8.9 Displacement and Outing Displacement 4% TOTAL DISTRIBUTION OF VIOLATIONS Blackmail 13% Outed Unfair Labour Practice 2% Hate Speech 1% Intersex 0% Bi-Sexual 0% Assault 18% Outed Lesbian 5% 2016 Transgender 16% Discrimination 7% 2015 Threat 15% Detention 7% Police Harrassment 8% 2017 Disownment 7% Outed 11% Outed 2014 2013 Gay 79% Invasion of Privacy 7% 2012 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Being outed commonly refers to one’s sexual orientation or gender identity being publicly revealed, usually as a way of inviting some form of punitive action. LGBTI persons are outed without their consent. In a number of the cases reported, outing occurred due to failure to properly secure their digital mobile devices or online accounts such as Facebook and email. In one case of outing, the complainant neglected to log out of his Facebook account, which resulted in the next user of the computer posting on the complainant’s wall a status that said ‘I am gay and I am Proud’. In another case, the complainant also forgot to log out of their online account, resulting in him being unwittingly outed to his employer. Across the period under review, outing was connected strongly to invasion of privacy whether through online accounts, unauthorised access to personal belongings or just simply eavesdropping. The 2014 Violations report noted a disturbing trend where families of newly outed LGBTI persons dealt with their discovery by reporting their ‘deviant’ family member to the police. More often than not, the reports resulted in arrests and detentions. The LGBTI persons would endure dehumanising ridicule while in custody and were then usually released without any formal charge. In other cases, families responded to the discovery through disowning the family member and displacing them from their home. A considerable number of outings also occurred during public gatherings mostly associated with LGBTI themes, in which the media would pick up on the stories and publish them with videos and pictures. It is worth noting however, that outing was most frequently experienced as a threat rather than an actual act of exposing one’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The current status quo, necessitates the need to keep an LGBTI identity a private matter, and this inevitably makes the threat of outing a grave issue. An analysis of the state of human rights violations against LGBTI persons in Zimbabwe (2011-2017) 35