Josh is lying on a footpath, curled up into a ball, his head covered with his hands as three men lay into him with metal bars.
“Am I going to make it out of here alive?” he remembered thinking. “What’s going to happen?”
He managed to get up but stumbled a few times after receiving blows to his head.
The men were laughing at him. One of them was filming.
“They were calling me a paedophile,” Josh, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, told 7.30.
Josh was so badly beaten he almost ended up in intensive care.
“Apparently I had lost so much blood that my blood pressure had dropped so low they were considering taking me to ICU.”
It was spring 2024 in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Josh’s Saturday night had turned into the early hours of Sunday morning. Like many men on the hook-up app Grindr, he’d been “looking”.
Grindr is one of the apps being used because users can be relatively anonymous. (Adobe Stock)
Josh, now in his 30s, has used Grindr since he was 18.
He started chatting to a user whose profile had three face pics, unlike the others, and “filled out” details.
“In the past I’ve usually been pretty good at picking up on red flags, sort of going, ‘Nah, I don’t know about this person.’ But this profile was very well set up, very well articulated,” he said.
“It looked very legitimate. I didn’t see it coming at all.”
After a few messages the user asked Josh to meet him at a nearby park, where Josh found the man crouching behind a bush.
“He’s just popped up. I noticed his face was covered and he was holding what appeared to be a metal baton and I froze,”
Josh said.
“At the corner of my eye I could see another person moving towards me, also holding something metal in their hands, and I just turned and ran out of the park.”
His assailants though managed to catch him.
Dozens arrested around Australia
Several teens were tried over an attack in Perth. (ABC News: Keane Bourke)
Josh’s case is part of a new wave of homophobic attacks around Australia, with dating and hook-up app users lured by fake profiles and then assaulted and robbed by groups of men or boys, some as young as 13.
Last month, five teenage boys were jailed over “planned and premeditated” attacks in Western Australia.
During their trial, the Perth Children’s Court heard that one of the targets was stripped naked, threatened with drowning and chased into a swamp after being punched in the face and tasered, losing teeth in the process.
In Victoria police have arrested 35 alleged offenders.
Jeremy Oliver, Victoria Police’s LGBTIQA+ Communities Portfolio Manager, said alleged incidents involved “posting and boasting” in which victims were filmed and the video posted on social media.
The video is sometimes used in a “shaming process” with threats to out victims for their sexuality.
“Part of it is a rise in anti-LGBTIQA+ sentiment or rhetoric that’s happening around the world,” Mr Oliver told 7.30.
“There’s a real decline in social cohesion and young men are being influenced to inflict violence against minority communities.”
Leanne McCusker says many assailants view themselves as vigilantes. (ABC News)
Mr Oliver said the offenders in the groups were known to each other and attacked men in a localised area, but it’s not known whether the groups were acting together in a coordinated way.
“We find it incredibly disturbing and distressing that these crimes are being committed by people at such a young age,” he said.
In New South Wales, police have pressed 39 charges in 44 incidents reported to them since January 2024.
The attacks have been located in regional and metropolitan areas, from the Central Coast and the Northern Beaches to Western Sydney and Campbelltown.
The victims were robbed, assaulted or extorted after meeting up with the offenders, while others were lured by offenders “purporting to be underage”, according to NSW Police.
“The intent we have seen is the perception that they are a vigilante to do good, and by their own bias against the LGBTQIA+ community,” NSW Police Assistant Commissioner, Leanne McCusker told 7.30.
Assistant Commissioner McCusker believed the offenders were exploiting any fear or shame around sexuality to prey on victims.
Victims fear coming forward
One victim told 7.30 he was worried police would go through the contents of his phone. (AP: Jenny Kane)
NSW Police said such crimes were going unreported because some victims believed their sexuality would come to light by doing so.
Others might be embarrassed to share such personal details with police.
A victim in another state told 7.30 he was cautious about potentially having to provide his phone contents to police for fear of “being led into the unknown”.
Late last year the man was lured by a fake profile which turned out to be two men who verbally attacked him.
They chased him into a busy intersection where they continued to harass and film him.
“It was the first time I’ve feared for my life,”
the man said.
“I really didn’t know how it was going to end.”
The men continued to yell abuse near his home, forcing the man to hide from them for nearly an hour.
While the man believed in the importance of police investigations, he wanted his privacy protected.
“No one wants to have their sex life to be out of their hands,”
he said.
“What’s the evidence that police can hone right in and not look at any other private messages?”
He was also deterred by the prospect of a lengthy court process and potentially lenient sentencing for the offenders.
Police say a rise in anti-LGBTIQA+ sentiment globally is playing into this new wave of homophobic attacks. (ABC News: Margaret Burin)
Both NSW and Victoria police stressed that victims would need to consent to giving evidence, and that screenshots of interactions, such as profile shots or text messages, would help their inquiries.
“We do not need the entire content of that victim’s phone,” Assistant Commissioner McCusker said.
“We need the evidence that is relevant to the offence they are reporting.”
Victoria Police Senior Constable Shaun Kelly told 7.30 police can request information from dating apps to assist in solving investigations and can also “conduct a criminal investigation even where one party has blocked or deleted someone from the app”.
“We want victims to know it is never too late to make a report, so when you’re ready, please speak to us,” he said.
The victim in Melbourne, Josh, said police did not look through his phone.
“I can imagine the embarrassment though, you’ve got nudes of yourself,” he said.
“I would say to other victims, don’t be scared to come forward because we want to hold those accountable for what they’ve done.”
Anonymity providing cover for offenders
Victoria Police say Grinder has been cooperative with its investigations. (Supplied)
It is about 50 years since the dark days of routine gay bashings and targeted murders on the streets of Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the 2020s, such violence has predominantly taken a different form embraced by a new generation of offenders.
Grindr’s launch in 2009 was a sexual revolution, changing the way gay men, and others, hooked up through a location-based app, leading the way for other companies like the straight-skewing Tinder.
The ability for users on Grindr to be anonymous was appealing for some, including those not wanting to express their sexuality publicly, or in countries where users were at risk of persecution because homosexuality was criminalised.
Sixteen years later that anonymity, through fake profiles, is being used to harm.
“Anonymity gives [offenders] something to hide behind,” criminology PhD candidate Hannah Robertson, from the Australian National University, told 7.30.
She said some forms of violence on dating apps, more broadly, had become normalised.
Grindr revolutionised the way gay men met each other. (grindr.com)
“An Australian Institute of Criminology study in 2022 found that three quarters of users of dating apps in Australia reported experiences of some form of violence, abuse, aggression or harassment,” she said.
“If you’re going to date, you kind of have to be on this technology even though it’s not necessarily enjoyable to you.“
Ms Robertson’s PhD is examining sexualised violence through dating apps and how tech companies have responded.
She said some apps had taken a positive step to sign up to the Australian government’s dating app code, which came into effect in October last year.
The code requires signatories “to implement reporting mechanisms and systems that detect potential incidents of online-enabled harm and take necessary action to address these incidents”.
Ms Robertson said the code was voluntary and did not specifically include hate crimes.
“This is certainly a type of victimisation that has perhaps been overshadowed by broader attention to sexual violence, harassment and aggression,”
she said.
Grindr is a signatory to the code but did not to respond to an interview request by 7.30.
Victoria Police said Grindr had been cooperative with its investigations, including by providing alerts in the app to warn users of incidents.
It said other apps, such as Scruff, SnapChat and Daddyhunt weren’t as responsive.
Could the apps do more?
Grindr has signed up to the Australian government’s dating app code which came into effect last year. (Adobe Stock)
Ms Robertson believed there were deeper questions about the offenders’ motivations.
“That [hate] ideology is not something that exists in this context only, and what we risk in terms of putting too much emphasis on the responsibility of the technology is that the underlying motivation is still going to drive the perpetrators,” she said.
“They’re not going to stop committing these harms and violence, they’re just going to do it elsewhere by other means.”
Melbourne victim Josh said the apps probably could do more to keep users safe.
“They have somewhat of a responsibility, but at the same time when you agree to those terms and conditions you probably should know that there’s a possibility [of harm] … it could happen,” he said.
“A lot of it, I think, is the whole ‘toxic masculinity’ [issue].
“It’s really sad because there was such a movement towards acceptance for the LGBT community and now it’s taking a step backwards.”
Josh has recovered from his injuries but still has problems with his jaw.
He’s wary of who he meets now.
“They could still be looking at my profile and know who I am, but I have no idea who they are,” he said.
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