How do you keep a nude beach safe from sex pests, accepting nudity is not the cause, but that a remote location can encourage predatory opportunism? For me, Tyagarah nude beach is a wicked problem. And I don’t mean morally. I mean culturally.
A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that’s difficult or impossible to solve because of its complex and interconnected nature. Wicked problems lack clarity in both their aims and solutions and are subject to real-world constraints which hinder risk-free attempts to find a solution. We need to drop our binary lens to solve this one, so I’m going to have a crack (pardon the pun).
I have listened to both sides of the argument and it’s hard (pardon the pun, again). It leaves me supporting the rights of liberty requested by both sides of the argument. That is a) the right for people to swim naked with their associated community at a designated location, recognised and protected by the law, and b) for people living in that area, and attending the beach to enjoy said beach, clothed or unclothed, free of harassment and sexual predation.
They are both perfectly reasonable requests, and we should aim to achieve both goals, thus ensuring the continuity of a much-loved nude beach, AND the safety of all those attending or living nearby. I feel like the conversation we have been having has been reduced to an ‘either/or’ situation, where the argument is ‘free thinking libertarians who are comfortable with nudity’ vs. ‘anti-freedom body shaming prudes.’ I don’t think that’s fair.
It has minimised, and at times erased, the harassment and predation many local residents have experienced and made the argument about public morality, rather than everyone’s right to not be confronted by a man masturbating in the carpark.
Surely addressing sexual predation and harassment is in the interests not just of local residents, but of anyone attending a nude beach? Shouldn’t safety for all beach users be a number one priority?
So I decided to listen to some local residents. One of the women told me about being followed home by a man asking her to get in his car. Others spoke of being confronted by men publicly masturbating on the beach or in the carpark. When one woman took her phone out to film a perpetrator as advised by the police, he chased her off the beach. She was terrified. Stories come gushing like a tap. They all spoke of being laughed at by authorities, and how the sexual predation was constant. They’re scared. And they’re over it. I wondered if a woman or child confronted by a man masturbating at The Pass would be treated with the same disregard?
Why are we minimising sexual assault? It’s not the fault of the nudists. They want safety too. But we have to face facts, predators are by nature opportunistic. A remote nude beach means surveillance is irregular if at all. It seems unfair to ask one portion of the community to suffer the unintended consequences of a remotely located naturist beach. As a speaker at the infamous 1997 Nude Ain’t Rude Rally calling for clothing-optional beaches at Belongil, the argument was that remote nude beaches make beach users unsafe as it opened the door for sexual predators to be unchecked.
In 2017 a young backpacker was raped at Tyagarah Nature Reserve by a man who said ‘you asked for this, you came to a nude beach all by yourself.’ This was widely reported. That perpetrator went to prison for nine years. He’ll be out soon. So let’s stop hiding nude beaches in places that make women vulnerable?
If we are really OK with it, then let’s locate clothing-optional beaches closer to town? Let’s trial days of the week, or hours of the day? I attended the English Garden in Munich. In the centre of the city is an enormous park with nude bathing. One side of the river is nude, the other is clothed. They are fully visible to each other. Everyone looked pretty comfortable. So clearly, other countries have made it work.
One thing that hasn’t been addressed adequately is the impact of online platforms supercharging the safety concerns. Tyagarah Beach is EVERYWHERE online. One post was asking for people to come shoot a porno. It shouldn’t be a debate about to nude or not to nude, it’s simply: how do we get rid of the uninvited wankers?
Queensland. It’s a major wanker source. You see they made nude beaches illegal so anyone who wants to access beaches has to come to ours. Local residents remarked that during Covid, with border closures, the sexual predation was close to nil. So was it mainly Queenslanders driving down to engage in predation? Anecdotally it would appear it’s not locals who are the problem. Sex pests are the cane toads of naturist beaches. So is this a way of solving this wicked problem? Border control? You shouldn’t need a global pandemic to feel safe.
So instead of talking about nudity, maybe we need to start talking about how we tackle predation. Predictably it’s men. To date no masturbating women have chased men on the beach or followed men in their cars demanding they get in.
Maybe the root (pardon the pun) of the wicked problem is, we’ve been talking about the wrong thing.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
