‘I was raped to cure me of being a lesbian': Jamaican woman says was she set up for attack by woman she met online

A lesbian has told how she was raped because of her sexuality after being tricked by a woman she met online.

Angeline Jackson was raped when she was 19 after being ‘lured off a lesbian chat room’ by a woman acting as a ‘honey trap’ who she thought she was meeting but instead she was met by an armed man who raped her and her friend.


In a harrowing account of her assault, the campaigner, who later identified her rapist in a police line-up, told Marie Claire for a piece titled ‘I was raped to “cure” me of being a lesbian’ that raping a lesbian is seen in her home country Jamaica, where there is widespread homophobia and sex between men is illegal, as ‘corrective’.
Angeline, who is the daughter of a church elder, said she learned at a young age that ‘liking girls was a sin’.

She said she lived most of her teenage years ‘in hiding’ for fear of being made to leave home or being killed.
Seven years on from her attack, she said she still wakes up every day ‘wondering if it is my last’ and whether she will be attacked for being gay or as a gay equality campaigner.

‘I learned to disguise my sexuality by dating boys to stop the rumors. I was torn between being the Jamaican Christian daughter who loves God and her family, and the lesbian girl I was inside,’ she said in an article entitled ‘I was raped to “cure” me of being a lesbian’.
When she was 15 she was ‘forced’ to go to Christian counselling after the the mother of somebody she had been ‘secretly seeing’ found out about their relationship and both their families thought Angeline was ‘mentally unwell’.

She said her mother and father’s parenting was ‘analysed’ to assess whether they had ‘done something wrong’ to ‘make’ Angeline gay.