Boys Will Be Boys

by Clementine Ford

  I mean, what’s a red-blooded man supposed to do? She was practically begging for it.

  In Night Games, Krien documents a criminal trial involving a young man accused of raping a woman after the 2010 AFL Grand Final. The man himself was not a footballer, but he was present at a celebration party alongside Collingwood players Dayne Beams and John McCarthy. After having consensual sex with the man she’d been dating, the young woman said she felt ‘compelled’ to have sex with Beams while a number of other men, including McCarthy, were present in the room. Neither Beams nor McCarthy were charged by Victoria Police, but when news broke the next day that two Collingwood players were being implicated in a sexual assault there was no shortage of supporters lining up to condemn the woman as either hopelessly naive or a liar. Former AFL player Peter ‘Spida’ Everitt took a break from aimlessly scratching his balls to tweet, ‘Yet another alleged girl, making alleged allegations, after she awoke with an alleged hangover and, I take it, an alleged guilty conscience.’ He followed this up with the truly ground-breaking, ‘Girls!! When will you learn! At 3am when you are blind drunk & you decide to go home with a guy IT’S NOT FOR A CUP OF MILO! Allegedly.’

  Got that, ya bunch of stupid bloody slappers? Stop asking blokes to fix you up with a nice drink when you walk into their homes, because you’re not there for hospitality—you’re there to be raped. Allegedly.

  This idea that women give up any right to their own bodies the moment they cross the threshold of a man’s house (or his bedroom) is more widespread than people think. What did she expect? is often asked of women who report being sexually assaulted after having even the barest interaction with men, as if it’s not a revolting indictment on society—and masculinity especially—to have women walking around assuming that men are just waiting for an opportunity to rape them. Mind you, the phrase itself is a nice companion to the other high-rotation response that’s given whenever feminists talk about rape culture and the risks posed by it to women’s safety, which is: Why do you hate men and assume they’re all rapists?

  Rape apologists! Can’t live with them, can’t blast them into the far reaches of the universe and enjoy the thought of their empty carcasses floating through the cold and barren emptiness of space until the end of time.

  But, then, why would the motivations of women (beyond ‘knowing what to expect’) possibly be considered relevant in a rape trial? All that really matters, it seems, is whether or not the men accused of sexual assault have decided for themselves that their alleged victim was consenting. Unlike the women (and it is usually women) who are effectively put on trial and forced to prove they didn’t consent to being ‘spit roasted’, filmed, shared among friends, penetrated while they were unconscious or asleep, or any other of the degrading acts that survivors of sexual assault have been subjected to over the years, it seems the men being accused (and it is usually men) are required only to say ‘it was consensual’ as a defence and they will have people falling over themselves to agree.

  In a column published in the Irish Independent on 31 March 2018, following the handing down of the verdicts in Belfast, journalist Ewan McKenna wrote:

  There’s still a startling number of men happy to hide behind the boys-will-be-boys and she-was-asking-for-it undertones. It makes you wonder what goes on in the mind of a person who celebrates a rape trial verdict as if a victory for their gender and as if vindication for acts that shouldn’t ever have taken place?

  It’s a question I’ve wrestled with numerous times over the last few years, and one that I consider central to the challenges being confronted by this book. There are always people willing to defend men accused of rape by arguing that consent was in place, even though their conviction is based on nothing other than the say-so of the man involved. A gang rape becomes group sex, the rape of an unconscious woman a case of ‘next-day regret’—and the truth is whatever the man being defended by the public and/or his immediate community says it is.

  But here’s a question. Why does ‘consent’—in the eyes of the stalwart defenders of these accused rapists—always look like anything from women giving in, to women being ambushed by numerous men and placed in an untenable situation? How can people still be so uneducated about the importance and necessity of an ongoing consent that their belief an initial ‘yes’ was secured allows them to happily ignore the objectively horrifying acts of degradation and disrespect that came afterwards?

  Like, why aren’t people more concerned about the kind of sex a lot of young men seem to be pursuing and the methods with which they choose to pursue it? Call me crazy, but I just feel that taking turns on a woman and high-fiving each other over it then sharing the recorded footage around school or uni or the locker room as evidence of what a loose slut she is might not be the healthiest expression of masculinity, and as such is probably not worthy of a robust and spirited defence.

  In 2002, the Cronulla Sharks (a rugby league team from New South Wales) was involved in an alleged sexual assault involving a nineteen-year-old woman in Christchurch, New Zealand. The woman (later given the pseudonym ‘Clare’ in the Four Corners investigative report ‘Code of Silence’ about sexual assault in Australian football codes, aired on 11 May 2009 (and tell me, why is it that the public broadcaster repeatedly appears better at prosecuting rapists than the Office for Public Prosecutions?)) went into a hotel room with two of the Cronulla rugby players, only to have a further twelve (a mixture of players and team staff members) come in afterwards. Six of the men had sex with her. Others just watched and masturbated. Clare told Four Corners that her eyes were shut for most of it but ‘when I opened my eyes there was just a long line at the end of the bed’.

  She consented!

  Clare filed a report with police five days later, but no charges were laid. Later, she was diagnosed with PTSD. By the time of the Four Corners investigation, she had attempted to take her own life several times.

  She consented!

  Matthew ‘Matty’ Johns was the captain of the Cronulla Sharks in 2002 and one of the two men who originally accompanied Clare into that hotel room. He told Four Corners that he had followed her to the car park after the alleged assault and apologised for the presence of the other men, some of whom had, as one man admitted to journalist Sarah Ferguson, climbed through the bathroom window and commando crawled across the floor.

  She consented!

  In 2009, when ‘Code of Silence’ was due to be broadcast, Matty Johns issued a pre-emptive public apology on Channel Nine’s The Footy Show, the panel discussion program he had been employed by for at least the previous seven years. Referring to the report, he said, ‘Um, for me personally it has put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment and has once again, and for that I’m just, can’t say sorry enough.’

  ‘Alright, mate, well said,’ his co-host Paul ‘Fatty’ Vautin replied. ‘Alright, let’s get on with the show.’

  After the report was broadcast, and it became apparent that the issue wasn’t just going to disappear, Johns participated in a softball sit-down interview with Channel Nine’s Tracy Grimshaw. He reiterated his regret for causing embarrassment to his wife and family, but affirmed that in his view Clare had been ‘a willing participant’ and that his only crime was that of ‘infidelity’ and ‘absolute stupidity’.

  Johns had more than his fair share of supporters, but the exposure didn’t sit well with the bigwigs at Nine. Johns agreed to leave his hosting role on The Footy Show, a move that prompted an even bigger backlash against Clare. ‘He’s innocent!’ fans screamed. ‘Why did she go into the bloody hotel room?!’ and ‘Why did it take her so long to make a report?!’ and ‘There were no charges laid, so nothing bloody happened!’ Some people argued it was a puritanical response to ‘group sex’, and that all this was a massive beat-up because ‘she bloody well CONSENTED!’

  How do we know that she consented? Because Johns said so. And if a man says sex was consensual, nothing a woman says to the contrary will ever be enough to convince people det
ermined to protect his reputation and preserve his entitlement.

  But the question of who’s consenting and to what is key, as is the question of how that consent is settled on.

  Consider the case of Ched Evans. In 2012, the English footballer was convicted for the 2011 rape of a nineteen-year-old woman at a hotel in North Wales. Evans was released after serving half of a five-year sentence, and he proceeded to pursue an appeal. That appeal was granted and a retrial ordered in which a legal exemption allowed for the jury to hear ‘evidence’ of his victim’s previous sexual history. This formed part of a defence campaign that also included the private offer of £50,000 as a ‘reward’ for information that would help clear the millionaire’s name, paid twice to a man who had previously given evidence that supported the woman’s claims.

  The inclusion of new testimony by two men (both of whom were known to the footballer) who claimed to have had sex with the victim during a similar time period was vehemently opposed by everyone from advocacy groups to the former solicitor general, Vera Baird, but the three presiding justices called it a ‘rare case’ in which it would be appropriate to allow ‘forensic examination’ of the woman’s sexual behaviour. The testimony of these men included Very Important Facts about their supposed time with her, including that she had asked to be ‘fucked harder’ and had favoured a particular sexual position—both things that Evans claims were features of his encounter with her but that were also by this stage a matter of public record.

  She consented!

  Never forget that a woman’s right to say no to sexual contact disintegrates each time she invokes her right to say yes.

  The prosecution in both trials argued that the woman had been too drunk to give consent but, intoxication aside, the circumstances surrounding the allegations that led to Evans’ initial conviction should be considered sobering even for those people determined to find every caveat they can to excuse sexual coercion and violence. On the night in question, Evans had been out in Rhyl with a group of friends that included his teammate, Clayton McDonald. It was McDonald who picked up the woman in a takeaway shop and brought her back to his hotel room—a room that had been booked and paid for by Evans. On the way, McDonald contacted Evans to let him know he had ‘got a bird’. Evans then made his way to the hotel, used the fact that he had made and paid for the booking to access a key from the hotel reception and then let himself into the room.

  The lights were out.

  During the retrial, prosecutor Simon Medland QC said, ‘I’m going to suggest that she did not even know it was you [having sex with her].’

  Evans rejected this proposition, claiming, ‘I would not hurt a girl, I would not do anything to harm a girl.’ He claimed that his entry prompted McDonald to ask the woman, ‘Can my friend join in?’ to which she replied, ‘Yes.’

  And yet, he also acknowledged during his account that he’d lied in order to get the room key, that he exchanged no words at all with her before, during or after they had what he claimed was consensual sex and that he left the hotel via a fire escape rather than through the lobby.

  She consented!

  Key witness testimony for the prosecution during the retrial came from a hotel receptionist who claimed to have heard ‘noises of people having sex’ from the room in question. The court was told he’d heard ‘a male voice saying from behind the door quite loudly and forcefully: “Are you gonna suck that cock or what?”’ He heard no reply from the woman, and the same male voice said, ‘No?’ in an ‘enquiring tone’. He also recalled seeing two young men standing suspiciously close to the window outside the room in which the alleged rape took place.

  Oh yeah—according to evidence offered during the retrial, Evans’ younger brother and another man were watching through the window and ‘trying to film what was happening’.

  She consented!

  As with the first trial, the prosecution’s case hinged on the inability of an inebriated woman to properly consent to sex. The jury disagreed, ultimately deciding that Evans’ knowledge of this lack of consent couldn’t be assured and therefore he couldn’t reasonably be convicted of rape.

  It took the jury just under three hours to settle on a verdict of not guilty.

  The woman, whose name was leaked on social media during the trial, has been forced in the aftermath to move home and change her identity. She continues to be harassed to this day.

  There are more stories like this, more examples of men colluding with each other to sexually abuse and degrade women as part of a fun group activity, all the while claiming everything’s above board. In all of them, consent and dialogue about what can be expected to happen is something apparently only valued between the men or boys involved, while respect for the women present is basically non-existent.

  If you don’t think this might be a problem for the young men you know, think again. This is exactly a problem that all parents of young men should be worrying about. In no particular order, reflect on the following . . .

  In 2012, an unconscious girl was carried from party to party by fellow high school peers in Steubenville, Ohio. She was raped, urinated on and then left on her front lawn. The incident was filmed and posted to social media, and later bragged about. The two young ringleaders, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond—self-proclaimed members of a ‘rape crew’—were tried and sentenced to one and two years, respectively, in juvenile detention. Numerous media outlets expressed concern for the loss of the two football stars’ ‘promising futures’, while editorials bizarrely concluded that this was not a clear demonstration of the need for greater sexual respect or understanding around consent, but rather a lesson for young people to be more careful about their use of social media. Many people in the tight-knit community blamed the victim for ruining her attackers’ lives and destroying their college prospects.

  In Auckland, New Zealand, similar teenage use of social media revealed a group of young boys calling themselves the ‘Roast Busters’. The boys bragged about plying girls with alcohol and raping them while they were incapacitated. When the story broke, it was revealed that one of the boys was the son of a local police officer; according to complainants and reports, the police had been aware of the Roast Busters’ operation for at least two years, and nothing was done to stop them. On being caught, one of the boys wrote in a public comment on Facebook that he had used this as a ‘learning opportunity’ and apologised to the girls—the girls who were raped by his gang—who had been ‘effected [sic] by this whole ridiculousness’.

  In Missouri, fourteen-year-old Daisy Coleman was plied with alcohol and then allegedly raped by a seventeen-year-old school peer. Her thirteen-year-old friend was also allegedly raped by a fellow peer. Video footage was recorded and then later passed around at school. Following the assault, Daisy was dumped on her front lawn in the freezing cold, where she spent three hours in a semi-conscious state before her mother found her. But although initial investigations found there was a case to answer, the investigation was later dropped. Daisy and her brother were bullied at school, her mother was fired from her job and the Coleman family was forced to leave town.

  In Texas, news broke that a cheerleader had been kicked off her cheerleading team because she refused to cheer for the sports player who raped her. In this instance, the occurrence of the rape had been corroborated by at least three witnesses, two of whom broke into the room to try to stop it and later chased the perpetrators. When the girl returned to school the following week, it was to a chilly reception; some of the students had gone so far as to paint two of the perpetrators’ numbers on their faces to protest their removal from the football team. Again, the victim was vilified by her community and called a slut. Anonymous letters were sent to her house blaming her for ruining the lives of ‘nice respectable boys’. The fact that she had been drinking was used as evidence of her complicity. According to one former friend, sympathy waned because she didn’t ‘act like a rape victim’.

  We can also look to Texas for perhaps one of the most egr
egious forms of assault (and subsequent victim blaming), where an eleven-year-old girl of colour was gang-raped by eighteen teenage boys and young men ranging in age from early adolescence to twenty-seven. She had been lured to a secluded trailer and then threatened. In what should now no longer be a surprise, video footage was taken on mobile phones and later reported to a teacher by a peer who had seen it passed around at school. There’s categorically no question of this being a sexual assault against a child—but in a subsequent New York Times editorial, the victim was described as having ‘dressed older’. The same editorial published quotes from neighbours who blamed the girl’s mother for letting her wander around by herself and who railed against the effect of the incident on the assailants. One community member was quoted as saying, ‘It’s just destroyed our community. These young boys have to live with this for the rest of their lives.’

  The system lets down all women, but it lets down women of colour most of all.

  She consented!

  She consented!

  She consented!

  Let’s be very clear about something. The ‘consent’ that’s really in play in situations like this is that agreed on by men pursuing sexual activity with each other. The woman is never a part of those conversations. She is only meant to facilitate the planned outcome of them.

  This is not what consent looks like. If there are multiple people in a room and you are discussing the terms of engagement with everyone but the person whose consent matters most of all, you are acting with conscious duplicity. If you craft a plan with your friends to spring sex on an unsuspecting participant at the last minute, to corner them and give them no other option but to say yes, you are making that choice for a reason. If you don’t make even the most basic of attempts to have a conversation with the person who you will later claim was ‘definitely a willing participant’, you are revealing your callous disregard for their right to say no. Young male rugby players texting each other (as McIlroy did to Jackson) asking, ‘Any chance of a threesome?’ and then deciding to walk in anyway isn’t what ‘seeking consent’ looks like. One man telling another ‘I’ve got a bird’ and that other man then surprising her fifteen minutes later in a dark room isn’t how sex should work. A rugby team feeling confident enough to burst into a room occupied by two of their teammates and a nineteen-year-old girl and then line up to take their turn indicates to me that this was a frighteningly well-practised activity. Teenage boys dehumanising and humiliating their female peers as part of a sex act is scary, but so too is the fever with which their communities will rush to shield them from the consequences of their actions.