Love, s*x, pride and morality

There is an upside to the rugby sex scandal. In a refreshing change, the community has been forced to think about morality which has nothing to do with legality.

Normally, the media, and therefore the public, are only interested in injustices upheld by the legal system. But mostly, life isn’t that simple.

I myself, as a naïve and emotionally neglected teenager, participated in group and all kinds of other humiliating sex. I had been told by so many manipulative men from the age of 14 when, as a virgin I was raped, that “sex is what life’s all about”.

I know exactly why “Clare” may have “bragged” about her incident. I did the same. In an attempt to escape feeling like a victim, my head tried to reframe it as a choice - as grown up and cool.

Despite those efforts, it took “Clare’s” real feelings five days to push past her head. It took me four suicide attempts before I began to see what, to others, may have been obvious.

Nobody, then or now, teaches kids that there is sex, and love, and sometimes they go together and sometimes they don’t.

Hard though it may be for your average Joe to comprehend, there are many young people who somehow learned as children that you get love, attention and nurture by pleasing adults and/or being sexually compliant. Often it takes many humiliating experiences to learn the fallacy of such lessons.

Judicial responses are rarely the answer to such behaviour. Certainly, morality and legality could not be further polarised in our adversarial system.

Take this 2003 research from Christine Eastwood of the Queensland University of Technology, interviewing people involved in child sexual assault cases. Replace the word “child” for “victim” and you have in a nutshell why the system so frequently fails to successfully prosecute such behaviour.

Defence counsel expressed strong views to the researcher on the child’s role in the process. “The Crown don’t care about the child. The police don’t care about the child. And I don’t care about the child. The kid - see the trial is not about the child.”

This highly paid, upstanding member of the community said “if I am defending a bloke I want to make life difficult for their witnesses”. He went on to argue “I’m not there to find the truth … no one’s there to find the truth”.

An adversarial legal system is never going to force people to behave well.

Preventive measures need to start way before.

Those rugby players learnt somewhere to fantasise about degrading group sex. There would hardly be an Australian of their age who hadn’t grown up seeing pornography normalising men doing degrading things to women throughout their formative adolescent years.

And then we’re all outraged by the reality of girls and boys, men and women, who’ve never been taught any different, feeling they’ve done what was sexually expected of them as young adults.

I’d bet the rugby players bragged about what they’d done afterwards to their peers too, and, like “Clare”, felt as bad about it later as she did. Why else would Matt Johns have confessed to his wife at the time to what he’d done?

I applaud Tanya Plibersek’s recent package calling for education about domestic violence and teaching basic principles of respect in schools.

We need to ban pornography which portrays anyone in degrading roles.

We should take Finland’s lead and teach sex relationship education in the last years of primary school. Research there showed that high school is too late. Lowering the age of sex education - not just about reproduction and STDs - raised the age of first sexual experiences in Finland from 13 to 17.

And take all sexual assault out of the criminal courts: the treatment of victims is appalling; proof is so high conviction rates are miniscule; and jail entrenches rather than treats the behaviour.

Tribunals, where the proof is less rigid, could order treatment, or re-education of offenders. And, importantly, victims could tell their stories unhindered by a judicial system that further abuses them.

As I said in the book about my own history, “if we can’t tell how our souls have been muddied, how can we ever clean them?”

To prevent a future generation of muddied souls, we must teach school children before pornography gets to them first. A good place to start is to teach them how to respect themselves and each other.