Chile: 25 years ago, only 3.7% of men and 6.1% of women accepted homosexuality

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In 1998, almost a quarter of a century ago, Chile’s population reached nearly 15 million people (14,975,000), and only 0.99% were migrants.

A year of convulsive and memorable events. In 1998, former General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London, England. Months in which sporting events and achievements would mark for decades: The tennis player Marcelo Ríos achieved his position as number one in the world after beating Andre Agassi; and the soccer team was one of the 32 countries that participated in the World Cup, which was held in France with the remembered “Dupla Sa-Za”: Marcelo Salas and Iván Zamorano.

It was also a different society, opening up with certain resistance to change. After five years of legislative discussion, Congress passed the law that gave equal treatment to all sons and daughters born in Chile, regardless of whether they were born in or out of wedlock, with the so-called Filiation Law.

A culture in which talking, for example, about sexuality still had many taboo subjects. Until 1999, Article 365 of the Chilean Penal Code, created in 1875, punished sexual relations between men with prison sentences, even when consent was between both parties and they took place in private spaces.

In Chile in 1998, only 3.7% of men agreed with male homosexuality, while the figure for women was 6.1%.

It was indicated at the time by the National Survey of Sexual Behavior, the first large-scale study on this subject in the country, carried out by the former National AIDS Commission in conjunction with the National Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS, France) and Chile’s Ministry of Health (Minsal), which focused on collecting information on sexual activity, values and risk behaviors for the transmission of HIV/AIDS.

“At that time, the urgency was HIV, and most of the surveys focused on HIV and risk practices”, says Jaime Barrientos, professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the Alberto Hurtado University, part of the team of researchers who conducted that first study, and who today is working on the second version: the National Health, Sexuality, and Gender Survey (ENSSEX), which after 25 years will be reissued by the Ministry of Health.
Transformations

The new survey, carried out by the Department of Epidemiology of the Minsal in direct collaboration with the University of Chile, the Alberto Hurtado University, and the Institut National d’Etudes Démographiques á Paris (INED), seeks to know the characteristics of health, sexuality and gender of the population aged 18 and over, with national, regional, age and sex representation in Chile, to produce evidence for the design and evaluation of public policies.

Michel Bozon from INED, France, Irma Palma from the Department of Psychology of the Universidad de Chile, and Jaime Barrientos from the Faculty of Psychology of the University Alberto Hurtado are the researchers in charge of the survey, plus the Minsal team.

The work will provide information at a population level and at a national level on the situation and needs of people in the field of sexuality, which has evolved a lot in the last decades.

This survey is carried out almost 25 years after the first one, and the country, says Barrientos, has experienced great social, political, economic, and cultural transformations. “Undoubtedly, we will find important transformations concerning the norms related to sexuality, concerning the acceptance of practices and also in terms of a set of phenomena related to sexuality and gender, such as, for example, the greater visibility we have today, due to the existing recognition of rights, of sexual orientations and identities”.

In 25 years, there have been several changes. Among them was the entry into force in 2012 of the law that punishes discrimination, known as the Zamudio Law, which incorporated sexual orientation, gender identity, and, as of 2019, gender expression as protected categories. In addition, in 2015, the law that created the Civil Union Agreement, the first legal norm recognizing same-sex couples, entered into force. And in 2021, Law 21,400 allows same-sex marriage, adoption, and homo-parental filiation.

Likewise, the Gender Identity Law, effective as of 2019, recognizes the right to self-perceived gender identity, allowing persons over 14 years of age to change their name and sex in their documents without prohibitive requirements.

It will be an x-ray of sexuality in a different Chile. Michel Bozon, research director of the French National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) and part of the ENSSEX team, points out that in 1998 it was a society where “there were many forbidden things”. He adds that “you have to imagine that even anal sex was forbidden by law. I don’t remember exactly when, but during the 2000s, the law that penalized anal sex was repealed”.

The first survey, says Barrientos, focused on investigating HIV risk, and the current one has a more comprehensive perspective on health, sexuality, and gender relations.

“The sample is another difference, the first survey had a sample of 5,000 people and more, and this one will have about 20,000 cases and will have an over-representation of the population between 18 and 34 years old, and phenomena related to sexuality and gender, such as, for example, the greater visibility we have today due to the recognition of rights of sexual orientations and identities”.

This information is fundamental for the construction of public policies. And it is required, says Barrientos, to be reliable and updated for the construction and planning of such policies in social development, education, health, and labor.

LGBTIQ+ POPULATION

It is a survey that will be in charge of making transparent the size of the LGBTIQ+ population, says Barrientos, insofar as it incorporates a specific module on this population, but it also takes charge of investigating violence directed towards these populations. “We will find unprecedented and unique information obtained through probabilistic sampling concerning these populations”.

The ENSSEX, in its methodology, will be applied in 2022, through a probabilistic and multistage sampling design in the selection of homes and people, according to three minimum variables to stratify: region, sex, and age.

It is a survey that incorporates a set of topics that were not included in the other study, such as sexual orientations, gender identity, abortion, sexual violence, and problems associated with the experience of sexual life, “from a health logic and not only focused on disease,” says Barrientos.

“Visualizing sexuality as relational, that is, sexuality is seen as an exercise in which there is not only one person alone but also one person in another, in a couple, with other people fantasizing, etc., those are the main differences,” Barrientos explains.

A survey of this type is a challenge of knowledge, says Bozon: “You should have that first perspective. As it is a society that is trying to know itself, it is also a challenge to evaluate the norms of society and the practices of that society. Also to evaluate the blockages in this society, as well as the prejudices that exist”.

With information from La Tercera