LGBTQ gangsters victims of the system, says lobbyist

Equality for All Foundation Jamaica has blamed Jamaica’s social and justice systems for distressed members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community falling prey to gangs in recent years.

LGBTQ+ people have often been kicked out of their homes because of their sexual orientation and live in storm drains and gullies in the Corporate Area and are referred to as ‘gully queens’. The police have cited some of them as the purveyors of both petty and hard crime.

Over time, such as in 2012, several cross-dressers have been cited as suspects in an illegal lottery scam and taken into custody.

Interim executive director of Equality for All Foundation, Glenroy Murray, said that many LGBTQ+ persons are at risk because of homelessness and a lack of intervention from the State.

“We don’t have a national homelessness policy in Jamaica, for example. We don’t have shelters that are operating fully across all parishes.

“There are many drop-in centres now, and they’re more, and we’ve seen an increase in investment, but that kind of social-service investment is not where it needs to be, and that was extremely exposed in the middle of COVID, and I think that’s also a part of the conversation,” Murray said.

Emphasising that accused persons from the LGBTQ+ community were no different from other Jamaicans alleged perpetrators of crimes, he advocated that more investment be pumped into support systems for the vulnerable to make lawlessness less attractive.

Murray argues that the Government has not done enough to intervene meaningfully in the lives of the incarcerated.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of National Security, Courtney Williams, said Jamaica’s recent rate of recidivism – the inclination of convicts to reoffend – averages approximately 40 per cent. The island’s Vision 2030 target is to reduce recidivism to 10 per cent.

“When we talk about criminality within the LGBT community, I don’t think it should be divorced from criminality in Jamaica in general, so, in other words, if someone commits a crime, you respond to criminality. However, a big part or a big challenge within the criminal justice system is its rehabilitative element is oftentimes lacking,” he said.

Murray believes that Equality for All Foundation Jamaica has a role to play in the rehabilitation of LGBTQ+ persons who have run afoul of the law, but the State, he said, bore a greater responsibility.

“As an advocacy organisation, our mantra is that our role is not to do the work of the Government. It’s to support the Government to be able to interface with the community in a way to do their jobs adequately because the truth is, when you look at the State and the ability of the State and the resources of the State, they’re backed by taxes, and that means they have a wider reach than we will ever have,” Murray stated.

He also said that Equality for All was willing to work with the police at various levels to be able to mainstream a certain type of approach to LGBTQ+ persons who are accused of crimes.

Murray cautioned that there was no automatic correlation between LGBTQ+ persons in gangs with mental illness, suggesting that vulnerability, in any form, was a condition that gangsters sought to exploit.

Those vulnerabilities may include social and economic factors.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com