Fight Like A Girl

by Clementine Ford

  This citation of the law as some kind of incontrovertible celestial ruling is particularly galling when you see how it helps to prop up the foundations of a very much man-made rape culture. If you’re paying any kind of attention at all, you’ll know that society overwhelmingly directs the responsibility for rape prevention towards women. These are the social ‘laws’ that women are instructed to follow if we want to participate in general life. We’re reminded frequently to ‘take care of ourselves’. To not drink too much, dress sensibly and not behave unwisely with strange men. Our bodies are positioned as some kind of external piece of equipment that, without proper care and attention, can be stolen or broken into after we’ve been careless enough to leave them discarded or unlocked somewhere. Stranger-rape still dominates most of the conversation around rape prevention, despite it posing the least likely risk to women’s bodily safety. Because of this, the majority of victims and the factors which lead to their abuse are ignored.

  Our current strategy of expecting women to be responsible for preventing rape ignores two fundamental issues: how rape is both a gendered crime and an act of casual dehumanisation. But more so, it shifts the emphasis from legislative and law enforcement bodies to actually end sexual violence (or at least establish zero tolerance policies around it) to that of ‘social law’ – i.e. the need for women to self-regulate so that we don’t disrupt the status quo.

  In 2013, American political analyst Zerlina Maxwell earned the damnation of the Fox News audience when she appeared on the show Hannity to discuss whether or not women should be armed in order to protect themselves from sexual assault. Maxwell, a rape survivor, made the daring suggestion that women shouldn’t be directed to do anything when it comes to sexual violence. Instead, she argued that we need to start telling men not to rape people.

  As Maxwell so succinctly told host Sean Hannity, ‘You’re talking about this as if it’s some faceless, nameless criminal, when a lot of times it’s someone you know and trust. If you train men not to grow up to become rapists, you prevent rape.’

  Cue predictable outrage and, ironically, an onslaught of threats against Maxwell that included rape. Because there is nothing more frightening to a society intent on demonising women’s behaviour than even the merest hint that men’s behaviour might be in need of regulation.

  Here is the uncomfortable truth that remains conspicuously absent from most mainstream discussions about rape prevention: rape is a gendered crime almost always committed by men. Figures released by the Victorian Crime Statistic Agency show that in the fiscal year of 2011/2012, 78 percent of juvenile and 90 percent of adult victims of sexual assault were women, while 95 percent of juvenile offenders and adult offenders were men.

  This isn’t to say that all men are potential rapists (although the culture of rape apology certainly paints them that way when it perpetuates the idea that men have sexual needs that can be triggered by women’s behaviour), nor does it deny that men can be victims themselves. It’s merely to state the obvious: that rape is a crime almost solely perpetrated by men and almost solely experienced by women.

  But perhaps it’s easier for men to absolve themselves of responsibility for caring about these numbers because, unless they’re in a high risk group for incarceration, the threat of rape isn’t something they’re taught to live with. And if they don’t feel like rape is something they’ll ever perpetrate, then it’s easy to imagine it has nothing to do with them at all. The fears and threats to women therefore become our problem alone to solve, far away from any space in which men might have to hear about it and thus be unfairly maligned or implicated.

  Again, this comes back to the way a form of social law is practised around sexual assault in place of an effective public and judicial legislation that places the onus of blame onto perpetrators. Why can’t we mount an effective campaign that puts men front and centre as both the cause and the solution? Because here’s another stat to add to those cited above. When Canada ran its ‘Don’t Be That Guy’ campaign, a visual project directing men to alter their behaviour by shifting the responsibility of rape and sexual assault prevention onto them, reported incidents of sexual assault dropped by 10 percent. This is a significant difference when you consider the fact that one in five girls over the age of fifteen will report being sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

  Still, it’s very difficult to have straightforward conversations about rape culture, particularly in a society that relies on victim blaming to avoid looking to closely at patriarchal dominance. In Australia, this is particularly evident in the way rape culture is covered up in the sporting community. In the AFL’s recent history, more than thirty-six footballers have faced charges of sexual assault (and that doesn’t take into account the fact that, despite my general pessimism, we have actually moved forward enough as a society that women report rape and sexual assault now at a rate that was unheard of as recently as twenty years ago).

  To date, not a single one of these players has been found guilty.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that allegations are automatically fact. Of course everyone’s entitled to a presumption of innocence, and false charges for rape do exist (although at essentially the same rate as any other crime, which is roughly 2 percent). I’m also not suggesting that a footballer can never be falsely accused of a sex crime. But it seems pretty suspicious to me that a culture which a) admits to fostering entitlement and privilege among young men, and b) does this while simultaneously demonstrating overwhelming evidence of its disdain towards young women would not have a single situation in which one of these young men was guilty of violating precisely the kind of person who holds the least value within their community. Not a single one?

  There are eighteen teams in the AFL. Twenty-two players are selected for each game. That means there is a minimum of 396 players across the board each year, operating in a professional and social environment that treats them like heroes and works furiously hard to clean up the messes they leave behind so that the precious team machine isn’t affected. This is the same league that heavily penalises players for taking recreational drugs or attacking another player on field, but gives ‘indefinite suspensions’ lasting a single game for players who beat their girlfriends. (Consider, for example, the suspension in 2009 of Adelaide Crows player Nathan Bock. Bock admitted to assaulting his girlfriend at a nightclub and was given a suspension that management stated would last indefinitely. He was back on the field one week later. The next year, Bock was drafted to the Gold Coast Suns and given a massive pay rise.)

  So: 396 players every year in a hyper-masculinised culture of entitlement sitting on top of an already existing culture in which one-fifth of all women are sexually assaulted. Women are a fundamental part of the fan base that attends AFL games, accounting for approximately 40 percent of members and attendees. At any given game, the stadium will be packed with thousands of them. Thousands of women, and one-fifth of all of them have been sexually assaulted. Statistically, it will have been by somebody they know well or someone who moves in the same circles as them.

  Now look at all those thousands of men: the players, the fans, the umpires, the coaches, the management team, the media. There’s a lot of them, right? Zoom out even further and look at all the men you know, the ones you know from school, your work, your sports club, the pub you go to on a Saturday night, the mates you chat with in online forums, the blokes who fix your car, who catch your train in the morning, who call their mothers on Mother’s Day, who walk past you on the street on their way to doing normal, everyday things. Men with families, friends, colleagues, siblings, children – people who’d swear to the heavens that they were all Decent and Good and would never do anything to harm a woman at all and how dare you even suggest that, there’s literally nothing in the world more offensive than suggesting that Good, Ordinary, Decent Blokes with friends and family who love them might also be capable of exercising power over women to take what they feel they deserve.

  One-fifth of all women over the a
ge of fifteen sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Most of them by people they know.

  Do the damn maths.

  The only AFL figure to have come close to being made culpable for sexual assault is Stephen Milne, a former player for the St Kilda Football Club. In 2004, a young woman went to the police and alleged that Milne had raped her after a night out. The woman, who had been having sex with Milne’s then-teammate Leigh Montagna, alleged that Milne snuck into the dark room. Pretending to be Montagna, Milne proceeded to initiate what she thought was round two. It was only midway through that she realised this wasn’t the consensual sex she had signed up for with one man: this was assault perpetrated by a different man altogether. Fronting the police afterwards, Milne described her as ‘just one of those footy sluts that runs around looking for footballers to fuck’. The charges were dismissed in what I would call ‘dubious circumstances’, and nothing more came of it.

  Nothing more came of it, that is, until a decade later, when new rape charges relating to the incident were brought against Milne. This time, his teammates – the good and noble blokes of the St Kilda FC (which makes a pretence of supporting the White Ribbon Foundation and its supposed stance against gendered violence) – held a public fundraiser to help pay for Milne’s legal costs. After all, boys have gotta stick together against the footy sluts, right? News of the fundraiser resulted in a modicum of backlash, but others came out in support of the team. ‘What else are they supposed to do?’ irate fans asked. ‘What happened to innocent until proven guilty?!’ ‘Can’t mates help each other out?!’ As it turned out, proceeds from the drive might have ended up helping to pay the limp and pathetic $15,000 fine Milne was slapped with after he finally admitted fault and pled guilty to the lesser charge of indecent assault.

  But despite the overwhelming public rush to urge respect for ‘due process’ when sexual assault allegations are made, admissions of fault aren’t guaranteed to lead to any actual condemnation from either the legal system or the community at large. Despite Milne’s guilty plea, Judge Michael Bourke’s sentencing remarks not only made sure to mention that the act was ‘out of character’ (as if the way someone treats, say, their friends is automatically indistinguishable from the way they treat their rape victims) but also noted how much ‘distress’ the situation had caused Milne and his family over the last ten years. Being accused of an act for which some kind of responsibility is eventually claimed is apparently traumatising not for the victim of that act, but the perpetrator and his poor, beleaguered family. But, then, Bourke also referred to the assault as ‘unplanned and spontaneous’, saying ‘there was no threatening or violent offending’.

  Isn’t it lucky that a male judge can make that call on behalf of a rape survivor for whom justice has taken ten years?

  The reality of rape is that it’s overwhelmingly more likely than not to be ‘unplanned and spontaneous’, and for a judge to decide that this makes it somehow ‘not threatening or violent’ is absurd. Threats transpire as more than just the use of physical force, and violence can be felt as more than just physical pain. Oh, but Judge Bourke did acknowledge that the victim had ‘done nothing wrong’ and ‘did not deserve what happened to her’ – language that is careless, obviously, but implies through its carelessness that there might be a circumstance in which she did do something wrong and thus ‘deserved’ it. This is the language that underpins rape culture, and it is shocking how many people are fluent in it.

  This scene is frustratingly reminiscent of the trial of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner, a twenty-year-old man convicted in early 2016 of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman at an on-campus party one year earlier. Turner’s assault of the woman, which occurred in public behind a dumpster and was so severe that doctors found abrasions, lacerations and dirt in her vagina, was interrupted by two graduate students passing by on their bicycles. Turner ran for it, but the men chased him and held him down until police arrived. His victim woke up hours later at the Valley Medical Center in San Jose. She would learn the specifics of the sexual violation later, after reading a news report about it on her phone.

  As unprecedented as it seems to convict privileged young white boys of sexually assaulting drunk girls at parties, Turner’s sentencing made international headlines for two major reasons. The first was because of the leniency of the sentence handed down by Judge Aaron Persky, himself a Stanford alum and former college sports star. Persky ignored requests from prosecutors for Turner to be given a minimum sentence of six years, saying, ‘A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him . . . I think he will not be a danger to others.’ Instead, he sentenced Turner to a measly six months in the county jail. With time served, Turner would be likely to serve less than three.

  That a man like Turner found favour with America’s legal system is hardly surprising – but it especially grated with what came next. That is, the publication of the twelve-page victim impact statement read to the court by his victim. In excoriating prose, ‘Jane Doe’ outlined exactly what Turner had taken from her that night.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she began, ‘but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.’

  Within days, her statement had been shared almost twelve million times. Rarely do we get to hear the voices of survivors, especially in such searing ways. The strength of her words seemed to cut through a culture more accustomed to treating survivors with suspicion rather than support, and cast Turner’s pathetic sentence under an even harsher spotlight.

  While it’s encouraging to see a different response playing out in Turner’s case, there are still signs of how much farther we have to go. Turner’s family seem to be refusing to acknowledge the crimes of their son, with his father stating in a character reference that Turner didn’t deserve to be punished for ‘twenty minutes of action’. Like so many people, they blame a culture of binge drinking for ‘causing’ rape as opposed to, you know, rapists.

  Meanwhile, I’m left to wonder how differently things might have played out had Turner chosen to perpetrate his crime in a secluded room instead of out in the open. If he had coerced a woman with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit back to a bedroom (or worse, discovered her after she’d taken herself off to lie down) and violated her in private, would people be so quick to offer their support? Or would it be business as usual at Rape Culture HQ, with sceptics everywhere deciding that this was just another case of consensual sex gone awry – a decision fuelled by alcohol and lowered inhibitions and a slut who decided after the fact that she ‘wasn’t that type of girl’? If the graduate students who’d intervened had been women instead of men, would people be as inclined to believe them? Or would there be speculation about whether or not this was some kind of orchestrated plan, a collusion designed to ruin an innocent young man’s life because Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?

  But the witnesses were men, and that gives them some kind of additional authority with which to judge. According to popular mythology, men have no reason to lie when they report rape. They can be the heroic bystanders intervening to rescue the damsel in distress, which proves immensely appealing for those men accustomed to seeing themselves centrally represented in almost every narrative the world offers them.

  Perhaps that’s why other stories of sexual violence and coercion play so poorly to broader audiences – without heroic male bystanders to intervene and save the day, men listening in after the fact automatically project themselves into the shoes of the only other men in the room: to wit, the rapists. Nestled in that uncomfortable dynamic, it becomes much more pressing to find ways to excuse or even nullify a behaviour that is far more common than men might like to admit.

  Consider another football code and the liberties extended to those who triumph in it. In 2009, the ABC TV’s Four Corners screened ‘Code of Silence’, a report into the sexual bonding activities present across some of Australia’s sporting codes. Part of the report detailed a 2002 pack sex incident involving a young woman in
New Zealand and members of the Cronulla Sharks, one of the teams in Australia’s National Rugby League. The woman, referred to on Four Corners as ‘Clare’, was working as a barmaid at the time at a hotel where the players were staying. She allegedly consented to go back to a room with two of them. Over the next two hours, at least twelve players and staff entered that room despite having had no prior negotiation with the nineteen-year-old Clare. Six of them proceeded to ‘have sex’ with her, while the others watched and masturbated.

  A statement from the Four Corners team later clarified, ‘Most of the activity that took place during the incident is not disputed. Players and staff gave graphic accounts to police of the sexual activity. One player told police that at least one of them had climbed in through the bathroom window and crawled commando-style along the floor of the room.’

  In fact, all that was disputed by the players was the issue of consent – they say she granted it. And large swathes of the public (none of whom were there) agreed. She had said yes, and this was accepted as a known fact. First of all, she’d gone back to the room with two of them, so we all know what she should have expected. And then there was the fact she hadn’t fought back – this tiny nineteen-year-old woman suddenly faced with a procession of more than a dozen massive rugby players hadn’t fought back against a pre-arranged deal she had no part in negotiating, and this was a sign she wanted it. Many argued that if Clare were telling the truth, she wouldn’t have waited five days to report the incident to the police. They said that if there were a case to answer, the police would have laid charges, and the fact that they didn’t apparently equates to incontrovertible evidence that nothing untoward happened.

  Leaving aside the fact that charges of rape and sexual assault are particularly difficult to bring forward unless they bear the aforementioned hallmarks of Violent Stranger Rape, the fallout from the ‘Code of Silence’ broadcast illustrates another side of rape culture that’s both infuriating and deeply concerning: namely, that there appear to be huge pockets of society who neither understand the complexities of consent nor the necessity for sex to be an unequivocally respectful exchange between two or more people. Equally worrying is how many people cling fiercely to the idea that initial consent means a green light for everything that comes after it. This sort of thinking not only holds that consenting to one person means consenting to any friends, teammates and colleagues who ‘happen’ to turn up during the event (undoubtedly for what Roy Masters, sports writer and former NRL coach, admits is seen as a ‘vehicle for team bonding’), but that the presence of any form of initial consent at all is the equivalent of a contract written in blood that surrenders a woman’s right to say no, to be respected, even to be considered present in the act as anything other than a conduit for male satisfaction and the facilitation of masculinity as performance.