Aurora Meeting 29th March 2006
at 7pm in Croydon Town Hall
Forced Marriage
Our gay Muslim contacts were strongly aware of other lesbians and gay men being forced into marriage and they recommended that we refer to the government’s new Forced Marriage Unit on our website.
Transgender Safety issues
We had looked at the general issue of safety of transgender people, following recent incidents. A project had been set up between our Transgender Working Party and TransPol-UK to discuss which safety issues for most people were different for transgendered. The project took the Suzy Lamplugh Trust’s booklet, Living Safely, as a basis, and was investigating how this general advice should be adapted.
Assault after sex in a cruising ground
Our LGBT police officer asked us to disseminate information on an attack which began in a local cruising ground. Initially the assailant had had sex with the cruiser. It was important to remember that someone is not more likely to be trusted because you’ve had sex with them.
Reporting system
The proposed reporting system for cruisers was now under way.
Community Safety Unit report
Unusually, there were no new LGBT hate crimes reported this meeting. Members perceived that these incidents were often not mentioned until the next Aurora meeting, and asked if we could be told about them sooner, so that we could act more usefully when appropriate.
We were told that the information was normally made available as soon as possible. However, each case is different and information is only given if the victim consents.
Victims would normally be told about Aurora, but they could, in principle be given printed details.
Croydon’s Press Officer
We asked that press notices relevant to LGBT issues might be copied to Aurora, and the Press Officer and LGBT liaison officer agreed to let us know about incidents and requests for information early, when appropriate. The police have no other means to target information or witness requests promptly to LGBT people.
The Press Officer was asked if there were guidelines for dealing with cruising incidents and could we see them. The answer was that they were part of a great volume of information which was impractical to reproduce, and the request to release these police policy documents was unlikely to be met.
The forthcoming event for the International Day Against Homophobia was outlined. It would precede the next meeting on May 17th.
CCTV, the gross indecency offence and HIV and AIDS prevention teaching in schools
We had run out of time in each of the previous three meetings and had not been able to deal with this topic. A lengthy document had been produced, but various members had not read it.
CCTV was seen to be used freely here in Croydon, and it was common if not usual for it be used outside the provisions and safeguards of the law. It was established that the police could and did seize this material if it was expected to be relevant to their investigations. They could not say whether their material on the recent killing of Sally-Ann Bowman
had been gained mostly illegally or legally, as this was an on-going investigation.
In one of several wide diversions from the topic on the Agenda, we outlined the procedure by which gross indecency offenders could have their names removed from the ‘sex offenders register’ after two years. It was felt that system should be more widely known and the lgbt liaison officer offered to research the details.
It was established that heterosexual parents were also guilty of the gross indecency offence if they had sex while their children were in the dwelling (this applied particularly to ‘unsafe’ penetrative sex). If this activity were registered on their criminal record, this would prevent them from becoming school governors, and would have a strong effect in countering the teaching of unsafe sex in state funded schools, as this topic is exclusively the prerogative of school governors. However, the police would not act on such offences unless someone complained.
Borough Commander, Mark Gore
Two members of the Publicity Working Party had been invited to meet the new Borough Commander. He had been very positive about Aurora but had not committed himself to the extent of funding any of our projects.