Hate Crimes Against LGBTQ People Highest In 14 Years

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Projects today released a collective report on hate crimes against LGBTQ people.

Despite increased public and political acceptance of gays and lesbians, the number of crimes against LGBTQ people is the highest since 1998, the year they began tallying such attacks and also the year Matthew Shepard was murdered.

The amount of physical violence, rather than just verbal abuse, has also skyrocketed — and, not surprisingly, younger people, transgender people and people of color are targeted the most. From NCAVP:

This year’s report shows that LGBTQH youth and young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 years old were 2.41 times as likely to experience physical violence compared to LGBTQH people age 30 and older.

As in the case of the murder statistics, transgender people and people of color were more likely to experience physical injury in a hate violence incident. The report found that transgender people were 28% as likely to experience physical violence compared to non-transgender people, and that LGBTQ people of color were two times as likely to experience physical violence compared to those who were not LGBTQ people of color.

These numbers are discouraging, yes, but there is a bit of good news: NCAVP found that mainstream media and the general public are now paying more attention to hate crimes of all varieties.

"In 2011, NCAVP members witnessed a critical shift in the national narrative on anti-LGBTQH hate violence. In the 2010 hate violence report, NCAVP analyzed person level data1 for the first time, which allowed NCAVP to examine the diverse and disparate impacts of hate violence on specific LGBTQH communities," they write in their report.

"As a result, journalists, advocacy organizations, policymakers, and LGBTQH community members began to focus their attention on how hate violence disproportionately impacted LGBTQH people of color, transgender people, and transgender people of color."

Unfortunately these reports based on media accounts and not all incidents are reported either to the police or by journalists, so there are likely many more cases going unnoticed.

Here's a PDF Download NCAVPHVReport2011 of the NCAVP 2011 hate crime.