Sometimes YES means NO

A lot has been made about the issue of ‘consensual sex’ over the last few weeks especially with regard to the behaviour of the Cronulla Sharks in New Zealand in 2002. Legally the question comes down to the issue of ‘consent’ - when is consent given, when is it withdrawn? If someone is drunk do they still have the ability to make that kind of decision? This is no cut and dry case.

As far as we know, at this point, Clare willingly went back to a motel room with two men. Once there, other members of the Sharks decided that ‘one in all in’. According to Johns, Clare made no protest and encouraged other players to participate, however according to her she did not. What happened in that room is a matter of conjecture but what does seem clear is that what did happen was immoral. Clare was a teenager, a waitress in a bar, the players a combination of singles, married men and team officials who should have known better.

This side to Australian male culture of regarding alcohol fuelled sex as a rite of passage is a hangover from a time that is best consigned to the dustbin of history.

Public opinion seems to have come down 75% on the side of Mathew Johns for having the courage to stand up and own his actions. Good for him.

However the majority of comment I have read has condemned Clare, saying that she is deserving of what happened to her. Some people believe that the reason she waited so long to bring it to the attention of Four Corners was to ‘grab the cash’, she was in fact approached by Four Corners. She has variously been described as, ‘a money hungry whore’ and ‘a wowser for not taking on the rest of the team’. A few preface their comments with, ‘I’m not in favour of rap (sic) but …’ or ‘if this had happened to a gay guy it would just be considered a dud root’. Those comments were taken from just one discussion on Facebook between a group of twenty something gay males. The comments section of The Daily Telegraph is filled with more vicious bile directed at this girl and the mix is 50/50 female male but almost all of it against her.

The consensus seems to be she got what she deserved.

I am amazed, horrified and frightened that we ‘gays’, along with the rest of society, are so quick to trivialise what has happened to this girl and dismiss those events with that old fashioned line “she had it coming”, this is the same argument that homophobes and racists have been using for years to justify the bashing, rape and even murder of any number of homosexual men and women.
One case in particular comes to mind; Mathew Shepard who was brutally bashed and left for dead on October 8, 1998 aged 21 in Laramie, Wyoming. The argument of the two accused was that he was ‘asking for it, he wanted it, he deserved it because he made sexual advances to us’. This was the birth of the sometimes successful “Gay Panic Defence”.

It is not too much of a stretch to see that if Clare had put up a fight, had resisted, then in the hands of another group of men she too may have been physically, as well as sexually, assaulted or worse.

Are we going to regress to a time when we could be bashed because of what we wear, how we act or who we are? Wasn’t it just a year or two ago when we took to the streets to protest at the violence that is plaguing Oxford St.

What gives any of us the right to judge what has happened to this woman? Was it consensual; possibly … was it moral, no.