Peter Gary Tatchell

Peter Tatchell, 2016.

Peter Gary Tatchell (born 25 January 1952) is an Australian-born British human rights campaigner, best known for his work with LGBTQ social movements.

Tatchell was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey in 1981. He was then denounced by party leader Michael Foot for ostensibly supporting extra-Parliamentary action against the Thatcher government. Labour subsequently allowed him to stand in the Bermondsey by-election in February 1983, in which the party lost the seat to the Liberals. In the 1990s he campaigned for LGBTQ rights through the direct action group OutRage!, which he co-founded. He has worked on various campaigns, such as Stop Murder Music against music lyrics allegedly inciting violence against LGBT people and writes and broadcasts on various human rights and social justice issues. He attempted a citizen's arrest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 1999 and again in 2001.

In April 2004, Tatchell joined the Green Party of England and Wales and in 2007 was selected as prospective Parliamentary candidate in the constituency of Oxford East, but in December 2009 he stood down due to brain damage acquired mainly during protests, as well as from a bus accident. Since 2011, he has been Director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation. He has taken part in over 30 debates at the Oxford Union, encompassing a wide range of issues such as patriotism, Thatcherism and university safe spaces.

Age of Consent

In 1996, Tatchell led an OutRage! campaign to reduce the age of consent in the UK to 14 years (as per Romeo and Juliet laws), to adjust for studies that showed nearly half of all young people had their first sexual experiences prior to 16 years old, regardless of sexuality. He stated that he wished to exempt these people from being "treated as criminals by the law", and that there should be no prosecution if the difference in ages of the sexual partners was no more than three years, provided that these youths were consenting and were given a more comprehensive sex education at a younger date. On 10 March 2008, in the Irish Independent, he repeated his call for a lower age of consent to end the criminalisation of young people engaged in consenting sex and to remove the legal obstacles to upfront sex education, condom provision and safer sex advice.

In 1997, Tatchell wrote a letter to The Guardian defending an academic book about "boy-love" against what he has said was "censorship". In the letter, Tatchell said "Whilst it may be impossible to condone paedophilia, it is time society acknowledged the truth that not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful", citing examples of "Papuan tribes and some of my friends" who did not feel harmed by these experiences. Tatchell later said that the letter was edited, and that he "was not endorsing their viewpoint but merely stating that they had a different perspective from the mainstream opinion". Tatchell has, on several occasions, since reiterated that he does not condone adults having sex with children and that his "articles urging an age of consent of 14 are motivated solely by a desire to reduce the criminalisation of under-16s who have consenting relationships with other young people of similar ages". Following the publication of a photo of Tatchell alongside the Irish Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Roderic O'Gorman, on Twitter, at a Pride event, O'Gorman issued a statement outlining that the apparent views in Tatchell's letter—written 23 years ago, when O'Gorman was 15—were "abhorrent" to him, and that he appreciated that Tatchell had since clarified his own position.

In 2011, Tatchell wrote an obituary in The Independent for Scottish gay rights activist Ian Dunn. Tatchell later said that he had not known about Dunn's connections with the Paedophile Information Exchange until "many years after", and denounced PIE as "disgusting". In July 2021, Hayley Dixon, Melanie Newman and Julie Bindel said in the Daily Telegraph that a positive review of the pro-paedophilia book Betrayal of Youth, attributed to Peter Tatchell, had appeared in the June 1987 edition of the Communist Party of Great Britain newsletter. The review reportedly stated that "consenting, victimless sexual relationships between younger and older people should not be penalised by the law". Tatchell said he hadn't read the book at the time and that a colleague wrote the review for him. He apologised for the review and said it did not reflect his views. Tatchell had also contributed a chapter to the same book, which he later said he had been "conned" into submitting.

Wikipedia

This article contains information imported from the English Wikipedia. In most cases the page history will have details. If you need information on the importation and have difficulty obtaining it please contact the site administrators.

Wikipedia shows a strong woke bias. Text copied over from Wikipedia can be corrected and improved.