Extreme Violence and the Invisibility of Women Who Murder: The Intersectionality of Gender,Race,Ethnicity,Sexual Orientation,and Gender Identity Equals Silence

Jayla ^* used two kitchen knives to stab Alexis more than 100 times across her entire body, from her right cheek to her left calf. Jayla, in her early-30's, and Alexis, in her mid-20's were two black lesbians in a same-sex relationship. Alexis eventually bled to death in the home they shared. Despite the brutality of the violence, cases of same sex violent deaths among racial/ethnic minorities, such as Alexis' murder, rarely make the local evening news or merit even a small blurb in the media.

This underscores the contradiction that while many in America come together to protest police shootings of African American men, chants of “Black Lives Matter” are rare when the brutal killings are of African American women (Crenshaw 2014), especially those who are sexual and/or gender minorities (SGM). Nearly half of all homicide victims in the United States are black. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, who collects statistics on extreme violence affecting LGBT populations in 12 states, reports that the majority of LGBT murder victims, particularly by shootings, are black transgender women. Many of these latter deaths go unnoticed.

While instances of extreme violence perpetrated by black transgender women occur infrequently and are generally within intimate relationships, those in which they are the victims more often occur outside the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). According to the National Violent Death Reporting System, most homicides, particularly with women victims, are preceded by arguments and interpersonal conflicts, including IPV (Lyons et al. 2016). This is not the typical pattern for black transgender women victims, as their societally unprivileged statuses attract violence not based on relationship issues, but rather social issues of racism, transphobia, cultural gender roles, and privilege of escaping consequences. Frankly, the brutal death of Alexis did not fuel outrage because Alexis, being black, female, and lesbian, was already marginalized and lost to societal concern.

This failure to value black women's lives is not unique to female SGMs. In 2016, Los Angeles County convicted serial killer Lonnie David Franklin Jr., the “Grim Sleeper,” of murdering 10 black women in a predominantly African American community of South Los Angeles (Gerber and Queally 2016). He was suspected in the deaths of at least 15 more. Franklin targeted his victims for more than 25 years before being arrested in 2010. Most of these women were low-income, black, drug-addicted, and sex workers. Despite pleas from their families to dedicate resources to investigate their disappearances, they were viewed instead as street women willingly taking risks with their lives for money or drugs. Activists and scholars have complained that the disappearances and deaths of these women simply did not receive the same law enforcement accountability and mainstream media attention as would occur if they were white. Indeed, the phrase, “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” has been used by social scientists to explain the media's general preoccupation with white female murder and kidnapping victims, and its blindness to black female victims (Liebler 2010).

In addition, research studies and violence prevention interventions predominantly focus on cisgender, heterosexual women, excluding concerns of SGM women. Even fewer of these studies employ an intersectional lens to recognize the multifaceted confluence of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation as unique risk factors for extreme violence. Crenshaw (2014), who coined the term intersectionality, explains that a focus on “fixing” black men and boys in race-focused initiatives often completely excludes black women, who face similar disparities in health, education, and income, and are often disproportionately affected by violence. She argues that as people's disadvantaged societal statuses multiply, so does their experience of societal discrimination and so, too, does their invisibility.

The concerns of highly intersectionalized individuals are not well matched to the needs of research studies that rely on detecting comparative differences between relatively large groups. Even more challenging is that, as SGM women's perpetrators are rarely pursued and prosecuted, we lack the opportunity to learn the ways in which the connection of societal racism, sexism, oppression, privilege, and domination play out in targeting these women in particular (Mays and Ghavami 2017). In 2016, 22 transgender women were killed, some by acquaintances, others by strangers, and some by partners. This is the largest number of transgender deaths recorded in recent years. However, just halfway through the year 2017, there are already 18 transgender women killed by homicide. The majority of these women were black or Latina (Dinno 2017) and, in instances in which the perpetrators are known, they did not have significant personal relationships with these women.

Our commentary here underscores the need to increase research, policy, and prevention interventions addressing extreme violence by and among SGM women, specifically among black women who live and socialize in situations where risk clusters with intersectional statuses (Mays et al. 2011).

Our ability to learn about extreme violence by and on SGM, particularly racial/ethnic minority women, is hampered to date by the small number of studies that have been conducted. One methodological barrier is that death and investigative records do not typically record SGM status. Indeed, just one study has investigated gender differences in intimate partner homicide (IPH) contextual factors between men and women in same-sex partnerships in the United States. The study (Mize and Shackelford 2008) found that about 2% of all IPHs involve same-sex partners, and many of these are among women. Mize and Shackelford (2008) investigated effects of gender and sexual orientation on level of brutality of IPH utilizing U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Supplementary Homicide Reports. Their results mirrored the extremely violent case of Alexis and Jayla: they found that the percentage of IPHs among same-sex couples coded as “Very Brutal” (i.e., beating or stabbing) was significantly higher among women relative to men, pointing to the possibility of gender-specific contextual factors in same-sex IPH. Furthermore, the type of homicide method used varied between lesbians and heterosexual women, with half of lesbians using “Very Brutal” means of homicide compared to just about one-third of heterosexual women.

Increasingly, IPV research has focused attention on physical abuse and violence among women in same-sex relationships (Duke and Davidson 2009; Messinger 2011). Among all women (same-sex and heterosexual partners), an estimated 22% experience at least one act of severe physical violence by an intimate partner during their lifetime (Breiding 2014). Reported lifetime prevalence of physical violence among women in same-sex partnerships varies across the few studies that have been conducted. For example, recent statistics from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that 43.8% of lesbians and 61.1% of bisexual women reported experiencing lifetime IPV (Walters et al. 2013). In contrast, a meta-analysis of 14 studies that focused on lesbian IPV estimated a mean prevalence of 18% for lifetime IPV (Badenes-Ribera et al. 2015).

Research on IPV and transgender women is almost nonexistent: one study investigating violence among transgender women with a history of sex work found that 45% of the physical violence was at the hands of a primary partner; however, the gender of partners was not recorded (Nemoto et al. 2011). While limited, the available data suggest that SGM women experience similar, or perhaps greater, rates of physical IPV compared to cisgender, heterosexual women. However, the contexts and timing of vulnerability, particularly for those outside of IPV, remain greatly understudied.

Adequate estimates of IPV and IPH among SGM women are also hindered by the lack of purposive collection of sexual orientation in clinical settings and/or in mortality records (Cahill and Makadon 2014). Furthermore, our ability to understand the context of IPV/IPH among racial/ethnic minority and SGM women is reduced by limited data collection (Mays and Ghavami 2017). A growing body of IPV literature highlights that IPV and IPH are more common in black communities (Hampton et al. 2003; Sokoloff and Dupont 2005), but this work is focused on the experiences of heterosexuals. The mechanisms used to explain the trends emphasize structural and cultural contextual factors, such as institutionalized racism, systematic unemployment among black men, and high levels of poverty faced by black communities in the United States. Indeed, after controlling for socioeconomic status (i.e., education and income), this work observes that IPV/IPH associations with race disappear, but unemployment emerges as the strongest demographic predictor of domestic violence and homicide (Hampton et al. 2003). It is a black woman's position within this system of economic oppression that determines her risk for extreme violence, with low-income, unemployed black women being at highest risk (West 2004). The impact of this experience, whether as a survivor or in death, is often worst for black and Latino women, and may be more so for those who are SGM. The ways in which biases operate, these women may not feel safe to utilize law enforcement resources or to access medical care for IPV-related problems (Sokoloff and Dupont 2005; Stockman et al. 2015).

Minority Stress Theory posits that people with minority sexual orientations experience chronic stress from enacted and anticipated discrimination and violence victimization, along with, for some, an internalized devaluing of their own sexual orientation (Meyer 1995). Understanding how socially marginalized identities, such as identifying as an SGM, increase risk of exposure to violence both from heterosexuals as well as from other SGM remains relatively underexplored, especially among women. In this regard, minority stress has been shown to predict both domestic violence victimization and perpetration among women in same-sex relationships (Balsam and Szymanski 2005). Furthermore, IPV can exacerbate minority stress, demonstrating the cyclical and syndemic nature of violence among multiply intersectionalized communities (Chen et al. 2013). Given the potential interactional effects of sexism, systemic racial oppression, and minority stress that black SGM women may face, it is imperative that their concerns both be clarified through research studies and targeted effectively in domestic violence prevention efforts. To that end, we make the following recommendations aimed at increasing research, policy, and prevention of extreme violence among SGM women:

(1) Sexual orientation and gender identity should be documented in death records for the decedent and the perpetrator across administrative records. This includes reports generated by coroners, funeral homes, medical examiners, and law enforcement. The information obtained could then be summarized within the National Violent Death Reporting System and State Public Health Departments, allowing public health researchers to identify targets of opportunity for interventions.

(2) Violence prevention programming must specifically identify and target the needs of racial/ethnic minority and sexual and gender minority women. This effort must be sensitive to the biases of researchers who may not be trained or experienced with SGM communities of color. Models that work for heterosexual, cisgender women have no assurance of working for SGM of color. Economic and social resources may be highly dissimilar, as well as family structures, persons to interview, and community norms surrounding violence and employment patterns.

This commentary highlights concerns that extreme violence perpetrated by racial/ethnic minority and SGM women is often rendered invisible to the field of public health, as is the victimization of these women. Brutal violence among black women in same-sex partnerships or among transgender women is generally overlooked in research, policy, and violence prevention programming, both because these populations are relatively small in number and those interested in their welfare are not often members of the research and intervention professional community. All of this reflects the pernicious effects of social marginalization.

The solution we are proposing is to bring these women to the foreground of our thinking, to modify our approaches for research, policy development, and intervention by greater inclusiveness to reduce their risk specifically. This may call for reliance on qualitative methods, novel quantitative methods, and development of new adaptive sampling approaches that can characterize their needs. It also calls for routine data collection of sexual orientation and transgender status across the public health infrastructure, including mortality reports, and ensuring that race/ethnicity is verified. And finally, we need to find ways to create innovative interventions for isolated populations. In recent years, telemedicine approaches have been created and widely implemented to improve the health of rural Americans with limited access to psychiatric services. These techniques may hold promise for highly intersectional populations such as black SGM women who may have more in common with others at great geographic distance than those who live nearby. We owe it to Alexis, and Jayla, to find a way to make their lives matter.