
Global Research Sounds Alarm on LGBTQIA+ Safety

A major new global report has warned that LGBTQIA+ safety is at risk as people are facing an intensifying wave of violence, hate and censorship, despite decades of progress toward equality.
The study, released this week by the London based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), paints a sobering picture of rising anti queer hostility both online and offline across Western countries.
The Five-year overview of the online and offline anti-LGBTQ+ landscape
“After two decades of gains for LGBTQ+ visibility and rights in many countries, anti-LGBTQ+ targeted hate and rhetoric are on the rise” the report reads.
“Offline, there has been a surge of reported hate crimes and book bans, alongside a wave of government and legislative actions targeting LGBTQ+ rights (with a focus on trans people). Online, LGBTQ+ individuals face coordinated harassment campaigns, a rollback of digital protections, and systematic erasure from AI training data and moderation.”
It comes as Australia grapples with its own surge in hate motivated attacks, policy debates over protections, and continued debates over LGBTQIA+ rights and visibility.
The ISD’s five year overview of the anti LGBTQ+ landscape examines developments between 2020 and 2025 across the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.
It concludes that queer communities are now operating in what it calls a “hate threat-scape”, where extremist movements, legislative rollbacks, and the unchecked spread of online abuse are converging into a sustained and coordinated challenge to LGBTQIA+ safety.
In the United States, federal data revealed that more than 20 per cent of all recorded hate crimes were motivated by bias against sexual orientation or gender identity in 2024. That figure has remained largely unchanged for three consecutive years, an indication, the ISD says, that violence has become “endemic rather than episodic”. GLAAD’s own monitoring showed 918 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents last year alone, including 140 bomb threats, seven deaths, and hundreds of attacks linked to extremist or conspiracy driven narratives online.
In the United Kingdom, the data paints a similarly alarming picture. While police recorded an 11 per cent decrease in anti-trans hate crimes in the most recent year, the longer term figures continue to rise steeply upward. Between 2021 and 2022, sexual-orientation hate crimes surged by 41 per cent, while anti-trans offences jumped by 56 per cent.
Across the European Union, the ISD found that discrimination against LGBTQ+ people at work had slightly decreased from 42 per cent to 36 per cent but this improvement was overshadowed by increases in hate motivated violence which rose from 11 per cent to 14 per cent and school bullying rose from 46 per cent to 67 per cent.
Online trends have proved even more alarming with the proportion of anti-trans hate speech detected in social media analysis climbing from 35 per cent to 46 per cent and queer creators being disproportionately affected by wrongful content removals and algorithmic suppression.
The ISD’s data also indicates that hate speech targeting trans and gender diverse people now accounts for nearly half of all anti-LGBTQ+ content tracked on major platforms. Slurs such as “groomer” have been weaponised to silence or discredit queer voices, while many LGBTQ+ creators find their posts flagged or removed under misguided “sexual content” policies.
“According to GLAAD, overmoderation includes wrongful takedowns of LGBTQ+ accounts and creators, shadow-banning, the mislabelling of LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “explicit” and demonetisation” the ISD stated. “For example, teenage users of Instagram were restricted from searching for LGBTQ+ terms for at least “a few months” in 2024. The list of affected terms included the hashtags #gay, #bisexual, #trans, #queer and #nonbinary.”
While it does not form part of the report recent Australian media coverage has echoed these global concerns. This includes multiple cases where men were lured via dating apps and assaulted in multiple states across Australia as well as recent acts of public vandalism in Tasmania and Victoria and the spate of anti-trans rallies across the country. Meanwhile in Queensland trans youth and their families continue to fight their own battles amid the recent ban on gender affirming care of trans youth under 18.
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