Persons from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex (LGBTQI) community can be arbitrarily arrested, detained and subject to systematic ill-treatment and torture and fellow inmates may be incited to abuse them and even gang rapes. They can be forced to perform sexual acts with other inmates.
They can be vulnerable to severe and repeated beating and sexual violence under the guise of forced anal examinations or virginity tests. They can also face verbal abuse, forced confession and denial of access to legal or medical care. This can be considerably worse where the community do not have legal rights. So even their existence can be treated as a crime and they can fall out of the social safety nets. Placing LGBTQI community in prisons of the gender not of the choice can be distressing. Sometimes in the absence of alternatives they can be placed in solitary confinement which can itself amount to torture.
. “Virginity” tests and anal tests constitute cruel, degrading, and inhuman treatment that can rise to the level of torture and sexual assault under international human rights law. They violate medical ethics, are internationally discredited, and lack scientific validity to “prove” same-sex conduct or “virginity.” Some of the victims maybe denied access to hormonal treatment or completion of gender affirming surgeries.
Post surgical care may also be denied. The torture can be aggravated depending on a person’s class, caste or religion.
Weekend arrests of LGBT persons for the sole purpose of extortion is common. This is also higher in countries were sex work or begging is considered illegal and social stigma and discrimination is a barrier to persons taking up other jobs.
When legislation criminalises same sex intimacy, LGBT people are threatened with criminal prosecution, even without real proof, and their sexuality or identity can be exposed to their community and family.Further, lesbian and gender non-conforming women have been subjected to “corrective” rape which has been described as a “hate crime in which an individual is raped because of their perceived sexual or gender orientation, with the intended consequence of the rape being to ‘correct’ the individual’s orientation or make them ‘act’ more like their gender.”
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