As the New York Daily News reported August 15, new data from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) “shows that, amid all the celebrations for legislative and cultural progress, attacks against [LGBTQ people] are still an issue,” and anti-LGBTQ violence surged this summer, right through Pride month.
The Daily News’s Muri Assunção grimly summarizes the NCAVP’s findings, drawn from criminal reports data collected between May 15 and July 15, 2019:
There were 14 anti-LGBTQ homicides during the two-month Pride period: an average of 1.75 each week. That represents more than three times the number of anti-LGBTQ homicides recorded between Jan. 1 and May 14 of this year.
Seven of the 14 victims were transgender women of color.
Beverly Tillery, executive director of New York City’s Anti-Violence Project, explained how, in Assunção’s phrasing, there is a “darker side of visibility.” While “unprecedented” numbers of Pride festivities were seen throughout the nation, Tillery noted that greater visibility also provides “another window into the various forms of violence our community faces, and shows how the visibility of Pride season can sometimes lead to greater targeting and attacks.”
Nearly two dozen anti-LGBTQ protests took place “at LGBTQ-related events or establishments” during the two-month period, along with a half-dozen “dating-related incidents” of intimate-partner violence.
These figures, NCAVP and others cautioned, necessarily omit comprehensive accounts of anti-LGBTQ violence, since these data reflect only reported incidents and rely on official statistical classifications, both of which may under-count actual incidents of anti-LGBTQ violence.
Given Instinct’s ongoing coverage of federal agencies’ reversals on LGBTQ-inclusive policies and other sources confirming spiking anti-LGBTQ hate crimes nationally, this tracks with the perceptible upward ticks in hostility, both official and societal. In fact, these trends date back at least three years, according to FBI data and USA Today reports from earlier this summer. As Instinct relayed at the time,
USA Today pointed out in its reporting that FBI data likely understate the true extent of nationwide hate crime incidents, though. “A better gauge of hate crime trends in the U.S.,” explained reporter Grace Hauck, “may be the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), a household-based survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau.” The NCVS estimates as many as 200,000 such crimes occur annually, accounting for all targets from race, ethnicity and religion to sexuality and gender identity.
Read Assunção’s full story, linked again below, for more information on NCAVP’s latest concerning data.
(Source: New York Daily News)
