Vicious attacks on gays in Australia like a 'sport'

By GREG ANSLEY Australia correspondent

CANBERRA - In the warmth of a February night five youths - one armed with a Machete - lay in wait in Alma Park, a well-known gay meeting place in the inner Melbourne suburb of St Kilda.

They had no one particular in mind: any "faggot" would do.

Shortly after midnight their first victim appeared, riding a bicycle.

He was pulled to the ground, kicked and punched again and again, and stripped of most of his clothes.

As his mates waded in with fists and boots, 19-year-old Clint Teariki brandished his 70cm machete and yelled: "Let me chop him ... let me kill him."

Finally Teariki had his chance.

"I could see how much force he put into the swing," fellow gang member Nathan Hill, 18, later told police.

"It was like he was opening up a coconut."

The victim survived, badly injured and severely traumatised, as Teariki, Hill and their friends went first to a nightclub, then on to another park in nearby Elwood, where they attacked two more men.

"I just don't like faggots," Hill told police.

It was just a night out for the boys, a disturbingly common pack assault on homosexuals that Australian Institute of Criminology director Dr Adam Graycar likens to a sport.

"In many cases it is aggressive, young men having a few drinks and then going out for the hunt, for sport, to find a few poofters to beat up - and they get carried away."

The institute has just released a report establishing not only the random violence of gay murders, many of them committed by teenage men, but also the extreme brutality involved.

Those accused of murder have also frequently used alleged sexual advances or assaults by their victims as a defence of provocation and "homosexual panic" to reduce charges to manslaughter and, in some cases, win full acquittal.

"If every woman dealt with an unwanted sexual advance in this way there would be bodies littered all over the streets," Graycar said.

Teariki was sentenced to 5 1/2 years' jail, and Hill to five years.

Given time already spent in detention, Hill could be free in 18 months, Teariki in two years.

Outraged gay activists are urging the director of Public Prosecutions to appeal against the sentences.

"If a middle-class matron had been attacked in the park while walking her poodle, the sense of outrage would have been very great," says gay activist David McCartney.

But the case follows a dark norm established in the Criminology Institute's study of 74 gay murders over two decades in New South Wales. The chances of gays being killed are also higher than national averages, and the likelihood of the cases being solved are lower.

The lower success rate for police is largely caused by the random nature of gay killings. The offenders are mostly gangs of teenagers bashing and stabbing their victims to death in public places.





In one case, a drunken - straight - soldier was fatally unlucky to pass out near a public toilet notorious for gay liaisons: two youths beat him to death for no reason other than they came across him in a "poofter park".

Even more disturbing is the force used in the murders. Gangs of killers typically bash, kick, stab and bludgeon their victims to death, using anything that comes to hand.

Weapons identified in the report included scissors, forks, a rock, stick, clawhammer, saw, bottle, bowling pin, fire extinguisher, spade, car wheel brace, plaster garden statue and a hunting bow and arrows.

"Many offences were notable for their exceptional brutality and the frenzied form of attacks, with victims tormented and wounded repeatedly," the report says.

In one unsolved case, a man was stabbed 64 times, with most of the wounds received after he had died.

Another man was stabbed 47 times in the face with a screwdriver, another castrated before death, and yet another bound, tortured and blinded.

The report concludes that, since many of the killers are young, poorly educated men, from low socio-economic groups who believed they were doing society a favour, education is the key to reducing gay-hate crime.