The Unique Severity of Injury of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Victims of Bias Crime Violence

• In Event: Victimization Consequences Among Different Populations

Abstract

2021 was the deadliest year on record for the transgender and gender non-conforming community with 46 casualties across the country. This was aggregated by the fact that only 23 states have laws in place to protect people against hate crimes motivated by the victim’s gender identity. In this study we will attempt to fill the gap in existing literature on hate crimes by using qualitative interviewing to collect the narratives of transgender and gender non-conforming victims of hate crimes across the country. This study will also build on previous work which found that the questions of the NCVS fail to gather accurate data on the prevalence of bias crimes against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming community (Pezzella et. al., 2022). We will accomplish these goals by transforming questions from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) into open ended, narrative driven, interview questions which capture the unique severity of victimization of this vulnerable population. This data will then be operationalized and run through the MAXQDA program for qualitative analysis. We hypothesize our findings will support a policy review on decisions to exclude gender identity as a protected bias crime category in state hate crime legislation.

Authors

• Elias Taylor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

• Frank Pezzella, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY