Piers Akerman says gay people in Australia should apologise for child sex abuse

Piers Akerman says gay people in Australia should apologise for child sex abuse
Image: Image: ABC.

Conservative commentator Piers Akerman has been criticised for an opinion piece blaming the gay community for child sexual abuse.

In the column for The Spectator, Akerman called on the gay community to apologise for sexual abuse and suggested that Sydney’s Mardi Gras pay compensation to victims.

He referred to statistics from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

“One apparently obvious inference from the report’s statistics is that it is mainly boys who are victims (63.6 per cent) and it is mainly adult men who are the perpetrators (92.8 per cent male, and 83.8 per cent adult),” he wrote.

“In short, child abuse in institutions seems to be committed mainly by homosexual men, preying on vulnerable and disturbed children displaced from their own families.”

Akerman compared the situation to the Stolen Generations of First Nations Australians, and called for an apology from the gay community as a whole to people who were abused as children in institutions.

“Perhaps [Sydney Mardi Gras] could underwrite the redress program,” he wrote.

“Or was the whole thing just a distraction from the real issue of child abuse in dysfunctional Aboriginal communities and broken homes?

“Wealthy homosexuals and corporations generously supported the homosexual marriage lobby earlier this year but like the ABC, show no appetite for exposing or indeed even recognising the reality of homosexual abuse in institutions.”

The piece does not discuss statistics showing LGBTI people are far more likely than their cis heterosexual counterparts to be the victims of sexual assault and abuse.

Akerman’s take has been poorly received.

Social media users called the opinion piece “disgusting” and “maybe the most vile thing he’s ever written”.

“I cannot roll my eyes hard enough,” wrote one person.

“He should retract it and then resign,” suggested another.

Akerman is no stranger to controversy and made his feelings about the gay community clear during the marriage equality debate, when he wrote a series of columns accusing the Yes campaign of everything from hypocrisy to bullying.

https://twitter.com/allisongallaghr/status/975969767591854080

https://twitter.com/raena/status/976020773172215811

https://twitter.com/joshuabadge/status/975952728428957696

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11 responses to “Piers Akerman says gay people in Australia should apologise for child sex abuse”

  1. I am reminded of John Guilgud’s comment in Arthur … “Normally, one would have to go to a bowling-alley to meet a person of your stature”.

  2. Thank God for ol Piers, the twisted ol fart. He and others like him still have a valuable part to play. He serves as a living reminder to us all that that the war against phobia, ignorance and hatred is a long way from being over. We can dance around proclaiming love has won etc and feel all fuzzy and gooey inside – but we must never forget the reality….there still really are people out there among us just like him- and there are plenty of them! Despite huge gains in recent years we still have a long way to go.

  3. What a sad desperate man who will deliberately say stupid things that will rile people. He’s a waste of space and hopefully will choke on his own bile that he constantly spits up.

  4. What Piers Ackerman and people of his ilk fail to understand is that abusing children is nothing to do with sexuality, and everything to do with power. Men who sexually abuse boys would no more have sex with another man than they would fly to the moon unassisted.

    The same can be said for men/women who sexually abuse opposite gender people, it is nothing to do with gender or sexual preference, it is all about power.

    As someone who was sexually abused by a married man with children of his own, I can attest to the fact that it had nothing to do with homosexuality and everything do to with his capacity to have power over me and other boys.

  5. A pathetic, uneducated and evil redneck preaching to the population’s other rednecks.
    Yet another of those people who protests too much, in lieu of something to hide (thus, one wonders what’s on his computer’s hard-drive?).

  6. To insinuate that every Gay Man is responsible for child molestations is nothing but hate speech. He should be taken to the Anti Discrimination Board for inciting hate. Now where are all our Gay Lawyers/Barristers, how about launching action against him for defamation on behalf of every Gay Man in Australia ? It is about time this mongrel is put in his place,

  7. What a nice specimen of excrement is Akerman……
    another that fell out of a jackass’s butt and suffered brain damage falling to the ground
    Wikipedia sums him up….A never wasa and a never will-be

  8. Good grief … all in the name of free speech Piers? Nothing like a toxic baby-boomer who is a “legend in his own lunchtime” that harbours racist, homophobic views to creep out of retirement. Piers was one of Rupert’s fossils that brought together such tombs of journalistic bile, like The Herald Sun in Melbourne and The Telegraph in Sydney. The saving grace here is Piers and his cohorts are literally a dying breed.

  9. It’s old idea that gay men are pedophiles makes me want to vomit. Victim blaming and down right homophobia. The stats show that it’s more girls we’re abused and that pedophiles identify as heterosexual. Hate piers so much

  10. The awful statistics for decades have concluded that many more girls are abused than boys, and further we know from the horrific evidence presented to the Royal Commission that many cases of boys being abused occurred at the hands of folks who definitely weren’t about to go marching in the Mardi Gras. How stupid does Piers have to be not to know these two obvious facts?