WickedGayBlog.com: Wicked Cohesive
:: Lesbian Crew Raped
Posted by alexstory on December 27, 2008
From a series of street bashings in Seattle to the baseball bat murder of an Ecuadorean immigrant in New York, episodes of anti-gay violence punctuated a year now ending with police investigating the alleged gang rape of a lesbian near San Francisco.
Advocates said Tuesday they do not know whether the threats, beatings and murders reflect a true rise in attacks or increased reporting of hate-based crimes that persist even as gays gain greater visibility and legal protections.
“When you are talking about hate crimes, people think someone is likely to report it, but in some communities the message is not always clear that our society has accepted LGBT folks,” said Sarah Tofte, a researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, referring to the acronym for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.
In Richmond, the crime-ravaged Bay Area city where the 28-year-old lesbian reported being assaulted by four men 10 days ago, police on Tuesday received so many calls from community members wanting to help that they asked the local rape crisis center to set up a fund to aid her.
FBI statistics show there were 1,265 hate crimes based on sexual orientation in 2007, up from 1,017 two years earlier and 1,239 in 2003. That compares to 3,820 racially motivated incidents in 2007 and 1,400 in which the victims religion was a factor.
Because not all states allow attacks motivated by anti-gay bias to be charged as hate crimes and because some victims are reluctant to reveal their sexual orientations to police, gay and transgender rights advocates suspect the numbers to be much higher.
The vast majority of brutality against gays is carried out by young men, usually acting in groups, said Riki Wilchins, executive director of Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, a Washington nonprofit that works in schools to address discrimination.
Their victims most often are other young men with feminine demeanors or transgender women, said Wilchins. “These assailants are looking to eradicate and exterminate something that enrages them, and that is what makes them hate crimes,” he said.
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