Teenagers are behind a rash of antigay crimes that have been tied to dating apps

Author: Trudy Ring

Police in Australia are investigating a rash of hate crimes against gay men who were lured through dating apps.

Gangs of teenagers have committed about a dozen such attacks in and around Sydney, the nation’s largest city, since April, The Sydney Morning Herald reports.

“In each case, lone male victims agreed to meet in public parks with someone from a dating app but were confronted by multiple teenagers,” the Herald reports. The men have been beaten, robbed, and in some cases coerced to call themselves pedophiles on social media. Videos have been posted to TikTok and Instagram in a trend called “pedo hunting,” and police discovered an Instagram account called “pedohunting_syd,” now removed.

Police have established two special strike forces to investigate, and they have arrested about 20 young people. Some of the teens are tied to the youth who is charged with stabbing a conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ clergyman, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, leader of the Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Sydney. Another clergy member at the church, Isaac Royel, was stabbed as well. Both survived, and the crime has been classified as a terrorist incident.

There has been a similar series of attacks on gay men in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city. with the perpetrators meeting their victims through Grindr. Police arrested 13 people this year.

The assaults on gay men are reminiscent of a string of antigay attacks in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s in the area. The cliffs surrounding Sydney were popular both with gay men looking to hook up in that era and also with homophobic groups who would assault and often kill gay men, throwing them or forcing them to leap from the cliffs onto the rocks below. As many as 80 gay men were killed in the area during the period, and police often refused to investigate, ruling the murders as death by suicide instead.

Those killed included American postgraduate student Scott Johnson, who died in 1988; his body was found at the base of a cliff. Police originally classified his death as a suicide, but his brother, Steve Johnson, helped initiate further investigation. Scott Philip White was arrested in 2020 and convicted of Scott Johnson’s murder in 2022, having confessed to the crime. He had punched Johnson, causing him to fall to his death. But White withdrew the confession and had his murder conviction overturned, and last year he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to nine years in prison. The judges involved in the murder and manslaughter trials both said they could not establish that Johnson’s death was an antigay hate crime.

Police and government officials in Sydney and its state, New South Wales, have apologized for failing to properly investigate the deaths of gay men over the years. A police spokeswoman told the Herald the recent attacks are being “treated with utmost seriousness.”

A spokesman for the LGBTQ+ group ACON said victims should report the incidents as hate crimes. “These reports show that we must continue the important work of addressing hate and creating community safety for LGBTQ+ people,” the spokesman told the Herald. “These are acts of hatred that stand at odds with community-wide consensus thay t LGBTQ+ people are full members of our society and should be able to live in safety.”

“Police and ACON are urging men to meet in public, verify identities, and share locations with trusted friends when meeting people from dating apps,” the Herald reports.

Original Article on The Advocate
Author: Trudy Ring