Our Identities under Arrest report
Arrests and prosecutions for consensual same-sex sexual acts, or for diverse genderrefers to a social construct which places cultural and social expectations on individuals based on their assigned sex. More expressions, continue unabated across the world. And yet, they are considerably under-reported.
Our Identities Under Arrest is a brand-new publication by ILGA World offering a global overview of the enforcement of laws criminalising consensual same-sex sexual acts between adults and diverse gender expressions.
The report reviews over a thousand cases in which law enforcements subjected LGBT and gender-diverse persons to fines, arbitrary arrests, prosecutions, corporal punishments, imprisonments and more – up to (possibly) the death penalty.
Governments often argue that criminalising laws are ‘dormant’, but this report offers evidence that such claims are largely inaccurate. How – and how often – they are enforced can vary abruptly and in unpredictable ways, making both our communities on the ground and asylum seekers who managed to flee live perpetually under threat.
The report will be of great value to the advocacy work of human rights defenders. It will assist asylum seekers and the legal experts working on their cases. And it will provide researchers, media outlets, governmental and global agencies with the necessary information to build a holistic picture of how the criminalisation on the grounds of sexual orientationrefers to a person’s capacity for profound emotional, affectional and sexual attraction to - and intimate and sexual relations with - individuals of a different gender or the same gender or more than one gender. More, gender identityrefers to a person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth. More, and gender expressionrefers to how a person presents their gender through physical appearance – including dress, hairstyles, accessories, cosmetics – and mannerisms, speech, behavioural patterns, names and personal references. More really looks like.