Wonderful. Thanks, Kate. It is great to be here. It is a tremendous honor to actually be on this panel with some folks that I know, and some new people, but I feel like I am going to learn a tremendous amount from being here, and so thanks, everyone, for joining us for this conversation as well.
When I first heard about this paper a few months ago, I was like, “Oh, my goodness.” As Kate said, my worlds all came crashing together. My past work at the Holocaust Museum, where we were very engaged in trying to pull together serious assessments of risk factors and how we can prevent genocide and mass atrocities from happening in the future, and then my work now at the Human Rights Campaign, where I really focus on ways to support LGBTQ advocates around the world who are, as we know, facing an extraordinary range of violence and discrimination in their everyday lives.
How do you bring these things together? In some ways, this book is a fabulous attempt to do so, and it is a tremendous starting point. For those of you who may be new to either of those fields, I need to say this is an incredibly exciting venture, and I commend Kate and her colleagues for coming up with it, realizing it, getting it into this book, and then offering it out into the world as an opening gambit in what will presumably be a much longer conversation. I also happen to know that in the room with us, we have an expert on this topic. I am a little intimidated! Lisa Davis is here with us, and Lisa really knows so much about this field. I hope that she and all of you will join in the conversation as well.
While plenty has been written about LGBTQ people and other vulnerable and marginalized communities who are frequently targeted for who they are or more likely to be disproportionately affected by conflict in humanitarian crises than others, this is the first time that we are actually trying to put a name on it to identify the things that make it different for LGBTQ people in crisis situations or conflict or humanitarian collapses than other people, and to try to assess why this is happening and to see what we can do to prevent these kinds of abuses in the future. A couple of things that really stand out to me, some of which are very well drawn out in this book and some of which I think could be lifted up more consciously, is not only are LGBTQ people likely to be targeted because of who they are, what we call “identity-based violence,” but they also are more likely to be disproportionately affected when things go wrong in the world around them. That is why we need this analysis so that we can understand more of the particularities of how these kinds of crises affect LGBTQ people and why we need to be thinking about the particular forms of violence that they suffer in these environments and what particular forms of protection might be needed for this community.
This is not to suggest any special treatment or anything more than anyone else. It is just to say that LGBTQ people, because of the nature of all of the things that Detmer has referred to already, the reasons why LGBTQ people are likely to be victimized, these will also all result in the need for particular responses to that victimization. This gives us an opportunity to really start laying out what some of those are and to identify them, and then adding that analysis into already-existing crisis prevention or atrocity prevention models, which has not been done until now. While various early-warning tools and various analyses might have constructed fairly robust risk models, none of them include specific risks to LGBTQ people and how that would play out. That is one point.
I could go at some length, and maybe we will get to this, and others on this panel I am sure are also experts on what happens in refugee settings and situations where there is a whole range of ways in which LGBTQ people are likely to be affected badly. I will not go into them now, but this is becoming clear to us in Afghanistan and now a little bit less so in Ukraine, but we could even talk about why that is the case.
Another point I want to make is that a lot of the risk assessments for mass atrocities and the conversation about abuses that LGBTQ people face are done at the national level, what kind of protections do they have in law, country by country, and so on. But, obviously, what we are looking at now and what this book does really quite well is talk about while those are important and will help us understand certain parts of the experience of LGBTQ people in crisis settings, obviously no national analysis could have prepared us for Ukraine or even Afghanistan—with engagement of, first, Russia, then the United States, all of this added onto local norms, standards, attitudes, and so on. We really need to broaden our lens and create an analysis that not only takes into account domestic considerations but looks at what is happening around us.
The third point has been really drawn out by Ukraine. Even though Ukraine is obviously about Putin coming in because he sees Ukraine as part of Russia, and that it is his God-given mission to bring Ukraine back under the Russian, he is also using this “Gayropa” idea, which is that as Ukraine has over the past few years looked to become much more part of Europe, others have used homophobia, transphobia, and so on to say, “Oh, no, this is just all about the gay idea and part of the morally bankrupt West, and it's our duty to go and get them back and save them from this moral decline.” There is this very complex way in which—sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken—anti-LGBTQ attitudes really are drivers in so many things that we see playing out.
Finally, briefly, what this book points out to me is the need to expand and make more inclusive the existing instruments that we have. At the Holocaust Museum, there is a very well-developed understanding and analysis of the roots of anti-Semitism, why it plays out the way it does, how it was a contributing factor, though obviously not the only one, to the Holocaust. But there is less of a conversation about why the other victim groups were also targeted by the Nazis, other than playing into the Nazi-Aryan supremacy view of the world. Obviously, it is much more complex than that. There are many different studies now of genocide, mass atrocities, and why they happen, but none of them includes a serious analysis of why LGBTQ people, as marginalized and vulnerable groups, are more likely to be victims and or more likely to be disproportionately affected.
This book offers us some initial ideas, and I think it is a fabulous starting point for a conversation about places where we can take this conversation and where we can really start challenging all the ideas of the risk factors as they stand and adding to them and building on them so that we develop an extraordinarily robust set of approaches regarding how we can both prevent mass atrocities happening and also protect folks who are the victims of them.
I will stop there and pass the baton. Thank you.
