Opinion & Commentary
A lesson from the real world
Another football season has begun and another footballer has allegedly behaved reprehensively towards women. The National Rugby League player Brett Stewart, Manly-Warringah's premiership-winning fullback and NSW State of Origin and Australian representative, has been charged with allegedly sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl as he made his way home following his club's season launch at a local hotel.
Stewart has been suspended for four weeks by the NRL for being drunk and bringing the game into disrepute. Compounding the NRL's embarrassment is the fact it chose Stewart to be the face of the league's multimillion-dollar marketing campaign for the 2009 season, a campaign that also has had to be suspended.
Stewart was picked to front the campaign because he was a fantastic player, had a spotless record and appeared to be of thoroughly good character. He also had overcome the challenges of Type 1 diabetes to play at the highest level. He seemed to be the role model that every mother could love and that league desperately needed to burnish its tarnished image. That strategy has gone horribly wrong and has become grist to the mill of jock-hating critics who claim that league has an intractable problem with rampant alcohol abuse and allegations of violence and sexual abuse of women.
The Stewart matter is before the courts and Stewart is entitled to the presumption of innocence. It is the job of the legal system to establish guilt or innocence.
More broadly, there is a long history of allegations involving sexual abuse by a small minority of rugby league players at various levels. It is hardly clear what role the so-called misogynist culture of sport plays.
Nevertheless, the allegations of abuse through the years have been transformed into something more than a salutary tale of often alcohol-fuelled individual irresponsibility that may or may not deserve full condemnation and appropriate criminal punishment.
Allegations of abuse of women have become a new battleground in the gender war as some commentators have gone far beyond condemning football.
According to Sydney academic Catharine Lumby, rugby league is a microcosm of society and represents the tip of the epidemic of sexual and physical violence perpetrated by men against women and children throughout Australia. Conflating the bad behaviour of relatively small numbers of individuals into a broader social problem, she argues that violence and sexual assault are products of the sexist attitudes that prevail among Australian men. Unreconstructed Australian males justify their actions because of the way they view women as mere chattels 'who ask for it.'
This is a simplistic and overblown caricature of an anti-women national culture that supposedly authorises appalling behaviour. It is debunked by the law-abiding and mutually respectful lives led by millions of Australian men and women every day.
Because of heightened awareness in contemporary times, violence towards women is widely denounced as morally abhorrent and aberrant and an inexcusable crime by men and women alike. But rather than recognise the progress made in discouraging abuse and sanctioning the perpetrators, it's Australian men who have been put in the dock.
Yet the strategies the same academic proposes to curb sexist attitudes and control men's brutal behaviour, through greater education, are peculiar and puzzling. By their own account, feminist warriors play cultural politics, blame lack of instruction and call in the sensitivity trainers while the women and children bleed.
The latest controversy tells us a lot about the confused attitudes of modern elites when it comes to maintaining law and order. The absurd idea that Lumby and her fellow travellers promote is that education can civilise brutes and make up for the low morals and deficits of character that account for the way some men behave.
Unfortunately, the NRL has signed up to these strange notions of social control in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to head off the possibility of more allegations ofsexual assault.
Following the spate of scandals that have dogged the game in recent years, the NRL hired a group of academics and counsellors including Lumby to run an 'award-winning' education program. It has been tough going for the Playing by the Rules program, which has tried but failed to prevent a small percentage of players from behaving badly. This shows that rugby league is no different from any other profession, which all have their share of bad eggs and reprobates. The only difference is the public scrutiny that footy players receive, which ensures their misdemeanours are splashed all over the media.
It isn't hard to figure out why the education program hasn't succeeded in protecting the sport. Participants in the Playing by the Rules program receive lessons covering a selection of Olympian moral challenges. These include learning how to behave respectfully when trying to drunkenly negotiate consensual liaisons with a member of the opposite sex.
This is a lesson that no self-respecting man, Australian or otherwise, needs to learn. Only a moral cretin or worse does not know the proper rules to play by in these circumstances. Furthermore, a moral cretin, let alone a violent misogynist, is unlikely to suddenly come over all respectful and sensitive to women because a politically correct middle-class academic tells him he should.
If most men did not know right from wrong and the proper way to behave around women, then our society would be in real trouble. But that is precisely the issue according to the architects of Playing by the Rules. According to Lumby, the whole point of the program is that it teaches lessons that men, in general, must learn to prevent violence towards women. The deeply insulting and highly sexist allegation is that most men—at least among those likely to become footballers—are potential or crypto abusers of women and therefore need to undergo an education program to teach them how to treat women with respect.
Here lies the chief problem with the Playing by the Rules program. Not only does it encourage moral confusion where none exists but, by attributing the abuse of women to the intangible influence of the sexist national culture, it also abrogates personal responsibility and takes the importance of individual character out of the equation. The fundamental point that is overlooked is that a person's character is the factor that ultimately dictates how they behave.
Character encompasses virtues that include self-control and respect for others. Character is shaped in part by nature and in part by nurture and the example set by parents. It is also formed by schooling in the broadest sense of learning about oneself and the correct way to act from role models and personal experiences. Give me the boy to educate and I'll show you the man, or so the saying goes. But it cuts both ways, and the general rule is that by the time the boy is an adult he has become the man he was always going to be.
Some individuals possess character and act morally, and some individuals lack character and act immorally. The parliament, the police, and the courts are the proper arbiters of the socially acceptable standards of behaviour we must not transgress. The primary purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the rest of us from the bad behaviour of criminals. The deterrent effect of punishing criminals also demonstrates the importance society attaches to enforcing the rules that all are expected to obey. Ordinary decent citizens know and respect these principles, and this is the reason they are so outraged when modern judges let criminals off with light sentences for terrible crimes.
This isn't the way that new age social engineers such as Lumby see things. They reject the traditional approach to crime and punishment in favour of grand sociological theories that excuse the criminal. The real culprit is said to be society because amorphous social forces ranging from class to sexism determine how people act. Their theory is that by changing the dominant social forces in society—in this case, male attitudes towards women by the mass re-education of men—you can prevent criminal behaviour.
This soft and soft-headed approach to combating crime—which privileges the role of the educators—is naive, especially regarding sexual assault. There are few worse crimes than the forcible violation of another person in the most intimate and humiliating way. For moral people, most men included, no always means no, and refusal to accept it is the crime of the man who mercilessly pursues his gratification without empathy for his victims.
The Playing by the Rules program stares this crime in the face only to banalise evil. Calling in the thought police to provide more education is futile. The notion that anyone capable of perpetrating so gross an act as rape, for example, can be transformed into a moral man by re-education programs is an academic fantasy. The proper place for these offenders, if convicted by due process, is the jail cell, not the classroom.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow in the Social Foundations program at the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies.
