Roughly one in six Australians believe gay people should be “charged as criminals”
Image: Image: Sebastian Rice.
New research has revealed one in six Australians agree that people in same-sex relationships “should be charged as criminals”.
The 2017 Ilga-Riwi Global Attitudes Survey, which surveyed people in 77 countries, also showed that overall a quarter of people agreed with the statement, The Guardian has reported.
About one in five North Americans thought that gay people should be charged as criminals, while 45 per cent of respondents from African countries agreed.
The researchers said that laws in each country affected how people see the LGBTI community.
“The law of the law affects the attitudes of people in the land,” said researcher Aengus Carroll.
“In repressive states where there are repressive laws, attitudes of the public are affected by the laws and this is very clear in this data.”
The study also investigated attitudes to trans people.
Worldwide, only 50 per cent of respondents thought that trans people should be legally recognised as their self-identified gender.
The survey showed that people who know a queer or trans person are more likely to support their rights, with 73 per cent agreeing that equal rights should apply to everyone, compared to 44 per cent of people who said they didn’t know any LGBTI people.
“It is universally clear that when respondents know someone belonging to sexual or gender minorities in their cultures, their attitudes appear to be significantly more inclusive and inclined towards equal treatment,” said the researchers.
No surprises there. As someone who lives in the real world; i.e. outside the insular gay ghetto, I can say Australia is not the laid back relaxed and progressive country that people overseas seem to think it is. On the contrary, as someone once said in the comments section of the Herald, “Australia is just like Texas but with better beaches.”
There’s still plenty of homophobia amongst young people; not just conservative old boomers.
Although this was based on an abysmal understanding of human sexuality, psychology, criminology and sociology it is a terrible fact that a great many Australians have lived in states where being gay was criminal for the majority of their lives and this had broad support among the ill-informed masses. It’s no surprise that this view lingers among some.
As a survey a few months back showed, about 8 percent of Greens voters oppose marriage equality while 50 percent of One Nation supporters are in favour. I don’t know which of those stats is weirder. We’ve got a lot of people in our community who have some pretty major blind spots on certain social, economic and political matters. And we’re not really very different to the rest of the world in that regard.
This number will come down with time. Millennials don’t seem to even get what the fuss about sexuality or gender identity is about. And this is also true throughout the western world.