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Legal status of same-sex sexual acts

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LGBT+ RightsHuman Rights

About this data

Legal status of same-sex sexual acts
Describes the legislation status of homosexual activity, consensual sexual activity between individuals of the same sex.
Source
Equaldex (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
June 3, 2024
Next expected update
June 2025
Date range
1950–2024

Related research and writing

Featured image for the article on LGBT+ rights. Stylized line charts with lines in red, yellow, green, and blue, going up from left to right.

LGBT+ rights have become more protected in dozens of countries, but are not recognized across most of the world

Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Equaldex is a collaborative knowledge base for the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) movement. The site aims to crowdsource every law related to LGBT rights to provide a comprehensive and global view of the LGBT rights movement.

Retrieved on
June 24, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.equaldex.com/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
LGBT Rights by Country & Travel Guide | Equaldex. (2024). https://www.equaldex.com/

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
  • We have extracted the data from the official Equaldex JSON API.
  • We combine the historical and current data extracted from the API to create a time series.
  • Whenever policy implementation dates for a status are not provided in the data, and this status is the only available for the country, we consider that this status has not changed during the entire period of the dataset.
  • We group some of the categories the source has defined for each issue, for further clarity in our visualizations.
  • We present this data only for sovereign states, defined by Butcher and Griffiths (2020). We use the definitions of the latest year available.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Legal status of same-sex sexual acts”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Pablo Arriagada (2023) - “LGBT+ Rights”. Data adapted from Equaldex. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/same-sex-sexual-acts-equaldex [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Equaldex (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Equaldex (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Legal status of same-sex sexual acts” [dataset]. Equaldex, “Equaldex” [original data]. Retrieved November 8, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/same-sex-sexual-acts-equaldex