourse is prescribed in the Middle Assyrian Law Codes, stating: "If a man lays down with his own brethren, when they have prosecuted and convicted him, they shall stay with him and turn him into a eunuch".

Europe

Many harshly enacted laws and penal codes that strictly prohibited the practice of sodomy are enforced and reinforced throughout the entire European continent to prosecute and punish those who were found guilty for their criminal offense from the 4th to 12th centuries.
Roman Empire
During the Republican Era of Ancient Rome, the poorly attested Lex Scantinia penalized any adult male for committing a sex crime ' against an underage male citizen '. It is unclear whether the penalty was death or a fine. The law may also have been used to prosecute adult male citizens who willingly took a receiving passive role in same-sex penetrative intercourse, but prosecutions are rarely recorded and the provisions of the law are vague; as John Boswell has noted. "If there was a law against carnally lustful relations between individuals of the same-sex, no one in around Cicero's time knew anything about it".
When the entire Roman Empire came under Christian rule beginning with the reign of Constantine the Great, all forms of sodomite activities between individuals were increasingly repressed, often with the pain of death. In 342 CE, the Christian Roman emperors Constantius and Constans declared sodomite marriage to be illegal. Shortly after around the year 390 CE. The Roman emperors Valentinian II, Theodosius I and Arcadius declared all acts of sodomy to be an illegal criminal offense against the order of human nature in a civilized society and those who were found guilty of it are severely reprimanded and condemned to be publicly burned to death. Roman emperor Justinian I made sodomites a scapegoat for problems such as "famines, earthquakes, and pestilences."
Switzerland
The earliest known execution for sodomy was recorded in the annals of the city of Basel in 1277. The mention is only one sentence: "King Rudolph burned Lord Haspisperch for the vice of sodomy." The executed was an obscure member of the German-Swiss aristocracy; it is unknown if there was a political motivation behind the execution.
France and Florence
During the Middle Ages, the Kingdom of France and the City of Florence also instated the death penalty. In Florence, a young boy named Giovanni di Giovanni was castrated and burned between the thighs with a red-hot iron by court order under this law. These punishments continued into the Renaissance, and spread to the Swiss canton of Zürich. Knight Richard von Hohenberg was burned at the stake together with his lover, his young squire, during this time. In France, French writer Jacques Chausson was also burned alive for attempting to seduce the son of a nobleman.
England
In England, the Buggery Act 1533 made sodomy and bestiality punishable by death. This act was superseded in 1828, but sodomy remained punishable by death under the new act until 1861, although the last executions were in 1835.
Malta
In seventeenth century Malta, Scottish voyager and author William Lithgow, writing in his diary in March 1616, claims a Spanish soldier and a Maltese teenage boy were publicly burnt to ashes for confessing to have practiced sodomy together. To escape this fate, Lithgow further claimed that a hundred bardassoes sailed for Sicily the following day.
The Holocaust
In Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe, homosexuals and gender-nonconforming people were among the groups targeted by the Holocaust. In 1936, the poet Federico García Lorca was executed by right-wing rebels who established Franco's dictatorship in Spain.

Contemporary

, 64 countries criminalize consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.
53 countries where homosexual acts are criminalized but not punished by death, by region, include:
Africa
Asia
Caribbean
Pacific Islands
Afghanistan, where such acts remain punishable with fines and a prison sentence, dropped the death penalty after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, who had mandated it from 1996. India criminalized homosexuality until September 6, 2018, when the Supreme Court of India declared section 377 of the Indian Penal Code invalid and arbitrary when it concerns consensual relations of consenting adults in private.
Jamaica has some of the toughest sodomy laws in the world, with homosexual activity carrying a ten-year jail sentence.
International human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemn laws that criminalize homosexual relations between consenting adults. Since 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has also ruled that such laws violated the right to privacy guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Criminal assault

Even in countries where homosexuality is legal, there are reports of homosexual people being targeted with bullying or physical assault or even homicide.
According to the Grupo Gay da Bahia, Brazil's oldest gay rights NGO, the rate of murders of homosexuals in Brazil is particularly high, with a reported 3,196 cases over the 30-year period of 1980 to 2009. At least 387 LGBT Brazilians were murdered in 2017.
GGB reported 190 documented alleged homophobic murders in Brazil in 2008, accounting for about 0.5% of intentional homicides in Brazil. 64% of the victims were gay men, 32% were trans women or transvestites, and 4% were lesbians.
By comparison, the FBI reported five homophobic murders in the United States during 2008, corresponding to 0.03% of intentional homicides.
The numbers produced by the Grupo Gay da Bahia have occasionally been contested on the grounds that they include all murders of LGBT people reported in the media – that is, not only those motivated by bias against homosexuals. Reinaldo de Azevedo, in 2009, columnist of the right-wing Veja magazine, Brazil's most read weekly publication, called the GGB's methodology "unscientific" based on the above objection: that they make no distinction between murders motivated by bias and those that were not. On the high level of murders of transsexuals, he suggested transsexuals' allegedly high involvement with the drug trade may expose them to higher levels of violence as compared to non-transgender homosexuals and heterosexuals.
In many parts of the world, including much of the European Union and United States, acts of violence are legally classified as hate crimes, which entail harsher sentences if convicted. In some countries, this form of legislation extends to verbal abuse as well as physical violence.
Violent hate crimes against LGBT people tend to be especially brutal, even compared to other hate crimes: "an intense rage is present in nearly all homicide cases involving gay male victims".
It is rare for a victim to just be shot; he is more likely to be stabbed multiple times, mutilated, and strangled. "They frequently involved torture, cutting, mutilation... showing the absolute intent to rub out the human being because of his preference".
In a particularly brutal case in the United States, on March 14, 2007, in Wahneta, Florida, 25-year-old Ryan Keith Skipper was found dead from 20 stab wounds and a slit throat. His body had been dumped on a dark, rural road less than 2 miles from his home. His two alleged attackers, William David Brown Jr., 20, and Joseph Eli Bearden, 21, were indicted for robbery and first-degree murder. Highlighting their malice and contempt for the victim, the accused killers allegedly drove around in Skipper's blood-soaked car and bragged of killing him. According to a sheriff's department affidavit, one of the men stated that Skipper was targeted because "he was a faggot."
In Canada in 2008, police-reported data found that approximately 10% of all hate crimes in the country were motivated by sexual orientation. Of these, 56% were of a violent nature. In comparison, 38% of all racially motivated offenses were of a violent nature.
In the same year in the United States, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data, though 4,704 crimes were committed due to racial bias and 1,617 were committed due to sexual orientation, only one murder and one forcible rape were committed due to racial bias, whereas five murders and six rapes were committed based on sexual orientation.
In Northern Ireland in 2008, 160 homophobic incidents and 7 transphobic incidents were reported. Of those incidents, 68.4% were violent crimes; significantly higher than for any other bias category. By contrast, 37.4% of racially motivated crimes were of a violent nature.
People's ignorance of and prejudice against LGBT people can contribute to the spreading of misinformation about them and subsequently to violence. In 2018, a transgender woman was killed by a mob in Hyderabad, India, following false rumors that transgender women were sex trafficking children. Three other transgender women were injured in the attack.
Recent research on university-level students indicated the importance of queer visibility and its impact in creating a positive experience for LGBTIQ+ members of a campus community, this can reduce the impact and effect of incidents on youth attending university. When there is a poor climate – students are much less likely to report incidents or seek help.