Sydney's gay hate crimes - true numbers

End of last century was a bad time in Sydney, with many supposed non-suspicious deaths now being re-examined as gay hate crimes. The numbers are far far more than what may be imagined for a progressive city like Sydney, and to me are indicative of the struggles gays have been through even here. I've heard about the odd one over the years, but when I was married and bringing up a daughter I had no contact with the gay community and so didn't hear anything about the more that there were. 

Piece by piece, month by month, the map of Sydney's greatest unsolved and unacknowledged crime wave has taken shape. What that map belatedly reveals is that thousands of men were stalked, savagely assaulted and, in at least 50 cases, murdered.

Mostly it was groups who preyed upon these men and they often brought implements for violence, sometimes knives, sometimes tools of their trades. Among the weapons used were bags of drill bits, claw hooks and iron bars. The preferred footwear was workmen's boots, good for kicking.

They hunted for a certain kind of victim, on thousands of outings, across different parts of Sydney. The police were oblivious. They remain oblivious to the scale of what they missed. 

Nobody in authority has acknowledged the extent of this wave of very specific crimes. It has taken 25 years for the big picture to finally come into focus. 

What these crimes all had in common was the type of victims: gay men. Most of the assaults were premeditated. These were gay bashings. When this wave of crime washed through Sydney between 1985 and 1999 the phenomenon was largely invisible to the wider culture. Read more

It's revolting that the cops were so inept, or perhaps so not wanting to help a gay person at the receiving end of foul play, that much of this was simply swept under the carpet. But then hey, we're talking about the NSW police here and nothing surprises me with them.

I have heard about gay bashing violence around Oxford St in the past, although I've never seen any. Maybe as things have changed now. But there used to be youths coming from western Sydney just to have a night out gay bashing. They would wait outside a gay venue and clobber some poor bloke leaving. This situation was IMO completely mishandled by the police, who would then label that venue where the violence had occurred outside of it, as a violent venue, and target it's opening hours, etc. In other words they punished the venue instead of those committing the crime.