Transgender Europe: IDAHOT TMM Press Release: May 8th 2015
Alarming figures: over 1,700 trans people killed in the last 7 years
Transgender Europe’s Trans Murder Monitoring (TMM) project launches an update for The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOT) 2015 so as to assist activists worldwide in raising public awareness of hate violence against trans and gender-diverse people.
The TMM IDAHOT 2015 update reports a total of 1,731 cases of reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people from January 1st 2008 to December 31st 2014.
While the actual circumstances of the killings often remain unknown due to a lack of investigation and reports, many of the cases documented involve an extreme degree of aggression, including torture and mutilation. Many cases are not investigated properly by the authorities and many have hardly received any public attention at all. The highest absolute numbers have been found in countries where strong trans and gender-diverse people’s movements and/or LGBT organisations do professional monitoring. This correlation points to the unknown number of unreported cases.
The TMM IDAHOT 2015 update reports killings of trans and gender-diverse people between January 2008 and December 2014 in all world regions: 1,356 killings in 23 countries in Central and South America, 155 killings in 16 Asian countries; 112 killings in North America; 94 killings in 14 European countries; 9 killings have been reported in 4 African countries; and 5 killings in 4 countries in Oceania.
While Brazil (689), Mexico (194) and the USA (108) have the highest absolute numbers, accounting for 57% of all reported cases worldwide in the last seven years, the relative numbers show even more worrisome results for some countries with a smaller population. Honduras, for instance, has a rate of 9.32 reported trans killings per million inhabitants, the Dominican Republic a rate of 3.27 and Uruguay a rate of 2.94, while for Brazil the rate is 3.44, for Mexico it is 1.59 and for the USA it is 0.34.
Our analysis shows the worrisome result of a significant increase in reported murders of trans children and young trans people in recent years”, explains Transgender Europe’s Senior Researcher Carsten Balzer. “ In the last seven years, 131 trans and gender-diverse persons under 20 years of age have been reported murdered, accounting for 12% of all reported murders where the age was known. Forty-eight of these 131 victims were under 18. An extremely distressing tendency is the fact that in the last two years five trans people under 14 have been reported murdered”.
Among the 10 murdered minors in 2014 were an 8-year-old trans girl, who was beaten to death on February 18th 2014 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by her father, who wanted to teach her to behave like a man, and 14-year-old Vanessa who – after receiving death threats – fled to her grandmother’s house in Angelica, Brazil, where she was found strangled on March 10th 2014. The largest group of murdered trans and gender-diverse people whose age is known is between 20 and 29 years of age, and it accounts for 44% of the total. This means that more than half of all the reported victims with a known age, i.e. 56%, were under 30 when they were murdered.
Furthermore the analysis of the TMM data shows that 65% of all murdered trans and gender-diverse people whose profession was known were sex workers. Of those reported victims where the cause of death is known, 44% were shot to death, 23% were stabbed to death and 13% were beaten to death. Of those victims where the location of death has been reported, 38% were murdered in the street and 24% were murdered in their homes.
More detailed information and analysis including maps and tables can also be found on the TvT website:
http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/en_US/tvt-project/tmm-results/idahot-2015.htm
In 2012, Transgender Europe published “TRANSRESPECT VERSUS TRANSPHOBIA WORLDWIDE – A Comparative Review of the Human-rights Situation of Gender-variant/Trans People”, which contextualises the TMM data:
www.transrespect-transphobia.org/uploads/downloads/Publications/TvT_research-report.pdf