LGBTQ people experience violence directed toward their sexuality, gender identity, or gender expression. This violence may be enacted by the state, as in laws prescribing punishment for homosexual acts, or by individuals. It may be psychological or physical and motivated by biphobia, gayphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, and transphobia. Influencing factors may be cultural, religious, or political mores and biases.
Currently, homosexual acts are legal in almost all Western countries, and in many of these countries violence against LGBTQ people is classified as a hate crime.Stotzer, R.: Comparison of love Crime Rates Across Protected and Unprotected Groups , Williams Institute, 2007–06. Retrieved on August 9, 2007. Outside the West, many countries are deemed potentially dangerous to their LGBTQ population due to both discriminatory legislation and threats of violence. These include most African countries (except South Africa), most Asian countries (except some LGBTQ-friendly countries as Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines), and some former communist countries such as Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia and Serbia. Such violence is often associated with religious condemnation of homosexuality or conservative social attitudes that portray homosexuality as an illness or a character flaw.
Historically, state-sanctioned persecution of homosexuals was mostly limited to male homosexuality, termed "sodomy". During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the penalty for sodomy was usually death. During the modern period (from the 19th century to the mid-20th century) in the Western world, the penalty was usually a fine or imprisonment. There was a drop in locations where homosexual acts remained illegal from 2009 when there were 80 countries worldwide (notably throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and in most of Africa, but also in some of the Caribbean and Oceania) with five carrying the death penalty to 2016 when 72 countries criminalized consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.
Brazil, a country with LGBTQ rights protections and legal same-sex marriage, is reported by Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB) to have the world's highest LGBTQ murder rate, with more than 380 murders in 2017 alone, an increase of 30% compared to 2016. Gay men experience potentially fatal violence in several places in the world, for example by ISIS, stoning by Nigeria, and others.
In some countries, 85% of LGBTQ students experience homophobic and transphobic violence in school, and 45% of transgender students drop out of school.
State-sanctioned violence
Historic
The Middle East The Torah, which contains the basis for the law codes of Judaism, contains, among prohibitions against a variety of sexual relationships in Leviticus, with one verse of prohibition against male-male intercourse in Leviticus 18:22. To contextualize the emphasis biblical authors had for this prohibition compare it to Leviticus 18:19's prohibition against a man having intercourse with a menstruous woman or the eight verses of Numbers 35:1-8 spent on describing city planning. A violent criminal penal code regarding same-sex intercourse is prescribed in the Middle Assyrian Law Codes (1075 BCE), stating: "If a man lays down with his own brethren, when they have prosecuted and convicted him, they shall stay with him and turn him into a eunuch".
Europe
Many harshly enacted laws and penal codes that strictly prohibited the practice of sodomy are enforced and reinforced throughout the entire European continent to prosecute and punish those who were found guilty for their criminal offense from the 4th to 12th centuries.
Roman Empire During the Republican Era of Ancient Rome, the poorly attested Lex Scantinia penalized any adult male for committing a sex crime (stuprum) against an underage male citizen (ingenuus). It is unclear whether the penalty was death or a fine. The law may also have been used to prosecute adult male citizens who willingly took a receiving passive role in same-sex penetrative intercourse, but prosecutions are rarely recorded and the provisions of the law are vague; as John Boswell has noted. "If there was a law against carnally lustful relations between individuals of the same-sex, no one in around Cicero's time knew anything about it".John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 63, 67–68, quotation on p. 69. See also Craig Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 116; Eva Cantarella, Bisexuality in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 1992), p. 106ff.; Thomas A.J. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality and the Law in Ancient Rome (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 140–141; Amy, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (Oxford University Press, 1983, 1992), pp. 86, 224; Jonathan Walters, "Invading the Roman Body", in Roman Sexualites (Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 33–35, noting particularly the overly broad definition of the Lex Scantinia by Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (American Philosophical Society, 1953, reprinted 1991), pp. 559 and 719. Freeborn Roman men could engage in sex with males of lower status, such as prostitutes and slaves, without moral censure or losing their perceived masculinity, as long as they took the active, penetrating role; see Sexuality in ancient Rome.
When the entire Roman Empire came under Christian rule beginning with the reign of Constantine the Great, all forms of sodomite activities between individuals (especially those of the same-sex) were increasingly repressed, often with the pain of death.(Theodosian Code 9.7.6): All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man's body in acting the part of a woman's body to the sufferance of alien sex (for they appear not to be different from women), shall expiate a crime of this kind in avenging flames in the sight of the people. In 342 CE, the Christian Roman emperors Constantius and Constans declared sodomite marriage to be illegal.Theodosian Code 9.8.3: "When a man marries and is about to offer himself to men in womanly fashion (quum vir nubit in feminam viris porrecturam), what does he wish, when sex has lost all its significance; when the crime is one which it is not profitable to know; when Venus is changed to another form; when love is sought and not found? We order the statutes to arise, the laws to be armed with an avenging sword, that those infamous persons who are now, or who hereafter may be, guilty may be subjected to exquisite punishment. Shortly after around the year 390 CE. The Roman emperors Valentinian II, Theodosius I and Arcadius declared all acts of sodomy to be an illegal criminal offense against the order of human nature in a civilized society and those who were found guilty of it are severely reprimanded and condemned to be publicly burned to death. Roman emperor Justinian I (527–565 CE) made sodomites a scapegoat for problems such as "famines, earthquakes, and pestilences."Justinian Novels 77, 144; Michael Brinkschröde, "Christian Homophobia: Four Central Discourses", in Combatting Homophobia: Experiences and Analyses Pertinent to Education (LIT Verlag, 2011), p. 166.
Switzerland The earliest known execution for sodomy was recorded in the annals of the city of Basel in 1277. The mention is only one sentence: "King Rudolph burned Lord Haspisperch for the vice of sodomy." The executed was an obscure member of the German-Swiss aristocracy; it is unknown if there was a political motivation behind the execution.
France and Florence During the Middle Ages, the Kingdom of France and the City of Florence also instated the death penalty. In Florence, a young boy named Giovanni di Giovanni (1350–1365?) was castrated and burned between the thighs with a red-hot iron by court order under this law. These punishments continued into the Renaissance, and spread to the Swiss canton of Zürich. Knight Richard von Hohenberg (died 1482) was burned at the stake together with his lover, his young squire, during this time. In France, French writer Jacques Chausson (1618–1661) was also burned alive for attempting to seduce the son of a nobleman.
England
In England, the Buggery Act 1533 made sodomy and bestiality punishable by death. This act was superseded in 1828, but sodomy remained punishable by death under the new act until 1861, although the last executions were in 1835.
Malta In seventeenth century Malta, Scottish voyager and author William Lithgow, writing in his diary in March 1616, claims a Spanish soldier and a Maltese teenage boy were publicly burnt to ashes for confessing to have practiced sodomy together. To escape this fate, Lithgow further claimed that a hundred bardassoes (boy prostitutes) sailed for Sicily the following day.
The Holocaust In Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe, homosexuals and gender-nonconforming people were among the groups targeted by the Holocaust (See Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany). In 1936, the poet Federico García Lorca was executed by right-wing rebels who established Franco's dictatorship in Spain.
Contemporary
, 64 countries criminalize consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex. Iran Brunei Afghanistan (fourth conviction) Mauritania Saudi Arabia Although the maximum punishment for homosexuality is execution, the government tends to use other punishments (fines, prison sentence, and whipping), unless government officials think that homosexuals have challenged state authority by engaging in LGBT social movements. Somalia Uganda United Arab Emirates Yemen Parts of Nigeria (some states in Northern area)
53 countries where homosexual acts are criminalized but not punished by death, by region, include:
Africa Algeria, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Egypt, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria (death penalty in some states), Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe Asia Bangladesh, Aceh (Indonesia), Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Gaza Strip under Palestinian Authority Caribbean Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Pacific Islands Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu
Afghanistan, where such acts remain punishable with fines and a prison sentence, dropped the death penalty after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, who had mandated it from 1996. India criminalized homosexuality until September 6, 2018, when the Supreme Court of India declared section 377 of the Indian Penal Code invalid and arbitrary when it concerns consensual relations of consenting adults in private.
Jamaica has some of the toughest sodomy laws in the world, with homosexual activity carrying a ten-year jail sentence.
International human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemn laws that criminalize homosexual relations between consenting adults. Since 1994, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has also ruled that such laws violated the right to privacy guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Criminal assault
Even in countries where homosexuality is legal (most countries outside of Africa and the Middle East), there are reports of homosexual people being targeted with bullying or physical assault or even homicide.