Violence against women and LGBTIQA+ communities is deeply interconnected, with drivers of both rooted in many of the same harmful beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Primary prevention offers a shared solution – by challenging and improving the underlying attitudes that enable all forms of gendered violence. In doing so, we also prevent ongoing discrimination and hate crimes against LGBTIQA+ communities.
Violence against LGBTIQA+ communities
Homophobia, biphobia and transphobia have no place in Victoria. Yet hate-crimes remain a real fear and reality for LGBTIQA+ communities. There is ongoing and intensifying anti-LGBTIQA+ backlash internationally and across Australia causing profound harms to LGBTIQA+ communities, particularly trans and gender diverse people, who have been targeted through hateful social and political discourse, direct violence and in some cases legislation and policies that can cause harm. This includes a recent increase in targeted attacks against gay and bi+ men, lured through fake profiles on dating apps. Since January 2024, Victoria Police have made over 35 arrests related to these incidents, with many more occurring across Australia and internationally.
Where violence is motivated by hate, bias, or prejudice directed towards a person or group of people, because of an attribute or characteristic, including gender identity or sexuality, this is defined as a ‘hate crime’ by Victoria Police. Data shows that LGBTIQA+ people report experiencing high levels of verbal and physical abuse, harassment and sexual assault. This violence can be experienced from strangers, or in the context of family violence or intimate partner violence (1).
LGBTIQA+ communities can experience distinct forms of violence, such as identity-based abuse. This can include threatening to ‘out’ someone to their community, pressure to conform with rigid gender stereotypes, denying gender affirming care, or social isolation due to their sexuality or gender (2).
Primary prevention of gendered violence
Primary prevention focuses on stopping family, sexual and all forms of gendered violence before it starts by targeting the deep underlying social drivers and conditions that allow it to occur in the first place.
Change the Story is Australia’s national framework to prevent violence against women and their children that identifies the key gendered drivers of men’s violence against women as:
- Condoning of violence against women
- Men’s control of decision-making and limits to women’s independence
- Rigid gender roles and stereotyped constructions of masculinity and femininity
- Male peer relations that emphasise aggression and disrespect towards women.
Effective, upstream prevention initiatives can, over time, reduce perpetration of family violence and gendered violence (3). These drivers must be considered alongside unique drivers of violence when working with different communities.
Drivers of violence against LGBTIQA+ communities
LGBTIQA+ communities are impacted by many of the same gendered drivers of violence as cisgender heterosexual women, such as rigid gender roles and stereotyped constructions of masculinity and femininity (4). Hate crimes against LGBTIQA+ communities and people within communities (most commonly perpetrated by cis men) (2) operate as a means of policing gender roles and punishing those who step outside binary, rigid and reductive stereotypes of what a man or a woman should be. In addition, cisnormativity, heteronormativity and rigid gender binaries are core drivers of inequality, discrimination and violence against LGBTIQA+ communities (5).
Different LGBTIQA+ communities will be impacted by these drivers in varied ways, depending on their identification and expression of gender and sexuality. Trans and gender diverse people consistently experience disproportionate levels of gendered violence and discrimination, in comparison to cisgender members of the LGBTIQA+ community (1).
A 2023 national study by the Trans Justice Project and Victorian Pride Lobby, highlights that anti-trans hate is intensifying, with 85% of participants reporting an increase in online anti-trans hate, and 39% reporting an increase in in-person abuse, harassment and vilification over the same period.
Trans women and trans feminine people are frequently targeted due to transphobic and misogynistic attitudes that perpetuate discrimination and normalise violence. Outlined in Zoe Belle Gender Collective’s, Allyship in Action: Framework for Trans and Gender Diverse Inclusion in Prevention of Gender-based Violence Initiatives, transmisogyny is an additional driver of violence experienced by trans women and trans feminine people.
Additionally, overlapping and intersecting forms of inequality and discrimination (for example racism, classism, ableism, ageism) can intersect to influence people’s experiences and further drive experiences of violence. Intersectionality encourages us to consider all forms of oppression in our work simultaneously, rather than a siloed approach which sees each form of discrimination as one unto themselves (6).