In Defence of Footballers

In Defence of Footballers

In the media at the moment, it seems there are two prevailing views regarding sexual assault and footballers: either footy players are a horrid bunch of men, who see themself as gods, have no self-control and get themselves into all sorts of trouble; either that or that the footballers aren’t to blame, they’re just blokes having a good time at bars and nightclubs, and if women don’t want to be assaulted, they should avoid such places and or be less provocative.

Now, if I may, I would like to disagree vehemently with both of these positions. The footballers who actually do these things are indeed despicable, all responsibility must sit squarely on the shoulders of the offender, and anyone found guilty should be dealt with as severely as possible. However the view that there’s a terribly sexist culture in the AFL and footballers have no respect for women is I think complete nonsense. The unfortunate fact is that the sheer number of sexual assaults each year in Australia is so high that the number of assaults committed by footballers is no higher than for everyone else. Let’s just look at the numbers, shall we? I apologise for the lack of compelling data, but I will make the case with what I’ve got.

First of all this page from the ABS states that there were, in Australia, 52500 sexual assault victims in the preceding year, 78% of which were women. That works out to 40950 women. Obviously there would be some men who assault more than one woman per year, bring the number of offenders down. Being very generous, let’s assume there are 20000 guilty men. There are about 8 million men in total, which works out to about 1 in 400 men commit a sexual assault in any given year.

Now, there are 17 AFL clubs with playing lists of about 40, and 16 NRL clubs with lists of about 30. This adds up to 1160 players, and given about 1 in 400 men commit these crimes each year, is it any wonder that the occasional sex scandal arises? The sheer weight of numbers of players means that such incidents are bound to arise. Yes, I agree absolutely that such scandals are awful, for those involved, the sport as a whole and especially awful for the victims. But such incidents are not an indication of a particularly terrible culture in the football, it’s just a reflection of the shameful culture we have in Australia, where 50000 people each year are sadly victims to sexual assaults.

It’s time we stopped tarnishing all footballers with the actions of a very few among them, It’s time we stopped seeing all footballers as marauding self-adulating uncontrollable libido machines, it’s time we stopped absolving ourselves from our own problems as a nation by shifting blame onto footballers. It’s time we realised that the actions of our footballers are simply an accurate depiction of what goes on everywhere in Australia. The problem is not with footballers, it’s with all of us, and it is this that we all need to be doing something about.