America at Large: US college sport’s frightening problem with rape

In a scene familiar to anybody who's ever watched Friday Night Lights, the newly arrived high school football coach is laying down the law to his players, rattling off cliches about no-huddle offences and two-a-day training sessions. Suddenly, he departs the script and informs them he'll also be operating a strict "no raping policy".

“No raping?” asks one player. “But coach, we play football!”

“My team, my rules,” says the coach. “You don’t like it? Don’t let the door rape you on the way out.”

So begins 'Football Town Nights', a skit from a recent episode of Inside Amy Schumer, the eponymous sketch show written by and starring America's hippest comedian of the moment. Think about what that cameo says about this country. Sexual assault cases involving athletes at all levels are such a staple of the news cycle Schumer can satirise this hot-button issue, knowing full well her audience would immediately grasp the nuances and her intention to skewer.

At the same time "no raping" was going viral on YouTube, Jon Krakauer published Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town. Nearly two decades after Into Thin Air, his seminal work on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Krakauer has written a timely book about a corner of Montana once dubbed "the rape capital of America". Local and university authorities there so mishandled 350 rape cases between 2008 and 2012 that the Department of Justice launched a federal investigation.

In a work that some critics have called “one-sided”, Krakauer focuses much of his typically forensic and often stomach-churning reportage on two particular cases involving football players on the University Of Montana Grizzlies team. One pleads guilty and goes to jail, the other is exonerated. Of course, it’s about much more than that, offering a depressing glimpse into the bizarre culture of entitlement and enabling that has produced a slew of frightening statistics about college athletes.

According to the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes (that such an organisation even exists offers its own sad commentary on society), one in three college sexual assaults are committed by athletes. Although less than four per cent of the male population on any campus are sportsmen, they are responsible for almost 20 per cent of attacks on female students. The conviction rate for perpetrators who wear the college colours on a field or court is 35 per cent. For the rest of the student population, the rate is 80 per cent.

Common thread

If those sort of alarming numbers indicate why the topic was worth investigating, they also point up that Missoula is not unique. Indeed, when Krakauer started researching, he quickly amassed files on more than 30 college towns with disturbing rates of sexual assault and low rates of successful prosecution. In all these cases, there seems a common thread where those in power often regard preserving the university’s brand and/or the good name of a team as more important than delivering justice.

In Missoula, the police chief sent one victim an article that claimed 45 per cent of all rape allegations were false. Another detective asked a woman reporting an assault whether she had a boyfriend and was maybe crying “rape” to avoid admitting she cheated. The local prosecutor refused to bring to trial one case despite there being blood-stained sheets and video footage of the alleged perpetrator returning to his room while holding the female student’s jeans aloft like a trophy.

Against that apparently all too typical background, it’s not difficult to understand why so many women in college are often scared to report sexual assaults, especially those involving athletes. Apart from the authorities appearing routinely suspicious of accusers and investigations becoming protracted, torturous ordeals, there is also the prospect of being treated like a pariah in a place whose entire existence can be intertwined with college sport. In the absence of any pro teams, the Grizzlies are Montana’s football flagship. The only show in town.

Backwater division

“What’s disheartening to me is, if you had coaches who care about more than winning, they could end this problem in team sports,” said Krakauer recently. “Just by saying, ‘You know what? I don’t care if it’s true or false, if I hear a rumour that any of you committed sexual assault, you’re suspended, and if I learn there’s more than that you’re gone.’ That would fix the problem overnight if coaches did that. But there’s so much pressure on them to win and there’s so much money involved, even in a small backwater division like the Big Sky in Montana.”

In too many messed-up places, the team’s fortunes take precedence over all else. Schumer actually based ‘Football Town Nights’ on the way Steubenville, Ohio rallied around its high school football players after some of them gang-raped a girl a couple of years back.

“Football isn’t about rape,” says Schumer’s fictional coach, trying to inspire his troops at half-time in a losing game. “It’s about violently dominating anyone that stands between you and what you want. You’ve gotta get yourself into the mindset that you are gods and you are entitled to this. That other team, they aren’t just going to lay down and give it to you. You’ve gotta go out there and take it . . . Clear eyes, full hearts, don’t rape.”

The last line is a parody of the Friday Night Lights mantra. The rest of the speech, well, that's a parody of an entire culture.