Are LGB People More Likely to Be Victims of Crime?

The label “LGB”, for lesbian, gay and bisexual, covers two very different groups.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics published these rates, with standard errors, in a report by Truman and Morgan. The rates come from a survey that interviewed 223,079 people in 2020 alone. In a later analysis of 2017 to 2021, Truman and Morgan, writing with Coen, found lesbian, gay and bisexual people victimised at two to six times the straight rate.

In this survey bisexual people were about a third of all lesbian, gay and bisexual people. They were 0.7% of people aged 16 and over, against 1.4% who were lesbian or gay. Yet they were the victims in 61% of the violence against that whole population. They suffered 888,600 of that population’s 1,456,560 violent victimisations.

Lesbian and gay people sit at roughly twice the straight rate. Bisexual people sit at nearly seven times the straight rate. Lumping them together produces a number that describes neither.

Every rate here is a count of crimes or victims divided by a population, and the population is not one number.

The population depends on what the survey asked. The smallest figure comes from asking about identity, whether people think of themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual. A larger one comes from asking about behaviour, whether people have had sexual contact with someone of the same sex. Asking about attraction produces a larger figure still.

The gap between them is not small. The government’s family growth survey published all three for women aged 18 to 44 in its 2011 to 2013 round. Same people, three questions, nearly three times the answer.

By 2017 to 2019 the contact figure, for women aged 18 to 49, had reached 20.8%. In the 2015 to 2019 pool about 10% identified as lesbian or bisexual.

So a rate will be too low if it divides a count of people who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) by a population defined by attraction. Reverse the mix and it will be too high.

Violent crime also concentrates in the young. So an all-ages comparison of LGB and straight people sets a young population against an older one, and that alone inflates the raw gap.

For bisexual people the gap is inflated by age and is still real. The American crime survey publishes age-specific rates. Inside the 18 to 24 band, where the straight and bisexual rates are highest, bisexual respondents were at 198.7 per 1,000 against 32.8 for straight respondents. Six times, among people the same age.

For lesbian and gay people the same 18 to 24 band shows 41.0 against 32.8, a difference the survey does not find significant. The lesbian and gay rate peaks at ages 25 to 34, at 81.4 against 24.1 for straight people.

The gap is not confined to one kind of crime, which rules out some explanations.

Two of those figures are not statistically significant. They should not be quoted as though they were. The lesbian and gay rates for aggravated assault and for intimate partner violence are within the margin of error of the straight rate. And the lesbian and gay rate for rape or sexual assault passes only the looser of the survey’s two tests, at 90% confidence.

The stranger-violence row matters. If the gap appeared only in domestic violence you could explain it through relationship patterns. It does not. Bisexual people are attacked by strangers at seven times the straight rate.

This article gives no homicide figure, because none exists.

Neither the United States nor England and Wales has a national count of murder victims by sexual orientation. The homicide reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) capture age, sex, race, weapon and the relationship between victim and offender, but not orientation. The homicide statistics for England and Wales come from the Home Office’s Homicide Index. They break victims down by sex, age and ethnic group and not by sexual orientation.

America’s violent death reporting system has a sexual orientation field. The field is filled in only where friends, family or acquaintances told investigators how the victim identified, and is otherwise recorded as unknown. A 2019 paper in the American Journal of Public Health reported that no jurisdiction or agency in the country routinely or systematically collects sexual orientation at the time of death.

Advocacy groups keep their own counts. The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, for example, listed homicides it judged likely to be hate violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. It drew on media reports, police reports and its member programmes, and said the true number was likely higher. That list is a count of what was reported and described a particular way. It is not a rate, and this article does not print one.

“Are LGB people more often victims” and “does being LGB raise your risk” are different questions. The raw rates answer the question about victims. The question about risk needs you to account for everything else that differs between the groups. Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) samples differ from the general population on several characteristics that predict victimisation. They are younger, more urban, less often married, lower income, more likely to report a disability, and more likely to have been homeless at some point in their lives.

Adjusted figures exist for three countries, and they did not all adjust the same thing.

The British analysis does not test the American one. The American and Canadian models are about violence. The British analysis is about being a victim of anything from fraud to assault. It leaves out stalking and harassment, and also sexual assault, where the American bisexual gap is widest, at 18 times the straight rate. The statistics office says domestic violence is prone to substantial under-reporting in the part of its survey the British analysis used.

The British analysis also treats lesbian, gay, bisexual and other as one group. The statistics office says differences by individual crime type were not explored. Its estimates for the year ending March 2023 rest on 31,183 interviews and are not designated National Statistics. The statistics office warns that lower response rates may affect their quality.

LGB people in England and Wales are victimised more often in the raw figures, and the British analysis does not mean otherwise. Harassment, one of the offences the British analysis left out, shows a wide gap.

Download this conclusion: the British result

This section as one image: what the British analysis measured, what it left out, and what the American and Canadian adjustments found for violence.

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Police-recorded hate crime counts do not measure how often hate crimes happen. They measure what victims reported, what officers recorded, and which agencies sent in returns.

In 2023 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) received hate crime data from 16,009 law enforcement agencies. Of those, 3,161 reported one or more incidents. The rest, four in five, reported none. Some of those are small departments in quiet years, and some are large cities returning zero.

Against that background, police recorded about 2,400 sexual-orientation hate crime offences in the United States in 2023. Police in England and Wales recorded 18,702 sexual-orientation hate crimes in the year to March 2025. That count leaves out the Metropolitan Police, London’s force, whose figures were excluded that year because of a change in how it records them. On that basis it was 2% down on the year before, the third consecutive annual fall.

The American crime survey gives an estimate by asking people directly. It found that between 2017 and mid-2019 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people experienced 6.6 violent hate crime victimisations per 1,000 people, against 0.8 for everyone else. Scale that rate to the population and it implies figures far above what police record.

Both numbers are real. They measure different things. A rise in recorded hate crime can mean more attacks, better recording, more agencies participating, or more victims willing to say the attack was motivated by who they are. The published tables cannot separate those.

Download this conclusion: police counts and the survey

This section as one image: why a police count of hate crimes is not a rate, and what the American crime survey found when it asked people directly.

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Who reports violence to the police runs against expectation, and in both directions at once. Violence against lesbian and gay people reached the police more often than violence against straight people. Bisexual people had the highest victimisation rates, yet violence against them reached the police far less often.

The survey counts a crime as reported whether the victim or anyone else told the police, or the police were at the scene.

In practice, police-recorded crime captures a smaller share of what happens to bisexual people than of what happens to anyone else. Multiply each group’s violent victimisation rate by the share reported and the order does not change, but the distance does.

So the bisexual rate falls from three times the lesbian and gay rate to about one and a half times.

How lesbian, gay and bisexual victims are treated once they do report is less well measured. The nearest national comparison is a 2021 Williams Institute analysis of two national surveys. In that analysis, 22% of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) people said they would probably not contact the police again, against 6% of the general population. And 13% of LGBQ people said they had not called the police even when they needed help.

Four serious objections. The weak version, that the surveys are activist, is not one of them: these are government statistical agencies running probability samples.

People who disclose being a victim may also disclose their orientation. Someone willing to tell an interviewer they were assaulted may also be more willing to say “bisexual”. If so the association is partly manufactured.

The American crime survey’s design limited this problem until the middle of 2019, because orientation was asked of every respondent aged 16 or over and not only of victims. So the population count included non-victims who disclosed. From July 2019 to the end of 2021 the question went to victims only. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated the population for the rest of 2019 and for 2020 from its early-2019 count.

Neither design eliminates the problem. And none of the surveys here separates disclosure from victimisation, so this objection stays open.

Some of the subgroups are tiny. True, and it matters for specific figures rather than the headline. Bisexual men are the clearest case: 64.5 violent victimisations per 1,000, with a standard error of nearly 12. That error is 19% of the estimate.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics marks three subgroup estimates “interpret data with caution”. Those estimates are for lesbian and gay people aged 16 to 17, Black lesbian and gay people, and bisexual people aged 65 and over. Neither of the bisexual figures by sex is among them. The bisexual women figure, 151.2, has a standard error of 12.4. That error is 8% of the estimate.

It is really about age and everything else. The strongest objection, and partly correct. In America these differences explain about 15% of the lesbian and gay gap in violence and about 41% of the bisexual one. In England and Wales the gap across a range of crimes was no longer statistically significant once they were allowed for, which is a different measure. Anyone arguing they explain all of the American gap has to account for the bisexual 18 to 24 rate of 198.7 against 32.8 for straight people the same age.

The group being measured has changed. LGBTQ+ identification, as Gallup measures it, went from 3.5% of US adults in 2012 to 9.3% in 2024, and shifted young and bisexual. The people identifying as LGBTQ+ in 2024 are not the people who did so in 2012. If those newly identifying have higher baseline risk for other reasons, the rate among identifiers rises without anything happening to anybody. This change is a real problem and it means trend claims about this data are unreliable, but it does not touch a within-year comparison.

Yes. In America lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people suffer violent crime more often than straight people, and bisexual people most of all. Age, income, marital status, where people live and other differences explain only part of that. They explain about 15% of the lesbian and gay gap and about 41% of the bisexual one.

In England and Wales the higher risk across a range of crimes was no longer statistically significant after adjustment. The British analysis did not look at violence on its own or at bisexual people separately. So it does not test the American finding.

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This card gives the answer and the three rates it rests on. In the American crime survey, lesbian, gay and bisexual people are victims of violent crime more often than straight people, and bisexual people most of all. The card also says why the British analysis in which the gap lost statistical significance measures something else. It is 1,080 by 1,350 pixels, and anyone may download it and post it.

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