The Worldwide War Against LGBT
GAY PEOPLE ARE BEING ATTACKED AND KILLED IN HUGE NUMBERS AROUND THE WORLD
The four men beat Daniel Zamudio with bottles and rocks, burned him with cigarettes, cut off part of his ear and used broken glass to carve swastikas into his body. He died from his injuries 25 days after the March 2012 attack in a Santiago, Chile, park. Investigators believed he was targeted because he was gay.
After the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, a U.N. official said that huge numbers of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are targeted for assault and murder across the globe each year. “Un- fortunately, [that shooting] is a little glimpse into a deep well of hatred that exists in societies across the world,” said Charles Radcliffe of the U.N. Human Rights Office.
FBI statistics show that the total number of homophobic attacks is second to the number of racial attacks in the U.S., he added, even though gay and transsexual people make up a small share of the population. “We also know that those statistics are probably just the tip of the iceberg because much of this crime goes unreported.”
Globally, the violence ranges from aggressive bullying to assault and murder—and even includes “corrective” rape, in which men rape women thought to be lesbians trying to “cure” their homosexuality, according to Free & Equal, the U.N. campaign for LGBT equality.
Targeted violence against homosexual and transsexual people in the U.S. also occurs regularly, from famous tragedies like that of Matthew Shepard, who died after he was tortured and tied to a fence in Wyoming in 1998, to lesser-known attacks like the 2013 fatal shooting of a gay man in New York’s Greenwich Village by a man who had taunted him.
Zamudio’s murder was sadistic, but it forced reform. Chile adopted new laws on homophobia and discrimination after his death, according to Free & Equal, and last year, the conservative country legalized samesex civil unions.
At least in most countries the violence is not state-sanctioned. In 13 countries, people who have gay sex may face the death penalty.