Kansas City Anti-Violence Project

The Kansas City Anti-Violence Project (KCAVP) is a Missouri 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation committed to providing advocacy and education to lesbian, gay bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) victims of violence including domestic violence, sexual assault, and hate crimes. Currently, there is no organization in western Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, or Nebraska that provides the types of services to the LGBT community that KCAVP provides.

KCAVP was formed due to the lack of assistance offered to local LGBT victims of domestic violence, especially with gay and bisexual male and transgender survivors of domestic violence. Domestic violence shelters are focused on providing a wide array of services to heterosexual women born as women who are battered by their heterosexual male partners. These shelters provide limited services to male and transgender victims in the form of limited outreach counseling and court advocacy. Lesbians and bisexual women can receive the full array of services that a shelter provides but the shelter may not provide an appropriate response to the survivor due to institutional homophobia. This limited response places an LGBT domestic violence survivor in a precarious, desperate, and sometimes life threatening position, where he or she has few to no options or resources to escape the batterer and break the cycle of violence.

Today, lack of awareness and denial of LGBT domestic violence and sexual assault are additional challenges, but as a result of the formation of KCAVP, strong steps have been taken to support all LGBT victims who are suffering from violence and improve their overall quality of life. KCAVP is providing training to both the LGBT community, as well as mainstream service providers such as domestic violence shelters, about the differences and similarities between LGBT and heterosexual domestic violence and sexual assault, and how these distinctive issues should be addressed.

KCAVP serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender victims of violence and their families by providing confidential services enabling them to regain their sense of control, identify and evaluate their options, and assert their rights. In particular, KCAVP assists survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and hate-motivated violence by providing support and advocacy within the criminal justice system and victim support agencies, information for self-help, referrals to practicing professionals, and other sources of assistance.

KCAVP also provides referrals, support, and information to victims of bias crimes. Bias crimes include verbal harassment, phone and e-mail harassment, property damage, threats of assault, being assaulted or "bashed," rape, and murder. They are crimes committed against LGBT people or their property out of hatred for who they are or who people think they are. These acts, or threats of them, are based on hatred of and prejudice against a particular group in society. This is why they are also known as hate crimes.

KCAVP also serves the larger community through efforts to educate the public about violence directed at or within the LGBT community and to reform government policies and practices affecting lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual survivors of violence. KCAVP plans to educate law enforcement and social service agency personnel and call attention to inadequate official and professional responses. KCAVP will work to hold law enforcement and social service agencies accountable to their obligation for impartial service. By documenting violence motivated by hate against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, organizing community-based activism, and working with organizations serving other communities victimized by hate-motivated violence, KCAVP works to change public attitudes that tolerate, insulate or instigate hate-motivated violence, and to promote public policies designed to deter such violence.

For more information call 816-561-0550 or visit http://www.kcavp.org.