Revealing the realities of hate crime - new Stonewall report
Homophobic, biphobic and transphobic hate crime in the UK have been put under the microscope by Stonewall in their latest report.
Print HTMLLGBT in Britain reveals the results of a Stonewall-commissioned survey with 5000 LGBT people in England, Scotland and Wales… and the publication makes for unsettling reading.
- One in five LGBT people experienced a hate crime or incident due to their gender identity and/or sexual orientation in the last 12 months.
- The number of LGB people who have experienced a hate crime or incident in the last year because of their sexual orientation has risen by 78 per cent when compared with 2013 figures (up from 9 per cent in 2013 to 16 per cent in 2017).
- One in four trans people (26 per cent) directly experienced transphobic abuse online in the last month
These figures are stark – however, their honesty is a wake-up call for authorities, and that push to take action is certainly welcomed by ILGA-Europe.
Over 80% of the Stonewall survey respondents who had been victims of hate crime didn’t report it to the police. Sadly, this confirms the pattern ILGA-Europe have witnessed in our work with members and partner organisations; as we know all too well, underreporting means that these experiences are only part of the total picture.
This reaffirms our commitment to improving cooperation between civil society and public authorities to encourage reporting, and thereby contribute to strengthening protections against hate crime and hate speech targeting LGBTI people across Europe.
It is worth noting that Northern Ireland was not included in the survey’s geographical reach and that no intersex people were counted among the respondents. So while we can only speculate, it is probably naive to expect that the results would have been less shocking when those communities are included.
More than a third of the LGBT people surveyed said that they aren’t comfortable when they walk down the street holding their partners hand. If affection is still being replaced by apprehension in 2017, it shows us that there is still much work to be done to combat LGBTI-phobia.
