THE SAME OLD BLOKEY STORY

Of course the girl who has made allegations against a Collingwood footballer might not be telling the truth. By why, when a woman makes an allegation must former footballers and clusters of blokes claim she’s doing what women always do, ‘lie about rape’?

When former footballer Peter Everitt says ‘Yet another alleged girl, making alleged allegations after she awoke with an alleged hangover and I take it an alleged guilty conscience’ he speaks for the apologists. The girl obviously had a night of group sex but in the cold light of day felt so guilty she had to turn the consensual sex into rape, think Everitt. Even if this is true what evidence is there that women routinely lie about consensual sex?

What a judge said

A few years back a retiring judge in NSW said the most distressing part of his work was the number of times men guilty of rape wwere found not guilty by a jury. There is simply no evidence that women commonly use rape allegation to damage a man. Yes, it can happen but it is so rare as to make a mockery of the suggestion that it’s what women do.

What does Peter Everitt mean when he says ‘Girls!! When will you learn! At 3am when you are blind drunk and you decide to go home with a guy it’s not for a cup of milo ‘? What an old fashioned and patronising view of women. Women routinely go home with a bloke for sex. And when was the last time one of them ‘cried rape’? Ask the Collingwood boys how many of them scored after the grand final and whether the woman they were with has run to the police claiming to have been raped?

This isn’t a case where sex or alcohol is the issue at hand. It’s about whether a woman's human rights have been trashed and she'd been pressured or forced into non-consensual sex. We can privately imagine what might have happened but why must men like Peter Everitt imply that any woman who puts herself in such a situation is either asking for it or lying about what happened?

In my book Just another little murder I wrote about how in the late 1950s Collingwood icon Frank Galbally – father of collingwood layer David Galbally - grilled a young girl who’d made an allegation of rape against a number of men whether she’d been wearing lipstick on the night of the assault. How little thing’s have changed.

On Thursday 7 October Neil Mitchell named Dayne Beams and John McCarthy as the players assisting police in their investigations. It was met with outrage by Collingwood president Eddie McGuire. Unfortuantely, so often moral outrage is a selective virtue in the mass media. Maybe it's time to begin the real question of why some footballers can't see a woman as anything but a commodity and how we might counter this neanderthal view.

Some - I've said as much - believe Eddie's old Footy Show hasn't exactly covered itself in glory as far as the status of women is concerned. But it's bigger and more complex than this.  For decades women victims - dead and alive - have been belittled in our courtrooms by well heeled judges. It's a sad tale really....

What a friend said

'These unfounded  allegations...'

We want fairness for the blokes but for a woman there is nothing but disregard and  the belief that she is lying..