Four Corners, Matthew Johns & Code of Silence

Walking from Gosford train station to Blue Tongue Stadium on Monday night, I began to write this column in my head. It was a very different column than the one you are about to read.

With Four Corners on the horizon, I was going to say how the incidents about to be detailed occurred regularly away from football. Although that clearly would not excuse them, I was also going to talk about the set of morals imposed on public figures - standards which few of us or those doing the imposing can ever hope to live up to.

This quasi-religious moral code does not allow for the fact that some people choose to have group sex, for instance, or behave in otherwise left-of-field ways. I was going to suggest that a public figure being implicated in such behaviour should just remind us that we are a flawed species and underline the stupidity of expecting anyone to be different just because they are on television or in the newspaper.

I was even going to outline some of my own foibles - like being suspended repeatedly from driving for speeding even though I don't own a car - to give my argument some added force.

At halftime in the Monday Night Football game, I found an unoccupied radio box and at 8.30pm I switched on the ABC. If my player ratings in Rugby League Week for the Sydney Roosters-Melbourne game seem a bit off-kilter, now you know why.

What we saw on Four Corners was horrifying.

I want to deal with some of the arguments which have been used against the program and to defend those who were implicated by its contents. The idea that it "unfairly targets" rugby league is totally irrelevant and - as Sarah Ferguson said in Monday's Sydney Morning Herald - a defence mechanism.

There seems to be some people who think that there is no objective truth - only what is allowed to be made public. They think Brian Smith should not have been filmed in the dressing room because he swore or that this woman should not have spoken about the incident because it happened so long ago.

The point that Brian Smith did swear in his halftime address (which I use as an example - it was totally unimportant in the context of the program) and that the incident did occur seems totally lost on these people. I suspect these viewers, in their own lives, define right and wrong based on whether or not they are caught.

Right now, I need to bring up a topic which has not so far featured in coverage of this tawdry affair.

At the time of the Cronulla investigation in 2002, I understand witnesses told police the Christchurch girl's account of events was wrong in several respects. Assuming those allegations have now been repeated in the public arena and - in one case, perhaps - cost someone their job, it is theoretically safe to assume that defamation action could now result.

But can you imagine a footballer getting up in court, in front of the media and his family, and saying: "Well, I did this to her but I didn't do that.''?

In effect, the players are now in the same position as the girls in Monday night's program described - if they come forward with the truth as a defence, it will actually make the situation immeasurably worse.

Touche.

There is only one conclusion to draw and it's a pretty straightforward one: this incident should never have occurred. So we need to look at why it occurred and how to prevent it from happening in future.

Let's talk about consent.

"GLOBAL Male Conspiracy" is a term I came up with as a 17-year-old smart arse. I used it to described the "Code Of Silence" which involves half the human race. In my humble experience, most men in relationships either cheat, want to cheat or like talking about it. I am one of them. And as brothers, I realised while still a teenager, it is the obligation of all 3,456,782,396 of us not to talk about that in front of the other 2,348,955,926 people that make up the human race.

There you go, I've betrayed my gender. Maybe women have their own conspiracy.

So we aren't going to condemn infidelity here. That would be hypocritical in the extreme on my part.

But even though a lot of us have urges to cheat, moral alarm bells go off in certain situations. A cab driver I had coming back from a footy interview in Cronulla this afternoon told me drunk, high and horny women throw themselves at him every weekend. He tells them ring him in the morning if they still feel the same.

To most of us, "group sex" invokes the image of people in all forms of embrace, like that scene in Logan's Run. Importantly, the numbers of each sex in this scenario are roughly even. Gang bangs are another thing altogether but certainly not restricted to professional team sports - remember Puberty Blues?

But most of us, no matter how kinky, would have those moral alarm bells go off if we were invited to one. We would realise either that it was exploitative or that someone involved might regret it later and we would get ourselves in a lot of trouble.

Why didn't the moral alarm bells go off in incident described in Four Corners? The most obvious answer is because it was considered by the participants to be normal behaviour and something which had not caused them any problem in the past.

Make no mistake, the contention by a young Knights player that treating the girls well afterwards (the difference with rugby union players is, so the old maxim goes, they kiss them goodbye) was the answer is an extremely commonplace belief.

There is something different about these people - and I believe it is not the sport they play.

The moral fabric of people who exist in a male-only workplace is skewed, deformed. The army or boarding school will illustrate that. Can you imagine going to an all-boys school until you are 34, which is virtually what rugby league players do from the age of 17 or 18?

This is not the way humans were meant to live and outbreaks of anti-social behaviour may have less to do with attracting "risk takers'' than it does with a stuffed-up social structure which needs urgent attention.

AS far as Matthew Johns is concerned, I am forced to go back to the column I was going to write.

In my moral code, if someone makes a mistake and they apologise for it, they should be allowed to continue in their employment and hold their place in society. But we have created a world where everyone in the media is judged like a public official.

If the mayor was once involved in a gang bang, he would have to stand down. So the same goes for a race car driver or a game show host. It's crazy - but so are some of the benefits our society hands people who are in one of those jobs.

I once suggested that all male-only body-contact sport would eventually die out as our race evolved and brutality and violence became obsolete. That was just stupid. While we can still go to war, we can still bash the bejeesus out of each other to kill time before the next one.

So if you're looking for a conclusion, the only one is this: more programs like "Code Of Silence". People will only change their actions if they are confronted with the consequences of them repeatedly.

Technology will do much of the work for us. Since a phone video got a player off the hook for a sexual incident during the 2007 Kiwis tour, filming encounters has apparently become the norm. What if the footage wasn't just seen by the investigating Sergeant but appeared on the next Four Corners?

That might change things.

The formula is simple for all of us: we are still entitled to do what we choose in our own time. But make sure it's not something you're ashamed of. Our right to keep it secret is just about gone.

And this week has made me think that might just be the best thing that has ever happened to us.

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