Sexual, Gender Minorities Four Times as Likely to be Victims of Violent Crimes

“There’s an incalculable amount of transphobia ... that plays into these relationships,” Cooper said.

The new study didn’t have a large enough sample of surveys by transgender people to come to a conclusion about their specific victimization rates, but Flores said other research has shown they are particularly vulnerable.

The study also found that sexual and gender minorities are burglarized at twice the rate of other households and that they’re more likely to be victims of other types of property theft.

Read also: Cultural Norms Stall Deliberations of Indonesias Sexual Violence Bill

The study is based on a national crime survey conducted by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which until 2016 had not asked respondents about their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Researchers examined responses to the 2017 survey, which was released last year.

But it may be a while before researchers can look at the data in this way again.

The Trump administration, without seeking public comment, announced that it was moving the sexual orientation and gender identity questions from the general demographic section of its national crime survey to a part of the survey only pertaining to victims.

This will limit what researchers can learn about crime disparities because asking only victims about their sexual or gender identification makes it impossible to compare those rates of violence to the general population. 

(Writer: Astrid Galvan) 

Source: https://apnews.com/article/science-5592ca2a53144f9acdad5a9865e3af74