Trans Siempre Amigas (TRANSSA)’s in-house human rights observatory has been documenting hate crimes against transgender women since 2006. It has become clear to King and his colleagues that the burden of documentation and seeking redress falls squarely and exclusively on their shoulders. Police and federal authorities rarely take violations against LGBT people seriously, allowing attackers to act with impunity. “When the police abuse trans women, the women are afraid of reporting, because often when you go to the police, the person you’re accusing is one of their colleagues,” King says. The media often won’t report hate crimes or will euphemize the violation by calling it a crime of passion or a domestic dispute between “two gays.”
This pattern repeats itself across the Caribbean. Much of the region still has laws against buggery and gross indecency that prohibit same-sex conduct. Lethal hate crimes against transgender people are just the more extreme end of stigma and discrimination that permeate police stations, hospitals, schools, and people’s homes.
But if Caribbean states refuse to protect the rights of their most vulnerable citizens, human rights defenders are compelled to take matters into their own hands. Out of a number of grassroots documentation efforts in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, the region’s first human rights monitoring platform was born. Launched by Caribbean Vulnerable Communities (CVC), a coalition of civil society organizations in 2016, the Caribbean Civil Society Shared Incident Database (SID) is a coordinated, standardized online reporting tool for community organizations across the region.
The project supports victims of attacks through access to paralegals, but it’s also building a solid record of violations from country to country and providing evidence for advocates. Carolyn Gomes, MD, the former executive director of CVC who spearheaded the development of the database, says the idea came out her first year working with the organization. “People were coming to me and telling me that all these abuses were happening,” she says. “But without any documentation to back up interventions, it became that much easier for authorities to say to people, ‘Oh, no, that’s just one person,’ or ‘This doesn’t really happen as a pattern.’ So documentation became critical.”