Grace Ritter: Sydney killings highlight deepest fears of queer community

Over the past few weeks, as the terrible news about the alleged murder of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird has unfolded, my phone has buzzed periodically with updates, not from news alerts but from friends.

I first heard about the news story via a link shared in a group chat. At the time, Mr Davies and Mr Baird were still believed missing. “Could it be a gay bashing?” a friend asked, voicing the fear I knew we all shared.

A second friend supplied a chilling update a few hours later: “Now detectives are searching for NSW cop who was the ex-boyfriend”.

For many members of the queer community, it’s been a tragedy that has been hard to look away from. The couple had been missing since February 18. A number of bloodied items were found in a skip bin the following Wednesday. By Friday, a 28-year-old police officer, who had previously been in a relationship with Jesse Baird, was charged with their murder. This week, police have reported the discovery of the men’s bodies.

There is much we don’t yet know. But what we do know has caused two separate but related fears to resurface in many of us. First, the fear of violent men. Second, the fear of violent police officers.

We hear about violent men all too often across the country. Of the family violence that is reported in Australia, 75 per cent of incidents involve a male perpetrator. There are likely to be substantially more unreported incidents.

As a family lawyer, I often work with people whose lives have been profoundly affected by family violence, and many of their stories aren’t the typical family violence stories we hear. Often, survivors of family violence are not the thin, frail white women who feature in TV shows and anti-DV campaigns.

By being too reductive in the way we discuss family violence, we remove the nuances that will be necessary in our work to fight it. Perhaps more tragically, we might also be failing the people we seek to help if they can’t recognise themselves in the resources we offer.

Research backs this up: LGBTIQA+ West Australians have reported significant perceived barriers to accessing services for intimate partner violence support. The Safer Options Research Report published by Curtin University in December indicated 39 per cent of survey respondents believed that support services would fail to recognise their experience of intimate partner violence or fail to take it seriously because they were queer.

Other perceived barriers included “lack of LGBTIQA+ specific or inclusive services” (39 per cent), “having to fit into gender binary service access criteria” (26 per cent), and “dismissal by professionals of a victim’s experience of intimate partner violence as mutual” (25 per cent). Family violence isn’t a problem only for the straight community, but the support is absent.

The fear of violence by police is no less complex for our queer community. Across the country, and indeed around the world, police were historically instrumental in the persecution of queer people. In WA, homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1989, and the memory of police persecution remains fresh for many.

Various studies report the lack of trust LGBTIQA + people tend to hold in police, which in turn limits the ability of police to monitor and act on criminal acts perpetrated on queer people. As recently as 2018, a report tabled in WA Parliament suggested an ongoing fear of being discriminated against by police was likely to be contributing to underreporting of hate crimes against LGBTIQA + West Australians.

Right now, on the eve of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, graphics declaring “NO COPS AT PRIDE” have once again been splashed across my Instagram feed. Several have borne an image of the alleged murderer of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird. That it is alleged the murder was committed with a police pistol does nothing to quell concerns.

The Sydney Mardi Gras board has requested NSW Police not join this year’s march. The anger is palpable, and the mistrust is real.

Ultimately, acts of violence rarely have a simple root cause. If they did, we can only hope we would have eradicated family violence a long time ago.

We’ll never truly know the intersection of personal, social and cultural factors that led to the deaths of people like Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. But we must take care not to flatten our discussions by reverting to stereotypes for victims or perpetrators.

It may be tempting to focus on the bigger picture when facing such a broad problem. But it’s essential we take time to zoom in and listen to the lived experiences of individuals. Only then can we hope to make real change. Only then can we properly look after each other?

And as our community mourns the loss of two of our own, looking after each other is more important than ever.