Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes

Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes

Introduction

A hate crime is the violent depiction of intolerance that significantly impacts the immediate victim and the group with which the victim identifies. Although hate crimes may have the same impact as other types of crime in society, they are distinguished from other crimes by the perpetrator’s motive. The motive of hate crimes may be personal and insufficient in revealing the real reason behind the crime. Hate crimes also consist of two unique elements. One of the elements is that it is an act committed that includes an offense under common criminal law. The criminal act under hate crime is referred to as the base offense. The second element is that the criminal act is committed with a specific motive, referred to as a bias. This implies that the perpetrator intentionally chooses the crime target because of specific attributes. The issue of hate crimes against LGBTQ has raised concerns in many communities over the past decade because most people who associate themselves with the group are not afraid of coming out and expressing themselves in the community. Although various countries have put laws regulating the existence of the LGBTQ community, anti-LGBTQ hate crimes make it difficult to protect the individuals who belong to and support the community.

Overview of Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes

The LGBTQ community is a group of people who describe themselves as transgender, bisexual, gay, or lesbian. The group is united by common practices and culture. The LGBTQ acronym stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. The community is becoming increasingly acknowledged, open, and visible in society. According to Lombardi & Bettcher, lesbians, bisexual men and women, and gay men are defined based on their sexual orientation, which includes sexual attraction, identity, or behavior, whereas being transgender is defined based on their gender presentation and identity (5). The existence of the LGBTQ community in society has spurred mixed reactions, leading to anti-LGBTQ crimes connected to other crimes, such as violence and murder.

Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are an issue that began developing in the 1800s after the rise of sexual identities such as homosexual and transgender identities. The problem was more prevalent in Europe and North America, forcing the government to set laws prohibiting same-sex intimate relations. The laws were then imposed on the indigenous people worldwide through colonialism. However, there was a rise of a group that violated the laws and influenced others to ignore the laws leading to the prevalence of same-sex intimate relations worldwide. According to Amory and Massey (3), a group of transgender women of color was unwilling to tolerate police harassment that was linked to their sexual identity because this harassment resulted in violence and arrests. The women created room for the development of the modern LGBTQ rights movement that included activists challenging the idea that a specific group of people should be targeted for violence because of their sexual identities. However, the prejudices and stereotypes against the members of the LGBTQ community continue to pose a challenge to the LGBTQ rights movements because most people are reluctant to embrace the idea that people from the same gender can be romantically involved. Therefore, anti-LGBTQ hate crimes have emerged as an oppressive ideology that degrades and rejects a specific group of people and any form of nonheterosexual identity, behavior, community, or relationship. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes offer a complementary bias to same-sex intimate relations, which is an oppressive ideology denigrating genderqueer, gender non-binary, transgender, and gender-conforming individuals. Hate crimes are also being embraced as symbolic crimes because they communicate to the members of a specific group that they are unsafe or unwelcome in the community they live in and interact with.

There are two categories of anti-LGBTQ hate crime perpetrators. The first group is the state perpetrators, including government officials such as police officers. The second group is non-state perpetrators, which includes community and family members. According to Walters, most anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are committed by family members and police officers (34). Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are also mostly committed by young individuals. Hate crimes are also more likely to have more than one offender than other types of crimes because of the toxic masculinity among young men, who are mostly motivated by the thrill of demonstrating violence toward members of the LGBTQ community and attacking them. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are theorized as the mechanisms for constructing masculinity because they allow individuals to establish themselves as an idealized heterosexual man while overpowering other subordinate types of masculinity. Therefore, based on a theoretical perspective, the perpetrators of anti-LGBTQ crimes focus on visually communicating their prejudice, punishing the perceived violators of traditional ideas of sexual orientation and gender identity, and establishing themselves as belonging to the acceptable social classes of cisgender and heterosexual individuals. The perpetrators of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes also view the members of the LGBTQ community as a suitable target for violence by provoking them using homophobic comments.

The laws in society and the state bodies in charge of implementing the laws play a vital role in promoting anti-LGBTQ hate crimes. Many Commonwealth countries have criminalized same-sex relations, thus giving state bodies such as police officers and the community leeway to engage in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes. Some laws have also made the members of the LGBTQ community vulnerable to hate crimes and violence. For example, although most laws prohibit same-sex intimate relations, gender-diverse, and transgender individuals are also criminalized by the laws that regulate their gender expression by prohibiting impersonation and cross-dressing. The laws result from and contribute to widespread discrimination, prejudice, violence, and stigma against the LGBTQ community. The laws put the LGBTQ community beyond the protection of the government by criminalizing their behavior, thus creating a climate of state-sanction discrimination, fear, abuse, and violence. Criminalizing the LGBTQ community also creates room for state and police harassment, extortion, blackmail, and exclusion from vital services such as education, health, employment, and housing. Therefore, criminalization creates obstacles to the measures taken by the government to fulfill its responsibilities to the citizens, including achieving economic development and offering high-quality public health. Such issues force most people from the LGBTQ community to hide their sexual orientation and gender identities.

According to Walters, the law offers a legal basis for demonstrating hostility towards individuals in the LGBTQ community, leading to severe forms of sexual and physical violence among victims (32). Such incidents are common in a social environment that has enabled unlawful and discriminatory court orders authorizing physical examination, canning and flogging of victims, and corporal punishment for individuals found guilty of homosexuality. Speeches made by politicians and authority figures advocating that all people from the LGBTQ community should be eradicated from society and endorsement of such statements by religious leaders also yield acceptance of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in society. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes committed by law enforcement officers also undermine the willingness of LGBTQ victims to report crimes, especially when experiencing firsthand police violence or when they know that police officers may not view them as deserving of police protection. Police may also be unwilling to help the victims and frustrate their efforts to get justice, thus discouraging them from reporting. A lack of training, bias, and limited applications cause the high underreporting rate for gender-motivated and sexual orientation hate crimes (Walters 46). Therefore, there is a high likelihood that law enforcement officers may not take action against a perpetrator accused of committing an anti-LGBTQ hate crime based on their perception of the community and pressure from colleagues.

Although many countries have passed laws prohibiting anti-LGBTQ to protect LGBTQ community members, some countries, especially developing countries, have passed such laws to protect their economic interests. For example, some developing countries have been pushed into passing laws that criminalize violent acts against the people of the LGBTQ community so that they can receive foreign aid and financial assistance from the countries that support the community. This has resulted in a heated debate about the intentions of hate crime laws that target anti-LGBTQ hate crimes and whether the community’s existence is based on moral or economic motivations. There are additional concerns about whether anti-LGBTQ hate crimes violate human rights. According to Godzisz and Mole (4), LGBTQ advocates depict their grievances as a human rights issue and have begun feeding their grievances into the global human rights system, hoping that doing so will help leverage their claims and push governments to protect them from hate crimes. However, some countries have refused to view LGBTQ grievances as a human rights issue based on their religious beliefs, traditions, and norms. For example, most African countries have refused to embrace the LGBTQ community and protect its members from hate crimes, violence, and attacks because their actions are against acceptable behavior.

Conclusion

The LGBTQ movement has gained global recognition because of its active involvement in advocating for the protection of the LGBTQ community and stepping up to push for justice when one of the members of the community is attacked. This has led to the prevalence of same-sex intimate relations as individuals from the LGBTQ community are no longer scared of hiding their sexual identity, thus increasing anti-LGBTQ hate crimes. Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes have become a significant problem in most societies because of the criminalization of same-sex intimate relations and cross-dressing, which creates a perception that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are acceptable because they help in fighting a crime. The involvement of state agencies such as police officers and authority figures such as politicians and religious leaders in anti-LGBTQ crimes through acts of violence against the members of the LGBTQ community and comments suggesting that the members of the LGBTQ community should be eradicated from society also makes it hard to prevent and mitigate the impact of anti-LGBTQ crimes. Moving forward, it is crucial to agree on whether anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are under human rights violations to facilitate the effective implementation of hate crime laws. There is also a need for a permanent solution to anti-LGBTQ hate crimes because the LGBTQ community is rapidly growing and acquiring more strength because of the unity of members in different countries worldwide.

Works Cited

Amory, Deborah. “LGBTQ Legal History.” LGBTQ+ Studies: An Open Introduction, edited by Sean Massey, Lumen Learning, 2020, pp. 2–4.

Godzisz, Piotr, and Richard C. Mole. “To Geneva and Back: Externalising Anti-LGBT Hate Crime as a Policy Issue.” The International Journal of Human Rights, 2022, pp. 1–24., https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2022.2153121.

Lombardi, Emilia, and Talia Mae Bettcher. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender/Transsexual People.” Social Injustice and Public Health, 2019, pp. 139–154., https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190914653.003.0007.

Walters, Mark. “Hate Crimes against the LGBT Community in the Commonwealth: A Situational Analysis.” Equality & Justice Alliance, 2020, pp. 32–34.

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