Persecute and prosecute - LGBTIQ Hate Crimes in the 1980s and 1990s.
Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes.
Violence against women and LGBTIQ people has occurred throughout human history. It is not an original event with a defined point of emergence but rather is part of the mainstream of human history, based on structural inequalities between genders and between sexualities.
During this time, the justice system has served to persecute and prosecute and not to protect. Also during this time, we have fought back. The most recent example of this is the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes, which is investigating unsolved suspected hate crime deaths of LGBTIQ people (or people who were presumed to be LGBTIQ) in New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s largest state, between 1970 and 2010. The genesis of the Special Commission is community activism for redress for the failure of the justice system to protect the lives and rights of queer people. Based on evidence presented to the Special Commission, key areas of concern include why the police were slow to investigate reports of suspected hate crimes, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s; if the police committed some of the suspected hate crimes; and if the police engaged in entrapment to lure gay men into committing crimes.
These murders did not happen in a vacuum and were not isolated events. They were committed against a backdrop of an epidemic of anti-LGBTIQ violence. The larger question is, how many of these lives could have been saved if the police had done their job properly and investigated each reported case of violence.
But the failure of the justice system to protect the rights of queer citizens in NSW runs much deeper than a failure of policing. Up until 1983 it was perfectly legal to discriminate against someone because of their sexuality and up until 1984, to send someone over the age of 18 to jail for practicing it (it was not until 2003, almost two decades later, that NSW equalised the age of consent to 16). Up until 1993 it was perfectly legal to vilify or incite violence against someone because of their sexuality. And up until 2014, it was perfectly reasonable for someone to offer in their defence for killing or assaulting someone that they had ‘a reasonable fear of homosexuals’. The new law removed the legal foundation for the use of the Homosexual Advance Defence, which was a common-law creation of the partial defence of provocation, in cases involving a non-violent sexual advance.
Meanwhile, the work of the Special Commission is being side-tracked by the antics of the NSW Police. The Special Commission had expressed frustration with how the police are providing evidence. The police have claimed that the burden of responding to the Commission’s requests for information has put a strain on their workforce and financial resources. Such a shoddy approach forced the intervention of the Police Commissioner, Karen Webb, who this week said the police were willing to cooperate with the Special Commission.
Courtesy of the Sydney Star Observer, 17 November, 2022
Ending hate.
Eliminating gender-based violence and hate related violence against LGBTIQ people, as well as racial, and other types of prejudice related violence, is possible. Violence is a human action, which means that an alternative human action to violence is possible, which in turn means that prevention is a smart investment.
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