Haiti’s LGBTQ+ community faced intensified threats and violence in 2022 as the security crisis created new vulnerabilities and some armed groups actively targeted LGBTQ+ individuals. Community organizations documented multiple cases of attacks on LGBTQ+ people, threats against community spaces, and the forced displacement of individuals who could not safely remain in their neighborhoods due to homophobic violence.
Gang networks, which had established de facto governance in many communities, sometimes explicitly enforced social conservatism as part of their community control strategy, threatening or attacking LGBTQ+ individuals as part of a broader project of controlling community behavior and identity. In neighborhoods where gang authority was total, LGBTQ+ individuals had no recourse against violence — the police they might have complained to were absent, and the gang members themselves were often the source of the threat.
LGBTQ+ community organizations had been building slowly over previous years, creating health services, legal support, and safe spaces for community members. Many of these organizations were forced to reduce their activities or close their physical spaces in 2022 due to security threats. Several had to relocate multiple times as threats followed them to new locations.
International human rights organizations documented Haiti’s LGBTQ+ situation in annual reports and called for specific protective measures for community members whose vulnerability was compounded by the general security collapse. They emphasized that the rights of LGBTQ+ Haitians were not a separate issue from the country’s broader human rights crisis but an integral part of it — that a society with total impunity for violence against any community made all communities less safe.