A study of 74 anti-gay murders in New South Wales over the past 20 years conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology showed that victims were usually killed by a stranger in incidents that involved high levels of violence, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

The report revealed that weapons used in the 74 murders included a claw hammer, a saw, a fire extinguisher, a spade, a car wheel brace, and a crossbow and arrow and most victims died from being kicked and punched with great force.

Adam Graycar, director of the institute said that the crimes in the report stood out as disturbingly different.

"We discovered so much more brutality than in other kinds of homicides - these killings were more likely to be done as sport."

According to the report, 43 per cent of the perpetrators were teenagers at the time of the murder, 38 per cent were in their 20s and 11 were over 30 while many victims were middle-aged or older men, with a peak in the 30s and 40s.

Dr Stephen Tomsen also found that the great bulk of the fatalities were retaliatory assaults intended to punish a homosexual advance.

The report also found that the young assailants generally had a low socio-economic status, limited education and were often unemployed and only six were classified as having a serious mental disturbance.

David Buchanan, SC, a member of the NSW Attorney-General Department's Homosexual Advance Defence Monitoring Committee, said although the justification of violence on the grounds that homosexuality was wrong or offensive was no longer acceptable, it was not unusual for those who murdered gay men to claim their actions were an uncontrollable response to an unwanted sexual advance.

"If women responded to unwanted sexual advances in the way these men claim they did, the streets of the state would be littered with corpses," he added.

Anti-gay violence was dangerously underreported, and many gay men and lesbians had grown to expect a level of violence to affect their lives, Brad Gray, co-ordinator of the Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project told the paper.

Dr Graycar believes that education is the key to crime prevention: "People must be taught, in schools and elsewhere, that it is not acceptable to turn on someone because they are gay," he told the paper.

"Some of the perpetrators ... do not believe they have done anything wrong, and in fact expect society to applaud them for what they have done."

The Herald noted that despite having one of the largest gay and lesbian subcultures in the world, inner-city Sydney is also the scene of a large percentage of the state's gay-hate crimes.