How often do you worry about your walk home?
Do you ever have to consider how loud you talk in public, what route you take or if it’s safe to hold your partners hand?
Before anyone is violent or abusive, it’s the anxiety that follows you around, telling you to be careful where you go, what you do and hide who you are for your own safety.
In just the past 12 months, there were over 200 hate crimes targeting people based on their sexual orientation reported to the PSNI. This equates to 1 almost every 2 days. There were a further 359 hate incidents against people for their sexuality and 57 against transgender people recorded in the same time frame.
Beyond being a direct victim of a crime, the threat of abuse or violence continues to hold a tight grip over people’s lives. 43% of respondents in our last State Of The Community survey told s that they were worried about being the victim of a hate crime, and 60% avoided certain areas to protect themselves.
This is the broader effect of hate crime, one which isn’t on official statistics. The fear, the altered behaviour, the choosing a different route home, or avoiding certain areas when renting or buying a house. Every one of those crimes and incidents has a massive impact on the individual victim, yes, but also sends a signal to the wider community that they are not safe.
While hate crime is very clearly an issue for our community, many simply don’t report it, brush it under the carpet, or may not even trust the process behind reporting. 51% of respondents who had experienced a hate crime said they did not report to the PSNI because they were afraid they wouldn’t be taken seriously or felt there was nothing the police could do about it. Some of that may be due to a lack of faith in police, often informed by historic or contemporary experiences, but a big part is the knowledge that the laws we have around hate crime simply aren’t sufficient to support victims.
For more than three decades, we at the Rainbow Project have worked to make Northern Ireland a better place for LGBTQIA+ people and their families. Among our work is the Hate Crime Advocacy Service, managed by Victim Support NI and delivered through ourselves and other partner organisations, which helps to provide outreach to those who have been the victim of a hate crime, whether they have reported it to the PSNI or not. This year, we’re focusing our pride presence across the country on hate crime and on improving the legislation through our ‘No Place for Hate’ campaign.
As part of this campaign, we’re collecting signed postcards at every pride around the country, which we will send to MLAs, asking them to help tackle homophobic and transphobic hate crime in Northern Ireland.
We also held a panel discussion with a number of extraordinary organisations, were we discussed hate crime legislation, community responses and how we can work together to tackle rising hate in Northern Ireland.
To many, going through the police and courts may seem like a last resort, or more bother than it’s worth. So often what we see is that the “Hate” element of a crime, the homophobia or transphobia, is lost in the judicial system, and isn’t adequately taken into account in sentencing.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Currently, the Sentencing Bill is making its way through the Assembly. This Bill, which marks the first change in hate crime legislation in decades, has the possibility of massively improving the ability of the justice system to address hate crime, and the experiences of victims who do decide to report.
This Sentencing Bill would change the model for addressing hate crimes to an ‘Aggravated Offences’ model. This means that the hate motivation for a crime would no longer be a designation that is tacked on after guilt has been proved, but something that will be considered throughout the entirety of the process. This would assist in making it easier to prosecute hate crimes, and also help probation officers ensure those convicted of hate crimes undergo training on the biases and prejudice that motivated the hate crime, which will assist with rehabilitation. The Rainbow Project has lobbied for a change in legislation and, while we don’t feel it goes far enough. We welcome that work is being done to improve the system for victims of hate crime.
A key flaw with the legislation is that it still, despite the clear evidence, does not include hate crimes based on ‘transgender identity’ and variations in sex characteristics (intersex) within the protected characteristics covered in this Bill. While transgender identity was originally included in the draft legislation by the Justice Minister, it was removed due to disagreements within the executive.
Over the past 8 years, the department of Justice has repeatedly acknowledged the importance of including transgender identity in new hate crime legislation including in its response to the independent review of the legislation (the Marrinan Review) and the PSNIs collecting of data on transphobic hate crimes and incidents over the past 15 years, demonstrating a clear need for reform. The exclusion of transphobic hate crime from this bill is not only disappointing but entirely unfounded, unsupported by evidence, and indicative of a broader politicisation of and hostility towards this community.
All of this is coming in the context of rising hostility towards transgender people, with UK media publishing an average of 9 articles a day on transgender people – most being negative in nature – and politicians and public figures in the UK using their platforms to spread mis- and dis-information about transgender people, identities, and lives.
We’re also call for the inclusion of hostility related to variations in sex characteristic and hostility related to gender expression to be included to protect intersex individuals and drag artists with diverse gender expressions. This is especially vital given the recent widespread harassment and assaults against drag artists. Having clear data and avenues for prosecution would improve community confidence in policing, reporting and prosecution.
While this bill is a significant opportunity that could possibly deliver real change for our communities, improving protections and restoring some faith in the process, we know that it’s not enough. We know that the root causes of hate, the spread of misinformation and hatred about LGBTQIA+ people, the ignorance that exists in some corners of our society, won’t be fixed by a simple change in the law. We need a whole society approach to addressing hate, prejudice and discrimination, not just against LGBTQIA+ people but against all marginalised communities, as has been laid bare so clearly by the racist violence which we have seen across Northern Ireland in recent weeks.
That’s why it’s so important that everyone, whether you’re LGBTQIA+ or not, uses every opportunity you can to challenge that prejudice, to give positive visibility and representation to our community, to provide hope for the young people out there who are yet to come out. While the hate we see in our society and around the world has huge impact on those who experience it, so too does love, solidarity, support. And we know there is so much more of that than hate.
Only by coming together acknowledging and accepting difference, and committing to building a better future for all communities, can we make Northern Ireland No Place for Hate.
If you or someone you know is affected by the information in this article, or wishes to report a hate crime or incident and access support, you can contact The Rainbow Project via phone, email or through our website at www.rainbow-project.org/contact-us
Photos from our ‘NO PLACE FOR HATE’ event. Held at The Mac on the 21st of July 2026