July 2004
In the wake of national public outcry over gang rapeallegations against rugby league and AFL players, a Monash University physical education expert has called for radical action at junior levels to combat the problem of footballers behaving badly.
Associate Professor Lindsay Fitzclarence said physicaleducation teachers and coaches should encourage junior footballers to develop a sense of individual responsibility for their actions, to overcome the 'group-think' factor that contributes to gang rape.
"Games such as football that actively foster tight bonding between players also have the capacity to objectify those not in the group as outsiders, creating an environment of 'group-think' where females can be treated as less than equal," Dr Fitzclarence said.
"Another factor within the ranks of elite sportsmen is the development of an exaggerated sense of entitlement and a diminished sense of responsibility and empathy, in which personal and group wants and desires dominate over consideration for others.
"When you add this to a set of unwritten laws of conduct in which drug abuse, excessive alcohol use and violence are prevalent, the sorts of scandals that have surfaced recently are no real surprise."
Dr Fitzclarence, an associate dean in the Education faculty at Monash's Gippsland campus, has been researching abusive behaviour by footballers for more than seven years, in partnership with Dr Christopher Hickey of Deakin University . They are currently completing a book on the topic.
The researchers, both former physical education teachers, observed and recorded a number of disturbing behaviour patterns in the junior football team they were coaching in the mid-1990s.
Their anxieties about what they were seeing were reinforced after witnessing an onfield assault at a senior football match that ended up with the victim in intensive care for nearly a week.
"There is a fine line between illegal behaviour and the practices required to play body contact sport," Dr Fitzclarence said. "Footballers are not being given enough training in how to walk that line and not cross over to the other side.
"Male team sports like football have been built on a military model that stresses group cohesion. Phrases such as 'one for all and all for one' reinforce that ideal, but when that is carried beyond the boundary of the game and into sexual relations, we have serious problems."
He said the best way to stop bad behaviour at senior levels was to attack the problem at junior levels, by promoting a culture of social and emotional responsibility.
"Teachers and coaches should aim to develop players' social and emotional skills as much as physical skills and team tactics, helping to create a revolution from below that can work its way up through the system."
Dr Fitzclarence said the crucial factor in breaking down group-think barriers that foster abuse of team outsiders was to find ways to encourage and reinforce individual responsibility while still maintaining the cohesion necessary to be an effective team.
"Teachers and coaches are in key positions to challenge intolerance of differences. To do this, they need to encourage young males to be able to make independent choices when they deem it is necessary to do so.
"But this is difficult emotional territory. To take a stand against one's group can come at a high price.
"Isolation and even rejection are what most young people fear most of all. Learning to understand such feelings and reactions thus becomes an important step in the process of developing emotional maturity."
Contact:
lindsay.fitzclarence@ education.monash.edu.au
Ph: +61 3 9902 6368 | 
