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News > World

Murders of LGBT People in the US Increased by 86% Last Year

  • FEELING BESIEGED: Mourners in San Diego, California, gather under an LGBT pride flag at a candlelight vigil in remembrance of victims of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida.

    FEELING BESIEGED: Mourners in San Diego, California, gather under an LGBT pride flag at a candlelight vigil in remembrance of victims of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. | Photo: Reuters

Published 23 January 2018
Opinion

For the first time since it started tracking anti-LGBTQ homicides 20 years ago, the NCAVP decided to release a mid-year report in order to raise awareness about the staggering increase of anti-LGBT violence.

The latest report by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs revealed Monday that 52 LGBT persons have been killed in the United States in 2017, representing an 86 percent increase compared with the previous year, for an average of one homicide of an LGBTQ person per week.

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The report only counts single incidents and does not include the Pulse Nightclub shooting that killed 49 people in 2016 in the comparison with 2017.

For the last five years, NCAVP has documented a consistent and steadily rising number of reports of homicides of transgender women of color, which continued into 2017 with 71% of the victims this year being people of color: 31 (60%) of the victims were Black, 4 (8%) were Latinx, 2 (4%) were Asian, and 1 (2%) was Native.

The great majority (67 percent) were age 35 and under and were shot dead in 59 percent of the total number of homicides, including three killed by police officers.

New York and Texas recorded the most anti-LGBTQ homicides, with 7 victims in Texas and 6 victims in New York, followed with Georgia, Louisiana and Florida.

The researchers found that almost half of the cases were related to hooking up online or through personal ads. “There appears to be a trend of targeting queer, bi, or gay cisgender men for violence, robbery and homicides, and other cisgender men are using these sites to identify and harm them,” reads the report.

The coalition that has been publishing the annual report on the LGBTQ hate crimes since 1996, has stated that the most severely impacted, are people of color, transgender, and gender non-conforming people as they make up the majority of victims of LGBTQ and HIV-affected related hate violence.

On the same day, the Brazilian-based organization Grupo Gay de Bahia released a report finding those anti-LGBT crimes had increased in 10 Latin American countries, with Brazil heading the list with 958 killed in the past three years —half of them last year.

In Latin America, the increase recorded is partially due to the fact that authorities are only recently taking into account the gender of the victims of homicide.

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