In 1991 I stood in a museum in Cambodia staring at a row of photos of people who’d been tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. I was a young journalist sent there to report on the United Nations arriving in Cambodia to set up democratic elections.
I dutifully took myself off to Tuol Sleng the former school where the Khmer Rouge tortured a bizarre array of people they thought were subverting their regime. No-one visits that museum without emerging horrified by the human capacity for irrational brutality. I wrote an article for the Sydney Morning Herald about my experience. Confident I’d broken new ground in feature writing, I asked a senior foreign correspondent what he thought of my effort. He told me: “Shallow and self indulgent.”
Moral outrage comes cheap.
It feels terrific to condemn evil because it affirms our own fragile hope that we are above the things others do. But if outrage is not followed by an analysis of what has been, what might be and how we get there, it goes nowhere.
The article I wrote was part of a genre I now recognise: Torture Tourism. You blow into a place, you express horror and shock, you blow out and you entertain your audience with the prurient details. The people on the ground – the people who are trying to move things on- are stuck there.
The Four Corners program on Rugby League that sparked so much commentary about what some footballers do to women quite rightly provoked a horrified reaction. Sarah Ferguson, the journalist responsible, certainly deserves a Walkley for her ability to get women who’ve been through trauma to talk so openly.
As someone who’s been part of a pro-bono team working on exactly the issues the program shone a light onto - men team bonding over women or even assaulting them – I’m left waiting for a lot of the media who followed her story to ask the most important question. What is being done, and what can we do to prevent this kind of behaviour wherever we find it?
Having donned my tutu for this particular media circus a number of times, I now have the FAQs on mental speed-dial.
Top of the list: Q: “Why do men playing Rugby League assault women so often?”. A: “If they were the only blokes on the planet doing it I’d be a happy woman. We could round up blokes based on their sporting code and put them in prison. How fabulous. Now go away and consult the statistics that tell us men who assault women live everywhere and some of them never move off their couches.”
Second most asked question: “Is it the money and fame that makes some players treat women so badly?”. A: “It may well be. Which might also explain why there are so many sexual harassment suits lodged against merchant bankers”.
Third one – and I love fielding this: Q: “Do you think some responsibility lies with the women who throw themselves at footballers?” A: “Do you mean to say that if I play movies loudly in my house I can’t complain to the police if someone breaks in and steals my DVD player?” A ruminating silence always follows this response.
The final one – and it usually takes a week for it to pop up – is the “Should we ban cheerleaders?” question. A: “Are you saying that how women dress or dance has something to do with whether they are assaulted or mistreated?” Journalists tend to move very quickly on to a new topic.
Some League players have assaulted and mistreated women. I wouldn’t be there with a team of other people trying to change things if there was no problem in the game. But what gets brought home forcefully to me every time a footballer is accused of sexual assault or of treating a woman like trash is that it’s our broader social views that need as much changing as anyone in the NRL.
So folks, some ground rules if I may. Women can have consensual sex with anyone they want to. It doesn’t make them ‘easy’, it doesn’t mean anyone has the right to treat them as disposable, group sex is currently legal so if it upsets you then lobby to change the law.
And finally, legal consent to sex barely covers the complexity of what’s going on when people are negotiating what they do with their genitals when they’re drunk. We need to start much younger. We need to get teenagers thinking about how they ask for and agree to sex: we need to focus on how to say yes not just on how to say no.
Oh, and a P.S. to Andrew Bolt and all the men who read his error-riddled column and sent me abusive emails calling on me to ‘sack’ myself from my unpaid NRL ‘job’. No-one has ever told the players that group sex is a good idea or that they should ‘go for it’. (I’ve never told the players anything as a matter of fact because I don’t deliver the education programs.)
The educators who do deliver the program encourage a robust discussion among the players about their different values, their experiences and the fallout. The players bring very different moral and ethical positions to sexual encounters. Some players are devout Christians or Muslims who don’t believe in sex of any kind before marriage.
The education gets players discussing the sexual and social situations they’ve been in and reflecting on the consequences. Effective education around sexual behaviour deals with the reality of what people do and gets them thinking about how to do things in a safer and saner way for all involved. If you walk into a room and give people a list of high-minded sexual ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ the evidence is very clear that you might make them feel guilty but you’re unlikely to change their behaviour.
The law is there to set community standards. But those should be minimum standards at the very least. Human decency dictates that we all go further in making sure our sexual partners are treated with kindness and respect. Some group sex scenarios can and do result in women being emotionally damaged, shamed or assaulted – but then there are equally women being assaulted or treated like garbage by men they share a monogamous marriage bed with.
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