Coaches & Cops & Clergies, Oh My!
With a title like this, you know it’s not going to be great. The Catholic Church should have its own trigger warning….
My face reading the news
Coaches
Earlier this month The Athletic released an interview with two former National Women’s Soccer League players, Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim, who exposed the sexual harassment they faced under coach Paul Riley between 2011 and 2015. At the time they were in their early twenties.
According to the article, Riley often drank with the young women that he coached. After one night out, he threatened to make the team run extra drills if Farrelly and Shim didn’t make out in front of him.
Gross.
Shim filed a complaint to the league in 2015, and Riley was subsequently fired from the team. He was allowed, however, to continue coaching.
Even grosser.
Only after the interview was published, six years after Shim’s complaint, has the league taken further action. Riley has been fired, and, while his removal is good news, the NWSL has had all the information for years. That public scrutiny was needed for the league to protect their players is disappointing.
Leaving an abuser to continue preying on players is nothing new in the sports world. We’re currently seeing the aftermath of USA Gymnastics and the FBI ignoring allegations against Larry Nassar. Similarly, USA Today exposed the NCAA for allowing college athletes and coaches who are proven responsible for sexual assaults to continue playing and working with the league, regardless of whether or not they have been suspended, expelled, are facing, or have been convicted of criminal charges. This “predator pipeline” enables known abusers to transfer to other schools without damaging their academic or athletic careers.
The case isn’t even unique within women’s soccer. In August another coach in the NWSL, Richie Burke, stepped down from the Washington Spirit due to an investigation by the league. In an entirely unrelated scandal, top American soccer players have long been fighting for equal pay, noting that they out-perform the men, but somehow are compensated less.
In each story, it’s striking how much the victims are ignored. Leagues have taken an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to the safety of their athletes, and slowly it’s catching up to them. On Wednesday, NWSL players paused in the sixth minute of each game to show their support for those who waited six years for their allegations to be taken seriously. #NoMoreSilence is their movement for structural reform in the sport.
The push for progress isn’t only happening on the field. This tweet from Caroline Fitzgerald says it best:
The fight for equity in sports is about so much more than sports. Sports are a microcosm of society. The issues we see in sports happen everywhere power imbalances exist. So, when women in sports fight for themselves, they fight for all women. It’s so much bigger than sports.
So let's see what's happening in other institutions...
Live footage of the Met
Cops
Last spring women everywhere were reeling over the death of Sarah Everard. Sarah was attacked during her walk home after following all the safety tips we’ve been told will help us: she called her boyfriend when she left, was wearing bright colours, and chose to walk through a large public park.
Despite her best efforts, Sarah was kidnapped before she got home. Police officer Wayne Couzens has since pled guilty to Sarah’s murder, and we recently learnt in trial that he had pretended to arrest her on the street. Couzens put Sarah in handcuffs and drove her to her death.
Naturally, people were upset by this. Officers are meant to use their badges to uphold the law, not as a way to handpick victims. In response to the news, the Metropolitan Police released a new “strategy” to help protect women. They encourage any woman who’s suspicious of the officer they’re stopped by to “run into a house” or "wave down a bus".
K.
This is a masterfully terrible strategy, mainly because it completely ignores any kind of ownership the police have to do their jobs. In fact, it pushes the responsibility of street safety onto bus drivers, who historically do not like to stop when people chase them.
The North Yorkshire commissioner Philip Allott dug the hole even deeper in saying
“[W]omen, first of all, need to be streetwise about when they can be arrested and when they can't be arrested. [Sarah] should never have been arrested and submitted to that. Perhaps women need to consider in terms of the legal process, to just learn a bit about that legal process”
The victim-blaming is astounding, isn’t it?
Ignoring how demeaning the suggestion is, I have a few follow-up questions for the commissioner. Philip, shouldn’t a police officer know that information for us and use it appropriately? Isn’t that the whole point of having professionals handle specific tasks? For example, you wouldn’t be expected to fully understand how to do a root canal in order to get one.
The Met is doing the absolute most to avoid putting blame on themselves for having shitty cops. Like Paul Riley, there’s no doubt that the force was aware of Couzen’s troubling behaviour before his arrest. He’d previously been the subject of three separate indecent exposure allegations, and he was part of a WhatsApp group with five police officers currently being investigated for gross misconduct and sharing misogynistic content.
The most disturbing part is that former colleagues had nicknamed Couzens “The Rapist” on account of him making the female officers feel uncomfortable.
The fact that the Met knew they were employing someone called “The Rapist” and still has the gall to give out “security tips” to protect women is mind-boggling. Seemingly it would be easier to regulate their own officers than an entire gender, but what do I know?
This isn’t the first time the Met has pushed responsibility off onto women in this case. When Sarah was still missing, police walked through South London recommending that women not go out alone. In response, many women suggested a male curfew instead
You know, since men are the ones murdering women.
If that wasn’t enough, police got violent at a vigil that members of the community set up for Sarah. They man-handled women out of the streets, claiming they were upholding COVID restrictions.
Funny that they were so passionate about keeping the streets safe from disease, but not from predators. Women should count on their knowledge of the law and bus routes to get the homes safely, not the police force…
No caption necessary
Clergies
If women are causing their own attacks, are children equally at fault?
Last Tuesday a report was published found that the Catholic clergy in France sexually assaulted approximately 216,000 minors between 1950 to 2020.
Yes, 216,000.
And that’s only within the religious system. The number jumps to 330,000 when including those who had other links to the Church (ie: schools). Those cases account for almost 4% of all sexual violence in France, meaning Catholicism is the biggest sexual predator in the country.
But hey, maybe that number would be smaller if all the kids were “streetwise” or flagged someone down.
That argument sounds a lot worse in this context, doesn't it?
What I find most striking is that all of these crimes were committed by anywhere from 2,900 to 3,200 abusers within the Church. On the low end, that means that each abuser had approximately 65 victims, an impressive feat to hide. Luckily for them, they were protected by a system that cared more about their external image than the experience of children.
Over the last 70 years, the Church has done little to prevent abuse. In 2019 the Pope mandated that each diocese needed systems for reporting sexual abuse, meaning that, up until two years ago, it was a free-for-all.
Unfortunately, barely any of the suspected 3,200 abusers will see justice. Of the 216,000 victims, only 22 cases have been sent to prosecutors. The others had either involved assailants who have died or have gone beyond their statute of limitations.
A sad reality that, if we believe what The Church says, was exactly what God intended.
Looking into every institution….
Oh My!
That’s a lot of terrible news, and it confirms what we already know: it’s brutal out there.
Rape, at its core, is an assertion of power. It’s not about the women or children being victimized – it’s about the rapist.
For some reason, institutions can’t figure that one out. Instead, they create an echo chamber of voices looking out for each other. The Met, sports leagues, and The Church all prioritize themselves over the safety of those who they’re meant to serve.
In an institution, stories of sexual abuse should be treated like cockroaches. Once you see one, the walls are likely infested. It’s not just sports, or religion, or the police force that has the problem. Our entire world is still being fumigated.
