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Not rape - just boys acting up

By Melinda Tankard Reist - posted Thursday, 28 February 2008


Is it no longer considered basic human decency, let alone a mark of minimum sexual standards, that you don’t take advantage of someone who is drunk? Do men really need special training on not tricking women into sex? It seems they do: it’s off to remedial behaviour boot camp.

The DVD questions fail to convey the seriousness of sexual assault. Will the statement “Sexual assault: maximum penalty, 14 years’ imprisonment” appear in the final cut? Perhaps a little post-interactive DVD field trip for our star performers to interact with men in prison for having sex with women who didn’t freely and voluntarily consent might help?

It is time to confront the culture of collusion in which sporting clubs offer only faint damnation for serious breaches of community standards that too often include criminal assaults against women.

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The chief executives of AFL, cricket, rugby union and rugby league, as well as other sporting organisations, should develop a nationwide code of conduct which would treat offences against women even more strictly than taking performance-enhancing drugs.

The AFL DVD is a sign of a broader malaise. Examples of increasing contempt for women are everywhere. An Australian-made T-shirt available online bears the slogan, “It’s not rape, it’s surprise sex”. A 13-year-old girl I know is sent photographs of waxed genitals on her mobile phone by boys asking when is she going to get hers shaved too. Other girls describe being called “boobs on a stick” by boys at school. One received an MSN message from a male student detailing the sexual acts he wanted to perform on her in class. She was 14.

Many young women don’t even seem to understand the meaning of sexual harassment: it’s become so normalised they just expect it.

Then of course you’ve got schoolies week on the Gold Coast, where the adult entertainment Girl’s Gone Wild crew ply girls with alcohol so they’ll expose themselves for the cameras. And the Canberra Summernats car show, which sees hordes of men screaming “show us your tits” to any woman in sight. Yes, it seems it has come to this.

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First published in The Australian on February 25, 2008.



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About the Author

Melinda Tankard Reist is a Canberra author, speaker, commentator and advocate with a special interest in issues affecting women and girls. Melinda is author of Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief after Abortion (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000), Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (Spinifex Press, 2006) and editor of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (Spinifex Press, 2009). Melinda is a founder of Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation (www.collectiveshout.org). Melinda blogs at www.melindatankardreist.com.

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