The Fire This Time spotlights the U.S. criminal justice system’s bias against women of color in general and against gender non-conforming, African American women in particular. In addition, the film demonstrates how the media perpetuates this bias through inaccurate and incendiary reporting. This kind of reporting contributes to an atmosphere that leaves LGBTQ youth vulnerable to harassment and assault because there are no genuinely safe spaces for them in American society.

The story of the New Jersey Seven (NJ7) has parallels to that of Sakia Gunn. In May 2003, Sakia and a friend were returning home to Newark, New Jersey, after an evening out in New York City’s West Village. While the girls were waiting at the bus station, a stranger called out from his car to Sakia and made sexual remarks. She declined his advances, and told him that she and her friend were lesbians. He then got out of his car and stabbed Sakia to death. Her murder is vitally important for understanding the story told in The Fire This Time for two reasons.

First, the women of the NJ7 and Sakia Gunn had been friends. Thus the message they took from Sakia’s death was that a young woman of color who is a lesbian or gender non-conforming realistically has to fear for her life when she is harassed. She has two options when sexually harassed or threatened with physical violence: incarceration or injury, perhaps even death. This untenable choice underlines the failure of society to protect women such as the NJ7. All too often, women who are able to fend off their attackers encounter biased law enforcement that may result in their being jailed rather than their abusers. As a society, we still do not recognize a woman’s right to defend herself. Women are expected to fulfill only the victim’s role.

Society assumes that a woman who has been attacked will inevitably be injured, sexually assaulted, or even murdered rather than defend herself. This is a disturbing message.

Second, in 2006, Cheryl Clarke, Director of the Office of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian-Gay Concerns at Rutgers University, conducted a study on the media coverage of Sakia Gunn compared with that of Matthew Shepard. Matthew was a young, white, gay male living in Wyoming in 1998. He was at a bar when two men convinced him to leave with them. They tortured him and beat him to death. This was a horrific crime and deservingly garnered much media attention. However, Clarke’s study found that while two years after Matthew’s death more than one thousand articles had been written about him nationwide, two years after Sakia’s death only twelve articles had been written about her murder. This disparity directly speaks to media bias against LGBTQ youth of color.

Another story that helps provide context for the case of the NJ7 is what happened to a group of white high school girls in Ohio in June 2006. A man routinely harassed these girls as they walked to their private school. One day, they decided to retaliate, and when he again sexually propositioned them on their way to school, they jumped him. The next day, their local newspaper placed their photograph on page 1; they were in their private school uniforms and presented as heroines who had fought back against a tormenter. In contrast to the way law enforcement treated the NJ7, local authorities in Ohio did not charge the white schoolgirls with any crime.

The disparity in the way that the criminal justice system in the United States treats women of color and white women is glaring. For example, in 2001 African American women made up nearly half of the roughly 150,000 women in U.S. prisons. African American women were eight times more likely than European American women to be imprisoned, and the rates of incarceration for black women were ten to thirty-five times higher than those for white women in fifteen states, including New York.

If a black woman is a lesbian, her access to justice decreases significantly.

In a poll published in the National Law Journal,

U.S. jurors chose perceived sexual orientation as the factor most likely to bias a juror against a defendant — three times more likely than the defendant’s race.

Victor Streib, a professor of law at Ohio Northern University, states, “Prosecutors first must defeminize the defendant, trying to show that her crime is more ‘manly.’ An effective means of defeminizing a female capital defendant is to show the jury that she is a lesbian. The more ‘manly’ her sexuality, her dress and her demeanor, the more easily the jury may forget that she is a woman. In essence, she is defeminized by her sexual orientation and then dehumanized by her [crime]. The jury is left with a gender-neutral monster deserving of little or no human compassion.” Furthermore, as the Los Angeles psychologist Robert R. Butterworth, PhD, points out: “If a woman sheds herself of her femininity, all sympathy evaporates.” Some studies estimate that only a quarter of women who claim self-defense are acquitted of [murder] charges, even with evidence of severe, ongoing violence at the hands of an intimate partner. Supported by media that stigmatizes lesbians of color, prison incarceration is justified as society’s primary tool of social control in response to problems that actually have been caused by inequality and gender discrimination

Each year, thousands of LGBTQ-identified New Yorkers become victims of violent crimes. Below are just a few statistics from 2007 that expose the failure of law enforcement in New York City to protect the LGBTQ community.

In 2007, in 13% of anti-LGBTQ-related violence reported to the police (a 92% increase over 2006), the individual identifying as the victim was arrested

80% of lesbians and gay men have experienced some form of anti-gay or anti-lesbian bias-related violence

Gay men and lesbians are over four times more likely to become crime victims than heterosexuals are

One in every six women will be raped or be the victim of an attempted rape during her lifetime

Every 127 seconds a women is sexually assaulted in the United States

Overall, anti-LGBTQ incidents rose 24% between 2006 and 2007

Law enforcement made up 33% of the primary offenders in anti-LGBTQ incidents (a 19% decrease from 2006)

*Statistics compiled from the Anti-Violence Project