AFLW great Kate McCarthy has addressed the “cultural” issue in Australia that the Sydney Swans hotel scandal exposed.
Five Swans players have been suspended for the remainder of the AFL season and are under investigation for their alleged involvement in a sexual assault report to police in the early hours of Monday morning at a Melbourne hotel.
WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Kate McCarthy’s impassioned response to Swans scandal
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Sydney president Andrew Pridham admitted on Wednesday afternoon that the club-imposed ban, which is separate to the Victoria Police investigation, has “torpedoed” their own season, effectively dashing any hopes they had of winning a premiership, despite sitting second on the ladder with one round left to play.
But that is not, and should never have been, the main focus of this story.
As an impassioned McCarthy detailed on The Agenda Setters on Wednesday night, it’s the victims and the ramifications for them that matter most, not those of the footballers and their team.
“The coverage of this issue does welcome a conversation that people are maybe a little bit too afraid to have because of how sensitive it is,” McCarthy said.
“But the reality of this situation is there is an epidemic of violence against women in this country. There is. One in five women have experienced sexual violence at some point in their life in Australia.
“Leading with a story like this and the reporting to start with — and this is early hours of this breaking — some news outlets going with just the ramifications on the Sydney Swans as a football club, I think it opened a conversation to have around gender-based violence, which is an issue in our country, it’s an issue culturally.
“And I think widely we are seeing that there is an issue within AFL football with the treatment of women and the way in which women are regarded in our game.
“That’s an important conversation to have in this, and I know it’s not a comfortable conversation, but it’s one that women are very tired of having.
“This opens the conversation for people that may not have thought of that or it hasn’t affected them, and now it has.
“And it’s time to speak about these things, because if we don’t speak about it, nothing changes.”
McCarthy isn’t critical of the initial media coverage of the story in the immediate aftermath of it breaking, given it was only known as an “incident” at that stage.
But once it became clear that it was a case of an alleged sexual assault, she said the narrative had to change rapidly — and it didn’t. Or at least not enough.
“I think once that had come to light, that needed to be reported by other outlets as what this was, not, ‘How is Sydney going to win the premiership?’” McCarthy said.
“Because this is not about that. There is so much more at play.
“And yes, we will get into the other ramifications of that from a footballing lens, but that conversation happening first was so much more important than, ‘How are we going to win the flag now?’”
Nick Riewoldt agreed, saying it was always the victims’ side of the story which mattered most here.
“The way we reported it on this show on Monday and then throughout the week, firstly and most importantly, acknowledging the alleged victims and the impact on them,” he said.
“And then to the specific allegations, we spent a lot of time with lawyers on the phone this week, just diving into and understanding what we can and can’t say about the specific issue because there are a lot of things that we can’t say.
“And then all of that for us has to be balanced with the fact that footy is a multi-billion dollar industry and we are on a football show.
“So when we are discussing those secondary football ramifications on football shows, we need to do that, and we have a responsibility to do that as respectfully as we can.”
