In 2013 the State Duma (Parliament) of Russia passed a law against “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations”, which includes a ban on distributing of information about homosexuality, bisexuality and transgender issues. In clarifying the subject regulated by this law, some Russian politicians claimed that nobody oppresses or discriminates against LGBT people; the law “just” limits the distribution of information about LGBT among minors. However, according to various media sources, we can observe systematic hate crimes against LGBT, while the law against “propaganda” legitimized these crimes and provoked their growth. In this light, statements of the politicians seem groundless and unreasonable.
Nevertheless, there is no verified statistical information of the approximate scale of hate crimes. In other words, there is no accurate data that could be used as an argumentative base by progressive politicians and activists to oppose discriminative legislature. Our project aims to collect and summarize this kind of data. In the Russian legal system, hate crimes based on sexuality are not registered by law enforcement. The absence of verified statistical data does not allow us to picture the scale of hate crimes against LGBT people in Russia. Sexuality Lab is working on two projects: one of them is dedicated to the examination of court decisions on this type of hate crimes; another project aims to research the archives of federal and regional mass media to acquire information about these crimes.
To obtain the necessary information, we go through all articles published in Russian media sources since 2011, which allows us to see if “the law against propaganda” influenced the growth of these crimes or drew more media attention to such incidents. We are aware of the fact that this method allows us to identify only those incidents of hate crimes against LGBT that were published in media sources. At the same time, this method gives us an opportunity to obtain regional statistics on the frequency of publications, identify tendencies, find out which media sources pay more attention to this problem, and how they deliver the information. As a result, we will get a database of media publications which can be processed both by methods of simple content-analysis, and by statistical methods. It will help visualize various strata of problems related to the discriminated LGBT group: from the facts of actual hate crimes to the usage of hate speech by journalists.
The main problem facing the LGBT community today is not solely the problem of discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity. LGBT are not recognized as a social group, which has its consequences on official statistics. In Russia, social groups are legally defined as formed by specific attributes or characteristics: sex, nationality, language, origin, or religion. Yet, the list is open for courts to form social groups on other attributes or characteristics that are not stated in the text of law. Research shows that LGBT is a conventionally understood as a social group (at least for legal matters). However, the results of such studies are left without attention from the law enforcement. Creating a database of media publications and court decisions on hate crimes will provide the most complete statistics on crimes against LGBT. For activists and human rights defenders, it will serve as another quantitative argument in courts of all levels; it will also be useful to researchers and journalists. We hope that it will draw more attention to violence towards LGBT on legislative level.
Long-term goals:
- Development of an open database of media publications about hate crimes against LGBT, which can be complemented with new cases and used as a tool by human rights activists, journalists, researchers, etc.
- Regular monitoring and expansion of the database with new cases of hate crimes against LGBT group.
- Encouraging new research based on this data, including Bachelor, Master and PhD theses.
This database, created by Sexuality Lab, can be expanded and can grow through the addition of cases for previous years or new cases after the publication date. Moreover, our data on hate crimes is visualized on The Map of Violence. This map can be integrated into websites of concerned organizations, human-rights groups and media sources. In the future this map will be complemented by data from other sources: court statistics on the one hand, and personal stories of the victims of violence on the other hand. Taking into account the absence of official statistics on hate crimes against LGBT, we believe that the development of a structured database will significantly strengthen human rights activists’ arguments in courts, will make their positions more reasonable, justified, and based on real numbers, which in turn will save the lives of people.
Sexuality Lab. 