Suspended ethics and the team: Theorising team sportsplayers’ group sexual assault in the context of identity

Australian team sports, group sex and media scandals

The Australian Football League (AFL) and the Australian National Rugby League have both been instrumental in formulating and managing programmes of violence prevention and the promotion of good off-field conduct. The AFL’s Respect and Responsibility initiative, launched in 2005, provides an education programme for all AFL club players and new draftees. The NRL has similarly initiated education models designed to address violence against women through their Playing by the Rules programme Albury et al. 2011: 340). While these have been important steps in the development of policies that aim to instil a sexual ethics among members of high-profile homosocial institutions, media scandals involving group sexual violence and group-based objectification of women continue to draw attention to the high levels of risk both to players and to those who encounter them in off-field contexts. Although the argument here does not depend on a quantification of sexual violence incidents in order to justify an ethical engagement, it is instructive to note the significance of alleged group-based sexual assaults that form scandal about footballers in Australia. A cursory examination of an online list of Australian Rules football media scandals between 1990 and 2011 indicates that of those that were about sex or sexual assault, 54% involved groups of players, usually from the same team. Of media reports about Australian Rules football players and violence, 43% involved more than one player in the same incident; 36% of the remaining were ‘individual’ violence reports involving violence against women, the majority of which concerned an attack on a player’s own girlfriend/wife or ex-girlfriend/wife (Full Wiki, 2010). Likewise in Australian Rugby League, 15 incidents of sexual assaults were reported in the news media between 1990 and 2011, with 53% of these involving groups of players and a single victim of the assault. Group violence was slightly lower in the case of Rugby League, with 18% of incidents involving more than one player (Full Wiki, 2013). The majority of news reports across both sporting codes occurred after 1999, when Four Brisbane Lions players were accused of rape in the UK during an end-of-year trip, without charges laid after players insisted to British and Australian police that the sex was consensual.

The media focus on masculine team sports and group sex/rape began in earnest in February 2004 with the allegations of six Rugby League players from the Canterbury Bulldogs involved in sexually assaulting a 24-year-old woman at a New South Wales resort (Waterhouse-Watson, 2011). No charges were laid. Subsequent scandals include a 2009 revelation of a 2002 incident when three Rugby League players from the Cronulla Sharks engaged in group sex for two hours with a 19-year-old woman while on tour in New Zealand, with reports that up to 12 players were in the room. The incident was investigated by police, although again no charges were laid. As Waterhouse-Watson has recently pointed out, of several dozen individual players accused of sexual assault either in solo or group situations over the past decade in Australia, only two have been ordered to stand trial (Waterhouse-Watson, 2011).

There are two common categories of responses to the off-field sex scandals, violence and misbehaviour of sports teams (both in Australia and elsewhere) in public discourse on the topic, in-part directed by the tone of news stories and opinion editorials, public statements by league representative organisations, blogs and online debates. These two categories indicate the polarisation of public opinion about ethical sexual behaviour and produce a reductive dichotomy that tends to foreclose on the possibility of debating footballer sexual behaviour and violence from perspectives that include nuanced understandings of ethics, subjectivity and identity. The first focuses on the victim, although typically excludes any possibility of speech or response beyond the initial accusation. In addressing her, responsibility is assigned and she is depicted as responsible for her own vulnerability: the skirt was too short, she consented to group sex and is now attempting to capitalise on it, she was herself the sexual aggressor victimising the men/team (Philadelphoff-Puren, 2004: 42); she allowed herself to be made vulnerable by drinking too much, she is lying about the assault or did indeed consent to sex but has later changed her mind. The second focuses on masculine team sports as problem: the sport itself is culturally rotten or, as a team sport, compares unfavourably with non-team sports and healthy exercise such as use of tennis, swimming, jogging and use of gyms – this is the case in government-sponsored health promotion which favours individual exercise but does little to advocate membership in sports teams at any level (Chalip, 2006: 5); misbehaviour will happen but the players require ever-greater discipline both on- and off-field (including increased curfews, drug and alcohol testing, supervision in public); the bonding of the team is problematic with hyper-masculine bonding that places others in danger when carried from on-field to off-field); the intensive homosociality of men’s sports promotes hegemonic masculine behaviours (Bird, 1996: 121; Connell, 1995); off-field misbehaviour will happen but should be stemmed through greater penalisation including exclusions from on-field activity, fines, bans and permanent bans; the misbehaviour will happen but the players require greater preventative training as a risk management strategy, with the expectation that institutional change will trickle down.

Neither of these categories of responses, of course, promotes an adequate framework for addressing men’s team behaviour. Rather, they both reproduce the assignation of responsibility to individuals within a liberal–humanist framework (Connolly, 1991: 73) and requires that individuals, whether footballers or women, manage their own risks on an individual basis (Carmody, 2003: 200) while often pathologising men’s violence (Pease, 2008: 2). The debate polarises on either the victim as responsible for her own sexual vulnerability or as not having really been vulnerable in the first instance, or on whether or not the team included one or more individually misbehaving players – the less-common argument given sporting teams’ capacity for public relations, legal defences and risk mitigation. In the case of the first, victims, bystanders and those who might participate in group sex or social activities with footballers fail to have their vulnerability acknowledged and recognised by members of the teams both in the context of the perpetration and as a counter to subsequent complaints.

In terms of understanding sexual violence through inequitable gender relationality, the voice of the victim is excluded or erased in such a way that sexual violence is mitigated. For example, the response of players to the scandal regarding a young woman who was sexually assaulted in 2002 by up to 12 members of the Cronulla Sharks while on a pre-season tour in New Zealand indicates the ways in which exclusion and erasure occur. When the scandal erupted in Australia in 2009, player Matthew Johns made a statement on The Footy Show and discussed the anguish the incident and its revelation had put his wife through. However, as presenter Sarah Ferguson stated in her Four Corners documentary of the incident, ‘But neither he nor any of the players we contacted asked about [the victim]’ (Ferguson, 2009). Although footballers who have been wrongfully accused of off-field misconduct rightly express the impact such accusations might have on their families, such statements are also frequently used as a mechanism to silence the critique of gender relationality in the context of team sports.

In the case of the second category of public responses, increased discipline appears not to be making an impact, as seen recently in the case of Australian Rules team St Kilda’s riotous misbehaviour while touring New Zealand, quickly on the heels of earlier scandals over the summer (Silkstone, 2011). Problematically, this response group consistently signifies sexual risk as risk to men or to the game (whether from the harm caused by the team’s misbehaviour, or the harm caused by the victims’ accusations). The polarisation of public discourse that becomes more concrete during the emergence of a group sex scandal establishes an impasse preventing critical public engagement in cultural, policy and prevention techniques. In the persistent media rehearsal of such polarised debates, women remain representable only within a dichotomy of ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ (innocent versus gold-digger or predator), rather than allowing the victim to be addressed as subject. As importantly, both of these responses involve the assignation of responsibility through judgement, which, as Kathy Dow Magnus has pointed out, is antithetical to a critical approach which investigates the ‘social conditions that induce individuals to act as they do’ (Magnus, 2006: 94). The continued dichotomisation of public responses to women complainants of team-related sexual assault and the binary location of its causality thus shuts down the possibility of public debate on the mechanisms that make sexual assault a form through which masculinity is enacted in the specific context of the group or team.

There are two necessary intellectual steps that need to be undertaken in order to develop alternative approaches to the broader cultural transformation necessary to intervene critically and pragmatically in sports-based group sexual assault; these will be addressed in order throughout the remainder of this article. Firstly, the possible array of responses to gang rape that have developed in recent literature must be investigated from a perspective that critiques the dynamics of group sexual assault by approaching it not as individual men acting in concert but as the result of a form of group-based sexual subjectivity. Secondly, and following this, it is important to address the event of group sexual assault from the perspective of how an ethics that recognises the vulnerability of others, including victims, is stemmed or suspended by group identity. The aim is to develop ways in which group homosociality in high-level team bonding environments can be transformed into a site for ethical behaviour by exploring the performativity of subjecthood between individual selfhood and group identity to determine the site of an ethics that has both pragmatic preventative and cultural transformative potential.

Teams, masculinity and group identity

Current approaches to group-based sexual assault have tended not to consider either the formation of groupings of men nor the production and performance of identities as integral and combined elements in the phenomenon. Prior studies have explored the ways in which male homosociality has operated to exclude and objectify women and marginalised others as a means by which male bonding is enacted (Flood, 2007: 342). Homosociality is the non-sexual organisation of relationships among men which, effectively, produces segregation of gender identities within institutions (Bird, 1996: 121). Homosociality is on the one hand continuous with homosexuality but, on the other, deploys mechanisms such as homophobia and sexual objectification of women in order to prevent homosocial men’s behaviour from being read or understood as homoerotic or homosexual (Sedgwick, 1985: 20), although the degree to which this occurs has shifted culturally over time (Anderson 2008: 606). Understanding team sports from the perspective of homosociality highlights the structure of the team and its off-field behaviour through the relationality of gender, which subsequently governs the ways in which off-field bonding behaviours are performed and the ways in which scandals erupting over those behaviours are discussed publicly. Group-based sexual assault is, then, a problem which emerges not through individual or group acts in and of themselves, but through the ways in which masculine identity is performed as an identity that demands for its coherence an exclusion of women as other and a directing of performance to the recognisability by other men. But to understand the centrality of homosociality in the context of group-based sexual assault requires further investigation of the mechanisms by which homosocial behaviours are performed and upheld through group sexuality.

There have been a number of accounts of group-based violence and sexual assault which have either articulated the root cause within a framework of ‘peer pressure to conform’ to group behaviours (Franklin, 2004: 36), low self-esteem among group members as pivotal in violent and aggressive behaviours towards others that results from identifying with a meaningful group (Knowles and Gardner, 2008: 1201), or by arguing that group dynamics in violence and sexual assault depend on a division of men into followers and leaders, with the subordinated followers acting along with dominators of the group ‘lest they be branded as nonmasculine, risk expulsion from the group, or, in extreme cases, become victims themselves’ (Franklin, 2004: 30).

Among the more useful accounts of group bonding and its relationship to group sexual assault is the work of Peggy Sanday who undertook a significant study of group bonding and sexuality in US university college fraternities. Sanday demonstrated the ways in which notions of fraternity, brotherhood and the group bond can produce an intragroup aggression whereby reasonable individuals will ‘gang up sexually on one woman and honestly believe that she can physically withstand multiple sexual activity with many men’ (Sanday, 2007: 124). Central to Sanday’s account is the way in which a sexual culture emerges on North American university campuses that makes a gang rape feasible, permissible, acceptable and often unchallenged by authority figures (Sanday, 2007: 2). The sexual culture is driven by the homosocial bonding of the group, but it is also this bond that makes participation in a rape possible, whereby the emotional bond forged through pledging and initiation rituals provides a sense of invulnerability (including invulnerability to the law) that would otherwise not be felt by young men acting individually (Sanday, 2007: 148). Thus the bonding between perpetrators rather than individual intent is central to making such acts possible. Although the empirical work which forms this element of Sanday’s approach was undertaken more than two decades ago and recent work has demonstrated some resistance by fraternity members to hyper-masculine behaviours (Anderson 2008: 617), her thesis remains significant in pointing to the potency of the group in the perpetration of sexual violence and, importantly, de-individualising masculine behaviours in favour of relationality.

More work, however, is needed on the mechanisms of identity that make possible the embodied activity of the group that overrides individual intent. For example, the relationship between these behaviours and the self-esteem of footballers – particularly those under persistent media scrutiny and whose reputations are maintained only as long as they sustain on-field success – is one area specific to team sports. That is, acknowledging that successful, celebrity and often wealthy individuals are not necessarily subject to the same conditions that produce losses of self-esteem among other men and boys in contemporary society opens the need to consider how group conformity and group-based unethical behaviours might be produced in ways other than common notions of peer pressure and to take note of the fact that recent research has indicated that the ringleader approach may not necessarily be as common in group-based sexual assault (‘t Hart-Kerkoffs et al., 2011: 5, 15). Unlike fraternities and some other forms of masculine homosocial grouping, elite team sports are not necessarily predicated on the need to maintain belonging through gender-based objectification and exclusion, given the on-field formations of team identities which may not involve the same level of form of risk of ostracisation or expulsion. Investigating, then, how homosocial bonds are manufactured through the off-field site of group sexual behaviour in ways specific to elite, masculine sports teams requires overcoming both the pedestrian individualisation of behaviours and developing sport-specific approaches to group identity.

To understand the homosocial bonding between masculine team sportsplayers that makes sexual assault not only possible but permissible as a ritual of group behaviour thus calls for a more nuanced account of the discursive processes of selfhood, masculine identity and group subjectivity. Studies in men and masculinity have long noted that masculine identity is not a naturally occurring or essentialist subjectivity. In the framework of Butler’s poststructuralist formulation, masculinity, as with other gendered, ethnic and sexual identities, is a set of performances citing culturally given norms of masculinity and played out in such a way as to lend the illusion that these behaviours are the emanations of the identity, not the means by which it is constituted. That is, in performing masculinity – which is never a conscious or voluntary act – one cites and repeats the name or category; such performances come to stabilise over time, retroactively producing the illusion of a fixed, inner core from which behaviours, attitudes and actions are felt to manifest (Butler, 1990: 143). That is, actions, attributes, behaviours and performances do not stem from an inner, fixed essence but constitute it. For Butler, there is no static subject (being) revealed through behaviour or desire (doing). Rather, identities are performed over time in accord with discursive expectations and cultural demands for coherence, intelligibility and recognisability, in order to maintain social participation and belonging (Bell, 1999: 3). Identity is the result of the culturally impelled compulsion to reiterate ‘a norm or set of norms’ which ‘conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Butler, 1993: 12). The expression of masculinity thus occurs through performances, attitudes, attributes and desires that constitutes the masculine subject. For Butler, identity – and gender identity – is manufactured in the languages, concepts and ideas available to a culture at a specific time, meaning the notion of gendered behaviour as fixed, natural and dichotomous is historical and ultimately unstable, even if reproduced through an array of cultural, institutional and discursive methods. That is, all identities are constituted within ambiguities, incoherences and inconsistencies, but for the sake of coherence we are required to disavow, suppress or reinscribe in order to perform as an intelligible and coherent self (Butler, 1990: 31–32; Butler, 1997: 27).

But what – and who – then are these identities in the scenario of a group sexual assault? To assume that group-based sexual violence results from within the context of a group of masculine individuals who have come together and behaved criminally or brutally to subordinate a woman or another subject cast as ‘other’ would be to restore intent and to argue that (masculine) self-identity precedes the acts and performances (Butler, 2005: 42). Instead, I am arguing that the identity performances at stake in group violence and sexual assault involve a suspension of the constructed masculine individual identity in favour of group subjectivity. That is, masculine group sexual assault focused on the semi-present woman or violence against the marginalised other is a performative and embodied act of collective identity in which integral elements of individual (masculine) subjectivity are sidelined in favour of a form of subjecthood that is represented through performances of engagement of the bonded group. Indeed, some literature on group sexual assault in particular has pointed to the (literal) performance nature of group rape, in which the turn-taking at sexual engagement with the woman becomes ritualistic, and by which the victim becomes a dramatic prop, with the collectivity of the group bonding through the symbolic act of sharing (Franklin, 2004: 29). The argument here, then, is that rather than investigating team-based group sexual assault of women from the perspective of individual men, it is necessary to develop a theoretical approach that addresses the performativity of the group as subject in itself, separate from its individual members. This is a group identity or subjectivity that peaks in particular contexts and scenes, that has its own set of coherent performances and its own codes of ethics that may be significantly different from those of the individual players.

One of the problems with the study of group rape is that, despite its prevalence, it is rarely examined as a phenomenon distinct from other forms of sexual assault, violence and crime (Franklin, 2004: 28). That has left much of the literature without the capacity to understand some of the ways group bonding not only enables the act or crime through addressing shifts in the performativity of identity, but can be investigated as the site for intervention and prevention (rather than through addressing individuals). What is needed for an approach that can consider the relationship between group sexual assault, identity and ethics is the need to investigate first the notion of the group before the idea of sexual assault or violence. Much of the study of group sexual assault and violence that has indeed explored the group element has focused on US college fraternities, and this has shed some light on the processes by which sexual assault occurs in the context of group behaviours. For example, Erhart and Sandler’s 1985 study of campus rape found that a number of conditions made gang rape of women by fraternity men both feasible and probable, including excessive alcohol use, isolation and protection from external monitoring, and behaviours which treated women in general as prey in addition to intensive competitiveness with other fraternities sponsoring the frequency and extent of group sexual assaults (Erhart and Sandler, 1985).

For other writers, it is the institutional group environment of fraternities as organisations in addition to the absence of university or community oversight that creates ‘a sociocultural context in which the use of coercion in sexual relations with women is normative and in which the mechanisms to keep this pattern of behavior in check are minimal and absent at worst’ (Martin and Hummer, 1989: 459). The practices of bonding through a notion of brotherhood presents the localised context by which the crime of group sexual assault can occur, particularly through the rituals of group protection, secrecy and loyalty (Martin and Hummer, 1989: 463–466). For Philadelphoff-Puren, the institutional problem of group sexual assault in fraternities (and other masculine-bonded sites) is in the re-identification of individuals with the organisation which begins with initiation and displaces identity and the law in favour of a subjectivity refocused on the group as the measure of values (Philadelphoff-Puren, 2004: 45).

The strand of the study of group sexual assault examining fraternities has thus examined some of the behaviours from the perspective of the group, although such findings are not, of course, fully translatable to the environment of football team group misbehaviour, as fraternities and team sports are considerably different, albeit both masculine and homosocially-oriented, institutions. Fraternities have greater secrecy (Martin and Hummer, 1989: 463–466) and certainly less media coverage than experienced by footballers and other team sportsplayers; most elite-level footballers have been brought up in team environments from an early age and at least since adolescence, whereas admission into college fraternities has very specific points of entry and initiation, including age, adulthood, the transition from school to university life and the transition often from a family household to living away. Nevertheless, this literature points to the centrality of group bonding as that which makes group sexual assault possible.

In attempting to approach team sportsplayer’s group-based sexual assault of women in new ways, it is important, then, to theorise the mechanisms by which that group behaviour is produced, how it is performative and the ways in which it suspends other ethical behaviours in particular scenes or moments in time, as well as the ways in which this has mitigated the assignation of responsibility at the individual level. Butler’s theories of identity performativity point to the relationality that governs the ways in which identities are articulated towards identity coherence and intelligibility, although that has tended to give precedence to the role of social discourse, language and norms in subject formation rather than to the specific intersubjectivity that can occur between members of a group, community or institution (Magnus, 2006: 96). What has not been fully explored in theories of performative identity and identification is the way in which such identifications and performances that constitute identity intersect with the citation of localised groups such as teams. That is to say, the masculine identity of footballers that is under question here is not built solely on the identification with broad, hegemonic or non-hegemonic-but-violent masculine norms given discursively, but on several intersections of identity that present masculine coherence and intelligibility in various contexts. No individual masculine sportsplayer (or other subject) is solely constituted by a singular and coherent set of norms, but through a complex array of mechanisms. Indeed, as Butler has argued, to ‘prescribe an exclusive identification for a multiply constituted subject, as every subject is, is to enforce a reduction and a paralysis’ (Butler, 1993: 116). Rather, there is an identification with the team of – at most – a few dozen players and related stakeholders (coaches, reserves, junior managers, rookies, etc.) as a homosocial masculine environment that may work in tandem with – and sometimes against – the citation of broader cultural codes, norms and categories of masculinity in the performance of male selfhood, including the subject positions which foster individual ethical responsibility towards the subordinated other.

While variants and strands of masculine norms make possible the objectification of women and others for the acts of forging group identity, it is through identification with the ‘masculine, homosociality of the team’ in both on-field (sport) and off-field (social) environments that group sexual assault becomes feasible. If identity is constituted in performances that occur through the repetition of culturally given norms (Butler, 1993: 2), and acknowledging that all subjects identify in multiple ways (Fuss, 1995: 49), then footballers in the context of group-based sexual behaviour are produced through the team bond itself. Where the act of group rape or sexual assault is often coded as recreation rather than crime (Franklin, 2004: 35), such bonded activities are the performativity of the group, not of a cluster of individuals acting in concert. In other words, to assume that the perpetration of sexual assault is the responsibility of individual players driven by the codes and norms of masculine individual identity precludes the centrality of the homosocial bond that is maintained through group identity and the collective performance of the act. This is not, of course, to imply that just because a sexual assault is the subjective performance of group identity that the players themselves are not responsible, but that intervening to prevent group sexual assault requires intervening with the group as group, and not individual players as members of a group.

It is in literature from social psychology that the distinction between individual identity and group identity has best been explored, although from a perspective that needs further adaptation to be understood within theories of sexual ethics and the performativity of masculine homosocial group bonding. Much of this work has been derived from Henri Tajfel’s theories of social identity (1978), whereby all individuals are seen to be undertaking identity work as members of social groups. This is informed by three processes of social categorisation: (1) dividing persons into positive and negative association; (2) social comparison which involves assessing one’s own group in terms of relative status to other groups, and (3) psychological group distinctiveness which involves the ideology of the group in terms of what it seeks to preserve or sometimes change about itself (Baxter and Wallace, 2009: 413–414). Psycho-social theories of group membership have pointed out that collectivity is valued in different ways, such as when a sports team has recently had a win (Chow et al., 2007: 1073), and this is seen to impact on both the integration and distinction between personal identity and group membership. More recent research in this field has indicated that while individuality and group identity are not independent but negotiated (Patterson et al., 2010: 654–655), no sense of solidarity is simply imposed on persons, but is achieved through intragroup interaction which does in fact include forms of group diversity, heterogeneity and individuality (Postmes et al., 2005: 748). In articulating these approaches through Butler’s perspective on the performativity of identity, it is important to input the factor of temporality in order firstly to avoid falling into the trap of assuming that small, localised group bonds are developed progressively and in a linear fashion towards solidarity and secondly to avoid the assumption that in all social, physical and temporal contexts that group identity and bonds are maintained.

In the case of masculine homosocial groupings such as teams, it can thus be said that group identifications – which are one element in the performativity of the perpetrating subjects – peak at particular moments and times, but are not necessarily maintained subsequent to those events. That is, at times individual codes of selfhood are performed; at other times, it is the norms and attributes of the collective group or team that not only dominate but impede other performances which would be intelligible at other times and in other contexts. Indeed, it might be quite productive to consider the peaked moments of group bonding that might occur both in on-field sporting activities and in off-field (mis)behaviour such as group sexual assault or violence as, following Nietzsche, a Dionysian loss of the self in a madness which he felt was rare in individual, but ‘in groups, parties, nations and ages, it is the rule’ (cited in Corn and Dunn, 2010: 143). Typically discussed in response to large-group masses acting irrationally or in ways which individuals would not, this formulation is often perceived through the notion of the carnivalesque, which operates as a celebratory temporal moment and space framed off from the norms, values and legitimacies of everyday culture and includes behaviours that transgress sexual and aesthetic norms (Bakhtin, 1984). Rather than categorise this as a wholesale loss of a self that might be seen to pre-exist the identity of the group per se, however, in the context of subjectivity it can be understood as a shift in the performativity towards the group in particular moments, scenes and contexts experienced as peaks and wanes.

This can perhaps best be seen in the discourses deployed when group members discuss a crime subsequent to the event. In Martin and Hummer’s study of fraternity group rape, they found through their interviews that ‘individual members knew the difference between right and wrong, but fraternity norms that emphasize loyalty, group protection, and secrecy often overrode standards of ethical correctness’ (Martin and Hummer, 1989: 464). Franklin found that much group violence is ‘committed by individuals who normally obey the law’ but that in groups such members ‘frequently behave in ways that contradict their individual values’ (Franklin, 2004: 26), indicating not only the distinction yet interrelatedness of selfhood and group identity, but the ways in which ethics differ between the context of the performative self and the context of the group as subject. In a July 2009 case of group violence in Alice Springs, five local young men had been drinking and partying and in the morning, unprovoked, beat indigenous local Kwementyaye Ryder to death, leaving the body on the road. In interviews subsequent to the event, however, one of the perpetrators Glen Swain stated not only his remorse but his bafflement as to how the group violence could have occurred, tearfully stating ‘No way, I’d never do that, intentionally do that, to anyone’. What is indicated here is that in the performativity of selfhood, an ethical element is part of the attributes, thoughts and behaviours that ground that identity – he could not normally conceive of a subjective capacity to harm a vulnerable person and, outside of the context of the performativity of his body within group identity through which the violence materialised, he is unable to understand how such behaviour could be a part of his subjectivity. This is also indicated in research on Australian Rugby League players by Kath Albury, Moira Carmody, Clifton Evers and Catharine Lumby (2011: 346), in which it was found that players individually could acknowledge the risks they, as a group, can establish for women, but would not necessarily have indicated this while in the context themselves of group subjectivity. It is thus through the multiplicity of subjectivity and performativities that particular ethics and values, which might commonly and reasonably be held by an individual player in some contexts, are suspended; in the case of group sexual assault, that suspension occurs in the shift of subjective performance from always-relational but individually-constituted identity to the identity of the group and team. Those shifts that occur in the context of homosocial team bonding make possible the scene of group sexual violence.

Subjectivity, individuality vs group identity and the ethics of the vulnerable

In seeking better to understand homosocially instituted masculine group sexual violence is not to dismiss localised institutions such as sports teams and their bonds and solidarity as being the site of responsibility itself. As Flood has pointed out, there is enough evidence that it is ‘not group membership per se but norms of gender inequality and other bonds that foster and intensify abuse in particular peer cultures that promote violence against women’ (Flood, 2007: 342, see also Pease 2008). Indeed, one does not wish to take the narrow, dichotomous view that men’s sports teams are, in themselves, the site of risk to others, nor to suggest that the bonds between men in sports teams should be undone. In fact, one can argue that in several ways the bonds of solidarity between a team that are necessary for on-field sporting success are not in themselves harmful to others, even if the team’s group identity is partially forged in off-field behaviours, socialising and partying. Team bonding has significant and proven value for team cohesiveness, sporting success and members’ self-esteem (Chow et al., 2007; Goffman, 1969: 204; Heere and James, 2007; Knowles and Gardner, 2008), and team sports themselves remain arguably legitimate in their promotion of health, salubrious socialisation and community development (Chalip, 2006). Pointing to these positive aspects of sport is not, of course, to dismiss the broad literature that has clearly demonstrated the relationship between team sports and inter-personal violence (Kreager 2007: 719), but to suggest that seeking to turn not only footballers but the team bonding process itself into a site of ethical behaviour is a more valuable approach than dismissing the sport and its culture per se.

It is in the distinction between self-identity and group identity as described earlier where an ethical perspective on group sexual assault is articulated in individual selfhood outside the group environment: the remorseful ‘I would never do that’ which both precedes and follows the act when the shift to a more individualised subjectivity occurs. This is not, of course, to reify or naturalise individuality within liberal-humanist claims, for all identity is relational in terms of discursive norms and intersubjective connectedness. Rather, it is to suggest that codes of ethical norms are currently better located when the subject is performing identity with a sense of singularity as opposed to the bonded sociality of the localised team environment – but there is no foundational reason why this need always be the case.

I would like to end this argument by turning to Butler’s more recent work in which, drawing on her readings of Levinas, she explores an ethics of non-violence that centres on the capacity to recognise and respond ethically and non-violently to the vulnerability of the other. I am arguing here that such an ethical capacity to recognise vulnerability is currently most effective outside of the group bonds of the temporal event of team/group sexual behaviour. For Butler, vulnerability itself is common to all human subjects, as it emerges with life itself and is a condition of subjectivity or identity (Butler, 2004: 31). In the context of ethical relations, seeing that another is vulnerable is a responsibility of all subjects, but not an automatic occurrence: it requires the other to be recognised as human, as vulnerable and thereby worthy of responsiveness (Butler, 2009). Recognition is never guaranteed (Butler, 2004: 42–43). Rather, the conceptual frames which prescribe norms of recognisability can operate at specific times and in specific contexts, along the lines of individual–group dynamics: individually, it may be possible for a subject to recognise the vulnerability of a woman outsider in a homosocial environment, act with responsibility and responsiveness and not enact violence. In the temporal scene of the bonded homosocial group, however, she may not be recognisable as a subject worthy of such responsibility – the ability to view her as vulnerable is suspended temporarily by the overriding form of group subjectivity This approach to an ethics that can occur in the relationality between men and women in the context of sexual assault is, I am arguing, one pathway towards intervening in the scene of group violence.

From some perspectives, one might assume it would be relatively easy to recognise the vulnerability of a woman during a perpetration of group sexual assault: not necessarily sober, not necessarily fully conscious, on a bed, surrounded by several men. An interview in the Four Corners 2009 documentary on the Cronulla Sharks group sexual assault incident in New Zealand points out the signifier’s vulnerability. The narrative presented by a complainant in this documentary demonstrates the suspension of ethics that can occur in the context of the group performing group subjectivity. ‘Clare’ discussed the event in which two or three players would be performing sexually on the bed with her, while others surrounded and watched:

They never spoke to me; they spoke just amongst themselves, laughing and thinking it was really funny … I thought that I was nothing. I thought that I was worthless, and I thought I was nothing. I think I was in shock. I didn’t scream, and they used a lot of, like, mental power over me, and belittled me and made me feel really small, like I was just a little old woman. (Ferguson, 2009)

In addition to the belittling, it is the failure to address or speak to ‘Clare’ that indicates the suspension of the capacity to recognise vulnerability, since recognition of the other occurs in the context of an address (Butler, 2004: 44). This need not be actual speech but an ethical inter-subjective responsiveness (Butler, 2005: 29). In positioning ‘Clare’ and other women as vulnerable in this context is not necessarily to subject them to the status of victim, nor to suggest that a conservative heteronormative coupledom is the desired outcome of the encounter with footballers, for in both cases this merely reproduces the privileging of male heterosexual subjectivity and erases women’s subjectivity into victimhood. That is, the responsibility by footballers towards a woman who has entered the group scenario is not ethically prescribed, but involves a range of possibilities of response and responsibility that include determining consent, consent with whom, and to what activities – sexual or otherwise – the consent is being given. Not to do so is to act violently both in physical and interpellative frameworks whereby the latter becomes an unethical act of objectification of the sort these narratives indicate are common in the group scenario. The fact that player Matthew Johns approached her afterwards in the carpark and apologised to her that other players had come into the room indicates again the ways in which a player, once outside of the context and temporality of the group, is able to make a suitable recognition of vulnerability and at least attempt to undo the unethical violence of ‘Clare’s’ de-subjectification that occurred among the group.

In the context of the group that turns its address unto itself, a discursive apparatus comes into play to reinforce the (non-voluntary) incapacity to recognise the vulnerability of the other, centring on the dual question of vulnerability and consent. The blurring of consent prevents the group from recognising the victim’s vulnerability through the assumption that she is sexually available to them, (perhaps understood simply through her presence in their space, perhaps by her submission to one player which in the context of bonded group subjectivity that overcomes singularity, means consent to all). As recognition is bestowed on the basis of socially determined criteria that precede an intersubjective encounter (Magnus, 2006: 97), presumptions as to the nature of the victim’s availability, stereotypes of women in footballer scenes as predatory (Waterhouse-Watson, 2011) and the blurred distinction between consent and coercion in the theatrics of sexual performance (Martin and Hummer, 1989: 470) prevent the recognition that the woman at the centre of group sex may be vulnerable.

Butler’s formulation of a non-violence ethics built on recognition of vulnerability explores the ways in which the intersubjectivity between the subject and the other occurs as the possible site of recognition, although this tends to be framed within a context of individuality by focusing on the ethical question ‘How ought I to treat another?’ (Butler, 2005: 25). As I have already suggested, there is some evidence that footballers are very much capable of that ethical question and the recognition of the vulnerable on an individual level. But how to impute such an ethics into the scenario of the group, the bond of the team and the social formations which impel the homosociality that, as I have argued, are necessary for on-field team success but practised in off-field environments? At one level, this occurs through broad cultural change since, as Butler points out, we are not dyads on our own, rather the exchange, address and recognition that occurs between subjects is conditioned and mediated by language, convention and norms that are social in character and that ‘exceed the perspective of those involved in the exchange (Butler, 2005: 28). This suggests that further work on the critical and reinterpretative framing of gender relationality is necessary to shift the discursive norms that make a woman appear to be available as an unwitting instrument of homosocial bonding exercises.

At the same time, however, intervention can occur through assisting teams in their group subjectivity to recognise vulnerability through a recognition of their own susceptibility and risk. This is to expand on Carmody’s (2003, 2005) significant contribution to anti-violence theorisation through the development of sexual ethics that are built on relationality and a care of both the self and the other, by placing the capacity to recognise the common vulnerability of both self and other as a key mechanism that makes ethical sexual relations possible. Indeed, elite masculine team sportsplayers are in an excellent position to understand vulnerability in the on-field arena: they are vulnerable to injury, to injuries that interrupt or end careers, to the shame of defeat in a public spectacle (Probyn, 2000: 22), as well as to media scrutiny of the private and the intimate, to risks of loss when the subjecthood of the group is ineffective and not team-like, among other perils of vulnerability which are, arguably, more extreme than those experienced by other men and women in everyday working and social life. While the specificity of elite-level masculine team sports disavows such vulnerability through a group performance of hyper-masculine machismo (Buchbinder, 1994: 1) inviolability and toughness, there remains the capability for intervention and change through a pragmatic focus on the shared vulnerability of the team and the victim. As a larger task and a later step, developing means by which teams (as teams and not as individual players) can recognise the vulnerability of others through understanding the shared human condition of vulnerability – in addition to other forms of cultural change – there is currently untapped potential to instil a currently lacking ethics in elite team sports to govern off-field masculine group behaviours beyond the current regimes of risk management and mitigation, and to turn the group homosocial bond into a harmless environment in which the capacity to recognise that a group sexual act may sometimes be a violent and thus unethical one.

Declarations

The submitted article is unpublished and not under review elsewhere.