LGBTIQ+ community denounces risks for the use of dating apps in Medellin

This Thursday, the Administration of Sexual Diversities of Medellín reported that it has received a series of complaints about alleged cases of violence against the LGBTIQ+ community. The facts would be being presented through dating platforms and applications.

“The platforms unfortunately do not have patterns of care and follow-up to appointments that are put on a virtual level,” Patricia Llano, manager of Sexual Diversities in the capital of Antioquia, told El Colombiano.

The official explained that the Management and Security Secretariat have received several complaints and found that as a common factor in violence against these people: the places where they meet there is no search, which prevents evidence that the aggressors were there.

Faced with this, entities are carrying out inspections at those sites, which are mostly hotels, to ensure that they comply with the regulations. “It was possible to seal one of the hotels that was allowing people to enter this space without registration and this shows that they do not comply with the security protocols,” Llano told the aforementioned media outlet.

For his part, the Secretary of Security, José Gerardo Acevedo, suggested that people who use dating apps that they “adopt safety and self-care practices because they have a high degree of vulnerability,” he told El Colombiano. He also recommended sharing the location, establishing trust-building dating sites and telling a third party who he is going to meet.

Cases of murders of members of the LGBTIQ+ community

So far in 2022, five people from the community have been killed in Medellin. Three of the crimes were committed in March and the LGBTIQ+ community noted that the killings were systematic.

In an article also published in the newspaper El Colombiano, they consulted Wilson Castañeda, director of the Caribe Affirmativo association. The expert assured that in the murders “there are patterns that allow him to think that they were systematic crimes”. The victims are: Juan David López Alzate, 31, Sahmir Javier González Sarmiento, a 28-year-old Colombian-Venezuelan, and Juan Danilo Bedoya Roman, age 30.

“Of these four crimes that occurred this year, there is a modus operandi that occurs in the residences, an alleged vehicle involved, a similar practice at the crime scene, and an alleged robbery that diverts the attention of the authorities,” Castañeda told the Antioquia newspaper.

The Mayor's Office of Medellín announced rewards for those who provide information to find the perpetrators of these murders, and that they are still under investigation to establish how they were perpetrated.

It should be recalled that murders of people in the LGBTIQ+ community increased between January and March 2020 with 19 cases, after falling in the same period of time since 2016, when 16 were registered, to 12 in 2017, reaching 9 in 2018 and reaching 7 in 2019. In 2021, 8 homicides were reported and this year there are 5, according to data from the Mayor's Office of the Antioquia capital.

The Diversity Management, for its part, said that it is making progress in the creation of a color map to provide information about which sectors of Medellin are most at risk to this population. At the moment they recognize that communes 8 and 10 are the most dangerous in these cases.

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