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Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old transgender woman, was brutally beaten to death in Newark, Calif., in 2002. Four acquaintances of Araujo began attacking her at a party after discovering that she was biologically male. After killing Araujo, the men buried her in a shallow grave in the Sierra foothills (Kelly St. John, "Chilling timeline of a killing; Death of a transgender teen described in grisly detail," The San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 26, 2003).
Clint Scott Risetter, a 37-year-old gay man, was killed after an alleged arsonist poured gasoline over him while he slept and set him on fire on February 24, 2002 in Santa Barbara, Calif. Martin Thomas Hartman, who, according to police, was a mentally troubled 38-year-old suspect in a number of arson fires in the city, said he killed Risetter "because he was gay, and he has a lot of hatred towards gay people." Hartman told police that he met Risetter about six months ago and learned recently that Risetter was gay. Hartman has been charged with murder, arson and a hate crime in connection with Risetter's death (Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2002).
On September 22, 2000, Ronald Gay walked into a gay bar in Roanoke, Va., and opened fire on its patrons. His rampage, in which one person was killed and six others wounded, was claimed to be the result of longstanding anger at the jokes people made about his last name. Gay told investigators that he resented the comments people made about his name and went into the bar to get rid of "faggots" (“'Gay' Name Long Irked Man Held in Bar Slaying,” The Washington Post, September 25, 2000).
In a graphic example of anti-transgender bias in the nation's capital, in 1995, transgender woman Tyra Hunter was denied life-saving medical care when rescuers discovered she had male genitalia. Hunter was severely injured in a hit-and-run accident placing her in imminent danger of dying when the paramedics arrived on the scene of the accident. When in the course of administering first aid the paramedics discovered Hunter's male genitalia, they ceased assisting her and began joking and making derogatory remarks about the dying Hunter. Hunter lay untouched for three to five minutes, when a supervisor finally re-commenced aid. She died at a local hospital. The victim's mother was awarded $2.9 million in a wrongful death suit against the District of Columbia for the city's failure to provide life-saving care, yet on December 19, 1999, Fire Chief Thomas Tippett promoted the firefighter found at fault in Tyra's death (Washington Blade, December 10, 1999).
Attacks upon Individuals with Disabilities
The social history of the lives of people with disabilities in the United States is largely a story of lives lived on the margins — of school, the workplace, the community, and society in general. People with disabilities are mostly marginalized, even by those who are themselves outsiders, and with this comes isolation, and frequently, fear and/or hatred. People with disabilities may look "different," may respond "differently," may just seem "off" to the general public, and for whatever reason, this sometimes inspires hatred.
In 1994, due to the growing prevalence of studies and massive anecdotal instances of hate crimes against people with disabilities, the category of "disability" was added to the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, and in 1997, the FBI began to collect data on these crimes under its Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Preliminary reporting to the FBI is quite low.
However, numerous disability and criminology studies, over many years, indicate both a very high crime rate against people with disabilities, as well as a very high level of disability discrimination. The U.S. Office on Crime Statistics reported in 2002 that in many cases, crime victims with disabilities have never participated in the criminal justice process, "even if they have been repeatedly and brutally victimized."
There are a number of challenges for disability-based hate crime reporting. For instance, hate crimes against people with disabilities are often never reported to law enforcement agencies. The victim may be ashamed, afraid of retaliation, or afraid of not being believed. The victim may be reliant on a caregiver or other third party to report the crime, who in fact never does so. Or, the crime may be reported, but there may be no reporting of the victim's disability, especially in cases where the victim has an invisible disability that they themselves do not divulge.
Perhaps the biggest reason for underreporting of disability-based hate crimes is that disability-based bias crimes are all too frequently mislabeled as "abuse" and never directed from the social service or education systems to the criminal justice system. Even very serious crimes — including rape, assault, and vandalism — are too-frequently labeled "abuse."
In one of the few cases successfully prosecuted, in 1999, Eric Krochmaluk, a man with cognitive disabilities from Middletown, N.J., was kidnapped, choked, beaten, burned with cigarettes, taped to a chair, his eyebrows shaved, and ultimately abandoned in a forest. Eight people were subsequently indicted for this hate crime — making this one of the first prosecutions of a disability-based hate crime in America.
In 2002, Nicolas Steenhout, who is now executive director of the LIFE Center for Independent Living in Savannah, Ga., was verbally assaulted while walking his dog. Steenhout, who uses a wheelchair and has a service dog, was on his way from work to his nearby apartment when a woman from a neighboring apartment building told him to "get his F*cking dog off her property," called him a "F*cking cripple!" and stated, "God punished you, and I hope he punishes you some more. People like you should be in nursing homes." When Steenhout went to the police to report the incident, the officer he spoke with told him not to let his dog go on that piece of property, and that if he let it happen again, he would bring Steenhout into the station in handcuffs (Nicolas Steenhout, "A Confrontation," Ragged Edge Magazine, May 6, 2002, http: //www.ragged-edge-mag.com/extra/steenhout050602.html).
Attacks upon Women
In recent years, many women's advocates have spoken out about the alarming rate of violent physical and sexual assaults against women. Although the most common forms of violence against women have traditionally been viewed as "personal attacks," or even the victim's "own fault," there is growing recognition that, as one woman's advocate testified before Congress "women and girls.... are exposed to terror, brutality, serious injury, and even death because of their sex."
Society is beginning to realize that many assaults against women are not "random" acts of violence but are actually bias-related crimes. However, the Hate Crime Statistics Act was passed, signed into law, and reauthorized without including hate crimes against women as a class. Other federal laws and many state hate crime statutes also exclude bias crimes targeting women.
This is wrong — and should be corrected. The Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act now pending before Congress would expand the HCSA data collection mandate to include gender-based hate crimes. As with hate crimes against racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, hate crimes against women are a form of discrimination. Gender-motivated violence reflects the efforts of some men to dominate and control women. These crimes are encouraged by stereotypes of what women are and how women should act. These crimes are often accompanied by hateful epithets against women as a group of people.
To be sure, not every violent assault against a woman is a hate crime — just as not every crime against an African American is based on bigotry. However, crimes that present evidence of bias against women should be considered hate crimes. And with these crimes, society should look for identifying factors similar to those present in other hate crimes.
These factors may include evidence of sexual assault, and the extreme brutality and cruelty that often characterize bias-related crimes. Many crimes against women reflect a resistance to their efforts to achieve equality. These crimes are often intended to intimidate women into staying in — or returning to — their "place" of subservience to men at home, in the workplace, and throughout society.
Women of color experience discrimination based on gender as well as race, national origin, religion, language, and sexual orientation. These forms of discrimination are not always separable. And without protections against gender-based attacks, such women's unique experiences of intersecting forms of prejudice cannot be fully recognized — or remedied.
Because women as a class are not covered by the Hate Crime Statistics Act, the FBI keeps no records of gender-based hate crimes. Thus, there are no federal government surveys of hate crimes against women. However, statistics gathered on rapes and domestic assaults demonstrate the pervasiveness of violence against women.
Examples of crimes that are committed against women because they are women include:
In a case of domestic violence, the court found that there was sufficient evidence of gender-motivation to support a Violence Against Women Act civil rights claim. That evidence included "gender-specific epithets and acts that perpetuated stereotypes of women's submissive roles, such as defendant's controlling all of the family's financial information and documents, holding all of plaintiff's personal documents such as her passport, not placing her name on title documents, not disclosing insurance information to her, and becoming angry if she questioned him about the family affairs." The fact that the defendant attacked the plaintiff during her pregnancy and at times when she attempted to assert her independence provided additional evidence that the violence was gender-motivated (Ziegler v. Ziegler, 1998 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 18180 (E.D. Wash. 1998), cited in Julie Goldscheid & Risa E. Kaufman, Seeking Redress for Gender-based Bias Crimes-Charting New Ground in Familiar Legal Territory, 6 Mich. J. Race & L. 265, 273-74 (2001).
A serial batterer was found to have violated that state's civil bias law for his crimes against women. Two former girlfriends and his ex-wife recounted his abuse, including severe physical battering, death threats, assault on his wife while she was pregnant, constant slurs and profanities, calling the women 'sluts,' 'bitches,' and 'whores,' and telling them that they made him sick (Maine v. Cabana, No. CV-98-034 (Maine Sup. Ct. Feb. 1998)).
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