Going Unreported

(From Transgender Europe's Trans Murder Monitoring Project)

I used this photo in my presentation in class. I however was unable to express the importance of the implications this information makes. Violence against transgender individuals in Jamaica is much higher than listed on this map. When they list the number of murders, the project states that these are only reported cases and "reports from local newspapers that have no web presence are missing". Murder and violence against transgender people, especially in countries like Jamaica, have very low rates of being reported. I noticed when I was looking for news sources, many of them headlines as, crossdresser murdered in Jamaica. In addition, as we read in the Jo Becker book, Campaigning for Justice, much of the violence against trans folks was done by police and if someone died it was not considered murder, it was cited as accidental. The incredibly low rate of reported crimes against transgender people is unacceptable. 

I have a friend whose is from Jamaica and he once told me, LGBT hate crimes and violence is just part of the culture. The Jo Becker book, also cited that Jamaica has a culture of violence. I thought of this when I was looking at the Trans Murder Monitoring Project and realized that we need to stop blaming culture. Uma Narayan discussed dowry murders in India, in her chapter Dislocating Cultures. She stated that we need to realized that dowry murders are a form of domestic violence, just as we have domestic violence here in the United States. However, domestic violence and murders by domestic violence are not are well documented. It is important to begin to bridge the gaps between narratives and realize that throughout the world we have common problems, like hate crimes and domestic violence, and we need to start looking at these problems as world wide and not just third world. 

As the map shows, there are a large about of murders against transgender people in the United States as well. In 2012-2013, there were 16 murders in the United States of trans folks. In 33 states in the United States, one can be fired for being transgender, or for being gender non-conforming. There is transgender discrimination all around the world, including in the United States. I focused on Jamaica in this post because it seems that there is a large problem with visibility around the violence, and a big problem with blaming culture. However, in Brazil we see that there are over 400 murders in 5 years. The problem is visible but people do not care. How can we get people to start realizing that this is a huge problem and something needs to change? We need to stop blaming culture, and the United States and the "West" need to stop pretending that they are so much further ahead, because in terms of trans rights the United States falls behind. 

Check out the Trans Murder Monitoring Project Website: http://www.transrespect-transphobia.org/en_US/tvt-project/tmm-results.htm

Sources mentioned in this article: 

Jo Becker, 2012. "Chapter 10: LGBTI Right in Jamaica and Nepal" in Campaigning for Justice: Human Rights Advocacy. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). 

Uma Narayan, "Cross Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings and "Death by Culture". in Dislocating Cultures.