Culture & Contact in the Promotion & Reduction of Anti-Gay Prejudice:Evidence from Jamaica & Britain

Dr. Keon West. He is a social psychologist from the University of Leeds in the U.K. He is also a gay rights activist while being the son of the popular anti-gay activist, Dr. Wayne West, in Jamaica linked to the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship and other coalition groups. He has produced a study done on anti-gay attitudes in Jamaica called "Culture and Contact in the Promotion and Reduction of Anti-Gay Prejudice: Evidence from Jamaica and Britain" which sought to find out how to reduce sexual prejudice (anti-gay attitudes) in Jamaicans.

Dr West is also Jamaica's 2005/5 Rhodes Scholar as well.

also available in the Journal of Homosexuality 

DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2011.614907

KEON WEST, DPhil

Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK 

MILES HEWSTONE, DPhil

Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 

Jamaica has been called “the most homophobic place on Earth” (Padgett, 2006, p. 1), and has been involved in numerous inter-national incidents with Britain, and other countries, concerning anti-gay prejudice. However, neither the severity of Jamaican anti-gay prejudice, nor any means of reducing this prejudice has ever been empirically investigated. Intergroup contact—social interaction with a person from another group—is one of the most successful and widely used social–psychological interventions to reduce prejudice and improve intergroup relations. In this article,we compared sexual prejudice in Jamaica to that in Britain and investigated the relationship between contact and sexual prejudice in both countries. Jamaican participants reported more negative attitudes toward gay men than did British participants, but contact was more strongly associated with reduced sexual prejudice for Jamaican participants than for British participants. Implications for reducing Jamaican sexual prejudice are discussed. 

KEYWORDS contact hypothesis, homophobia, homosexuality,intergroup contact, intergroup relations, Jamaica, sexual prejudice 

If dem bring it tu wi, ful dem up a kappa shatRa-ta-tat evri chi chi man dem havi get flat

. . .

Chi-chi man fi ded an dats a fak

Culture and Contact 

[If they approach us with it (homosexuality), pump them full of coppershots (bullets)Ra-ta-tat, every gay has to get flat (? Lie on the ground dodging bullets)

. . .Gay men should die and that’s a fact.]” (Farquaharson, 2005, pp. 109–110)“Aal bati-man fi ded”[All homosexuals must die]. (Chin, 1997, p. 128)

Despite several claims of strong Jamaican prejudice against gay men (e.g.,Farquaharson, 2005; “OUTRAGED!,” 2004; Pinnock, 2007; Schleifer, 2004),and numerous international incidents concerning Jamaican anti-gay sentiment (e.g., “Homophobic Silliness and a Failure of Leadership,” 2008;“Identity Politics and Homophobia,” 2008; “London Pressures Dancehall Stars,” 2004) no study to date has ever attempted to investigate the strength of Jamaican anti-gay attitude, assess any method of changing it,or understand its predictors. With no empirical research on the issue, it is unsurprising that attempts by international gay-rights lobbies to impose anti-homophobia restrictions on Jamaicans have met with limited or no success(“Gay Lobby Rebuked,” 2008). 

What models can social psychology offer that may allow us to measure, understand, and reduce Jamaican sexual prejudice? Over 50 years ago, Gordon Allport (1954) hypothesised that contact— social interaction—between members of opposing groups would reduce bias and improve intergroup relations provided it occurred under certain conditions (i.e., equal status, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and institutional support). In the half century that followed, a wealth of research has supported the contact hypothesis (e.g., Brown, Vivian, & Hewstone,1999; Hamberger & Hewstone, 1997; Harwood, Hewstone, Paolini, & Voci,2005; Paolini, Hewstone, Cairns, & Voci, 2004; Plant & Devine, 2003; Voci & Hewstone, 2003; see Brown & Hewstone, 2005, for a review). 

A recent meta-analysis of 515 studies on intergroup contact (Pettigrew &Tropp, 2006) confirmed the robust, highly significant negative relationship between contact and prejudice, and contact is now one of the most widely used interventions for the reduction of prejudice and the improvement of intergroup relations (Hewstone, Rubin & Willis, 2002; Oskamp & Jones,2000).This study investigates the relationship between contact and sexual prejudice in Jamaica, comparing it to the corresponding relationship in Britain.The reasons for comparing Jamaica and Britain include their understudied sexual prejudice and their shared history: Jamaica was a British colony until independence in 1962 and continues to share cultural tendencies with Britain (Lambert et al., 1989). Also, several of the international incidents surrounding Jamaican anti-gay prejudice have occurred between Jamaica and Britain. These include the relatively benign, such as the cancellations of performances by Jamaican artistes in England (“London Pressures Dancehall Stars,” 2004), as well as the more egregious, such as the murder of British.honorary consul, John Terry (Bird & Reid, 2009). We begin with a discussion of sexual prejudice, particularly in Jamaica and Britain, before discussing the effects of contact on sexual prejudice in general and our current research on contact and sexual prejudice in both countries.

SEXUAL PREJUDICE

Homophobia is currently the most common term used to indicate anti-homosexual prejudice (see Choi, Han, Paul, & Ayala, 2011; Diaz, 2001;Herek, 1984; Lehne, 1976; Morin & Garfinkle, 1978; Weinberg, 1972), but this term has long been criticized. Millham, San Miguel, and Kellog (1976)considered it “oversimplification” (p. 3) as it lumps together all the varied negative attitudes, beliefs and behaviors toward homosexuals. Herek(1986) also discouraged the use of the term “homophobia” because it overly individualizes and “psychologizes” (p. 553) the prejudice at hand. In place of the term homophobia, we use the term “sexual prejudice” (see Herek,1986, 2004), which describes the phenomenon as what it actually is —any action, or general mode of conduct, whether it occurs on an individual or a systematic level, that disadvantages non-heterosexuals (Herek, 1986).Sexual prejudice is a global problem, occurring in many forms, at different levels of severity, and in many different societies (Herek, 2000; Herek &Berrill, 1992; Herek & Gonzalez-Rivera, 2006; McLelland, 2000; Polimeni,Hardie, & Buzwell, 2000; Rivers & Cowie, 2006; Subir, 2007; T. Williams &Maher, 2009). At its most severe, it can result in violent hate crimes, sexual attack, robbery, or vandalism (Herek, Gillis, & Cogan, 1999), and even murder (Willis, 2004). Other, less explicit forms of prejudice, such as avoidance,ostracism, disgust, disapproval (Herek, 2004), forced silence (Moran, 2011),and the withholding of legal rights (Araiza, 2010), also continue to have severe and enduring physical and psychological consequences.Most research on prejudice against homosexuals has taken place in North America, where this prejudice has been declining for some decades(Altemeyer, 2002; Millham et al., 1976), and where the gay movement has produced tangible changes including the contemporary debate around the legality of gay marriage (Araiza, 2010; Goodhough, 2009) and the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy (Moran, 2011). However, in places where gays are more openly scorned and severely mistreated, such as Iraq(T. Williams & Maher, 2009) or St. Martin (Padgett, 2006), there has been little or no research. Such places are left to improve their situation without the guidance of any empirical research, or dependent on empirical research conducted by and in other countries, not knowing which, if any, findings are cross-culturally applicable. In this article, we take the first step toward filling these gaps in the research by investigating sexual prejudice in one country recently called “the most homophobic place on Earth” (Padgett, 2006, p. 1).

CONTACT AND SEXUAL PREJUDICE IN JAMAICA AND THE U.K

.

Contact has been shown to reduce prejudice in general and prejudice against gay men in particular. Furthermore, this effect was stronger on prejudice against people of different sexual orientations (r = −.271) than on prejudice against any other outgroup (e.g.,r (physically disabled)= −.243,r (race)=−.214, r (mentally ill)=−.184) 

However, of the research investi-gating the effect of contact on anti-gay prejudice, little has been conducted in the U.K. and none has been conducted in Jamaica. In Pettigrew andTropp’s (2006) meta-analysis of all available contact research to date, most studies (71%) were conducted in North America; of the studies specifically investigating the effect of contact on sexual prejudice, 23 of 25 were con-ducted in the United States, one was conducted in Canada, and one in New Zealand.

Please see the FULL study HERE