The victim's story was broadcast last week on an ABC program that revealed the participation of a high-profile former NRL player named Matthew Johns in the grotesquely degrading use of the then 19-year-old New Zealand waitress by a pack of Cronulla Sharks players in 2002. Fallout from the show resulted in Johns' sacking from the league's weekly TV show -- and for predictable 'But she consented!' wailing from male commentators that helped explain how a tradition of using women for gang bang 'team bonding' sessions over the years could be tolerated.
Wilson writes:
We have dared to publicly claim that Matthew Johns did the wrong thing -- that it was not about infidelity but about something far more sinister.
The gang-bang culture relates to male power and domination, rather than to issues of love and sex.
It is endemic to rugby league and it is foul behaviour by most sensible standards.
Yet because a naive 19-year-old said yes, and because Matthew Johns is a megastar, he should have been allowed to get away with it.
Rugby league is one of the last bastions of macho sporting culture in Australia.
It lives in a time warp because so many of its club bosses, coaches and administrators did exactly what their charges are doing now when they were players.
It took one female journalist, who doesn't normally work in sport, to rip the guts out of it and expose it to all Australians.
For her trouble, she has also uncovered an underbelly of vitriol within the sport that is shameful and has to be changed if the game is to survive in a modern world.
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