LGBTQ Americans 9 times more likely to be target of hate crimes

A recent analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey says the odds of being a violent hate crime victim for LGBTQ people was nine times greater than it was for cisgender and straight people from 2017 to 2019.

There were an average annual 6.6 violent hate crime victims per 1,000 LGBTQ people during this three-year period. In contrast, there were 0.6 violent hate crime victims per 1,000 cisgender and straight people.

A hate crime is an attack or threat of an attack that’s motivated by the victim’s perceived race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender or religion. Or it could include someone’s association with any of the previous categories, such as an antiMuslim hate crime committed against someone who is Sikh.

The National Crime Victimization Survey is a nationally representative survey that asks over 200,000 people about non-fatal crimes that happened to them in the past year.

Since 1999, it has asked victims if they suspected their victimization was motivated by certain biases, and if so, the reason for the bias. We use the National Crime Victimization Survey classification of hate crimes, which is consistent with the Bureau of Justice Statistics classification: victimizations that involve hate language, hate symbols, or were confirmed by police to be a hate crime.

Since 2017, the National Crime Victimization Survey has been documenting sexual orientation and gender identity of respondents. This has allowed us to estimate the rate of hate crimes against LGBTQ people for the first time.

The study suggested that violent hate crimes involving LGBTQ victims have unique characteristics. Prior research has suggested that LGBTQ victims of hate crime frequently didn’t know the offender. In our analyses, 49% of violent hate crimes with LGBTQ victims involved an attacker who was a close friend, family member, partner or former partner.

We also found that LGBTQ victims of violent hate crimes were more likely to have physical and psychological symptoms as a result of the attack when compared with LGBTQ victims of violent crimes that were not hate crimes.

For example, LGBTQ victims of violent hate crimes were four times more likely to feel worried or anxious as a result of the incident than LGBTQ victims of non-hate violence. Despite this, we found that only about 1 in 3 LGBTQ victims of violent hate crimes sought professional help for their symptoms.

The findings complement a series of studies relying on the National Crime Victimization Survey that showed that LGBTQ people are generally victims of crimes at higher rates than cisgender and straight people, with bisexual women having markedly higher victimization rates than lesbians, and transgender people having higher victimization rates than cisgender people.