Deb Suzanne Waterhouse Watson

None of the several sexual assault allegations made against footballers from the nation‘s principal football codes cases in 2004 were tried in court, and despite several new cases since, no Australian footballer has yet been made to stand trial for sexual assault. The author argues that in the public discourse about these events, certain narrative and grammatical techniques are repetitively employed to deflect blame away from footballers and onto the women involved in the cases, providing footballers with ‘narrative immunity’ against allegations of sexual assault. These broader discourses of football underpin the discourses of sexual assault, and are further investigated by the ways in which individual narratives intersect with, and are informed by, ‘stock’ or ‘cultural stories’ which are widely understood to have truth-value, and work to undermine the validity of a woman‘s claim of sexual assault. The author attempts to show that the circulation of these stories constitutes a de facto adjudication of the women's claims, and thus the media debate supplements and replaces an actual legal process.
Review by Rob Hess.… (more)