LGBT Rights in Jamaica - Violence Against Homosexuals

Violence Against Homosexuals

According to Human Rights Watch, verbal and physical violence against homosexuals in Jamaica, ranging from beatings to murder, are widespread. For many, there is no sanctuary from such abuse. Men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women reported being driven from their homes and their towns by neighbors who threatened to kill them if they remained, forcing them to abandon their possessions and leaving many homeless. In addition, police actively support homophobic violence, fail to investigate complaints of abuse and arrest as well as detain men based on their alleged homosexual conduct. In one gay-hate murder several witnesses said that police participated in the abuse that ultimately led to his mob killing, first beating the man with batons and then urging others to beat him because he was homosexual.

"Gay men and lesbian women have been beaten, cut, burned, raped and shot on account of their sexuality. Action against Homophobia in Jamaica Amnesty gave an example of a recent incident reported in a newspaper, where a father encouraged a mob to beat up his son, whom he suspected was gay, while he looked on smiling. No charges were laid. While police do not compile statistics on attacks against homosexuals in Jamaica, The Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays report that they know of 30 gay men who have been murdered in Jamaica between 1997 and 2004.

The violence has prompted hundreds of LGBT Jamaicans to seek asylum in countries such as Great Britain, USA, and Canada. The European Parliament passed a resolution calling on Jamaica to repeal their sodomy laws and to actively combat homophobia. Human rights in the world and the EU's policy. "Paragraph 79 calls on the Government of Jamaica to take effective action to stop the extra-judicial killing of people by security forces; also calls on the Government of Jamaica to repeal sections 76, 77 and 79 of the Offences Against the Person Act, which criminalise sex between consenting adult men and are used as justification for unacceptable harassment."

In February 2007, three men were accosted by a large mob in a shopping area in Kingston and accused of being homosexual. Riot police were called, and they eventually carried the men to safety. There are allegations, however, that the men were also abused by the police. In January 2006, Nokia Cowan, a young Jamaican man, plunged to his death off a pier in Kingston after reportedly being chased through the streets by a mob yelling homophobic epithets. In April 2006, students at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies rioted as police attempted to protect a man who had been chased across the campus because another student had claimed the man had propositioned him in a bathroom. The mob demanded that the man be turned over to them. It only dispersed when riot police were called in and one officer fired a shot in the air. If the claim of a sexual advance is substantiated, the chased man could face charges.

The high incidence of violence in Jamaica presents a huge problem to securing better health outcomes. The World Health Organization (WHO) has labeled violence a public health priority because of the “serious immediate and future long-term implications for health and psychological and social development that violence represents for individuals, families, communities, and countries”. In their 2002 World Report on Violence and Health, the WHO discusses violence in an ecological model, occurring at the individual, relationship, community, and societal levels. This model is moving from a criminological approach to violence that only examines the individual level. It recognizes that individual acts of violence are part of a systematic culture. The nature of homophobic violence in Jamaica certainly fits into this model. Men do not commit violence due purely to personal malevolence, but are part of a larger social structure that does not view violence against homosexuals as wrong.

However, the influences on violence against homosexuals are not limited to the societal level. Global forces also have a tremendous impact on local violence. The high levels of violence in Jamaica can be understood in terms of globalisation. As Richard Falk wrote, “Democracy must be deepened at the level of the state and extended effectively to cover international institutions and transnational market forces.” In essence, he is arguing that a strong democratic government and provisions for human rights must be in place before economies participate in the global economy. The forces of globalisation have caused the Jamaican economy to develop in ways that they did not have the cultural or governmental mechanisms to support. Increasing wealth disparities caused by globalisation have created a climate ripe for social violence. The expansion international markets had a number of effects on Jamaica, the growth of an illegal drug trade chief among them. The inherent violence of the drug world can easily have made an impact on the average person’s likelihood to use violence against another. The restructuring of economy, even without such vast wealth disparities, can cause violence. As was noted in the WHO World Report on Violence and Health, “rapid social change in a country in response to strong global pressures can overwhelm existing social controls over behavior and create conditions for a higher level of violence.