The Secretary of State for Citizenship and Equality, Rosa Monteiro, said that training aimed at security forces on crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex people (LGBTI) aims to enable those professionals to provide” appropriate intervention with those who are victims’.

“That the professionals of the security forces understand this specificity and what can be done to help avoid victimisation”, added the Secretary of State, in statements to the Lusa news agency, in the presentation of the manual “Policing of Hate Crimes against LGBTI people: Forming a Professional Police Response, in Lisbon.

The group will have access to a manual produced by the Council of Europe, translated into Portuguese, with guidelines and a comprehensive approach for daily use, dealing with issues ranging from insults to physical violence.

Rosa Monteiro also mentioned the intersectional specificities of an immigrant transsexual woman or a homosexual gypsy man, for whom the absence of a support network makes it urgent to perceive the complexity that these persons face, not just another victim of an aggression.

“There is a lot of work to do to give more visibility to this problem that people feel in their concrete lives,” said the Secretary of State, adding that this is an issue that exists both on the streets and in social networks.

Rosa Monteiro, highlighted the increasingly trend in cyberbullying, stressing that the main objective is to denounce situations of violence against LGBTI people, “and today we will have a training session, in addition to the presentation of the manual, with the collaboration of the Judiciary Police (PJ) so that these agents multiply their use by the various security forces’.

The first training course took place between May 28 and 29 in Lisbon, adding 30 professionals from the criminal police, from the Public Security Police (PSP), the National Republican Guard (PNG) or PJ, to the Public Ministry.