Examples abound of government-supported homophobia in the Caribbean. In a recent UN resolution to condemn arbitrary killings based on various identity features, nearly all Commonwealth Caribbean states voted to remove “sexual orientation” as a category. With the exception of the Bahamas, former British colonies of the region all retain laws criminalising male homosexuality. These laws either date back to, or are a literal transplantation of the Victorian 1861 Offences against the Person Act. Offences of “buggery” or anal sex and “gross indecency” meaning any sexual intimacy between men, remain on the books.<\/p>\n
A judge once said that the risk of prosecution in places where sodomy laws exist makes gay men into “unapprehended criminals”. In HIV prevention and care, the anti-homosexuality proscriptions are obstacles that reinforce societal stigma and discrimination.<\/p>\n
Ian McKnight, executive director of Caribbean Vulnerable Communities (CVC) \u2013 a coalition of interests representing high-risk groups in the fight against HIV and Aids in the Caribbean, says the law makes reaching out to men who have sex with men (MSM) a high-wire operation: “Outreach workers face harassment for distributing condoms. The police aren’t afraid to throw the book at anyone.”<\/p>\n
In 1967 consensual homosexual acts were decriminalised in England and Wales. In the case of Dudgeon v UK in 1981, the European court of human rights agreed with a gay man from Northern Ireland that though he had not been prosecuted under the provisions of the 1861 Act, the “maintenance in force of the impugned legislation constitutes a continuing interference with the applicant’s right to respect for his private life”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Examples abound of government-supported homophobia in the Caribbean. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[100,49],"class_list":["post-4772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-caribbean-2","tag-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}