Great article. Apologies in advance for this long rant on your post :)
I think this case is interesting from a judicial and psychological perspective, because (i) that's my expertise, and (ii) the AFL is charged with running a system of justice here. The position the AFL is taking with homophobic language essentially boils down to a zero tolerance approach with mandatory minimum sentences for specific words. The primary sentencing option the AFL has open to it is suspensions. It's a blunt but highly deterrent instrument, and for an AFL player, missing 5+ matches (including all of finals) is a crushing sentence. The AFL despairs that homophobic insults continue despite all this, ignoring decades of evidence that analogous sentencing approaches in the criminal justice system have been ineffective at addressing crime because they ignore the underlying social and psychological functions of problem behaviour.
People engage in antisocial behaviour for different reasons, and in the criminal justice system these reasons are important because they can speak to one's moral culpability and the general deterrent effect of sentencing (and to be clear, this policy from the AFL is solely about general deterrence). I don't want to hypothesise too much about Izak specifically because it just sounds like I'm defending him, and my experience trying to voice my thoughts on social media was an unpleasant one. And I get that the AFL judicial system needs to be expedient and doesn't have time to consider everything. But there may be context here that we just don't have.
I just ask people to please keep an open mind about Izak and his basic character, and perhaps try to separate the action from the man. Remember that you don't know his story. Mateo, you say that everyone should feel disappointment and disgust towards Izak. Disappointment, sure. But disgust? Come on. Watch some of the vision back. The Collingwood players are getting stuck into him all day, taunting him both physically and verbally. Izak is losing his cool, mouthing off, and the Collingwood players are all laughing at him. Picture a young Aboriginal kid in an Adelaide public school. Do you think what was happening at AO might have reminded Izak of something?
Yes, I'm a bleeding heart. And yes, Izak needs to work on whatever personal issues he has that cause him to act out like this. You can't be a grown man acting like an angry child, and you can't use that language anymore. I just hope that, whatever happens, Izak can serve his sentence, get help and support, and then be welcomed back to the game with open arms as the brilliant player that he is. Based on the discourse on both traditional and social media of late, I'm not optimistic about the last part.
Thanks Mateo for the great article. Sam, I completely agree. The entire discourse has been focused on punishment and precedence (or lack thereof) with little to no consideration as to whether suspension (and escalation of suspensions) is actually a meaningful way to change behavior and reduce homophobia in sport.
We don't know whether Izak is homophobic or not but the reality is that use of homophobic language on and off the pitch is much more nuanced than has been presented this week. There has been consistent research that athletes who use homophobic language are generally not doing this to express hate or prejudice towards gay people, and that only a small proportion of athletes seem to be using homophobic language because they're homophobic (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1440244020308094).
That is a much harder story to tell. It's much easier to confine the issue to the offence and the offender. Where is the evidence that this will change social norms? Honestly, I think this week has shown that this approach does more harm than good.
We have different views on this as you know. The AFL chose (rightly) to punish the use of homophobic language in the sport. They've also chosen to make those rules somewhat opaque and arbitrary, with some possible allowance for vibes around relative player contrition. It's unclear whether this ban just applies to 2-3 obvious words but that seems to be the case. Would izak be suspended if he'd used a slightly less direct expression with the same homophobic intent? I doubt it, which might not be entirely unreasonable but highlights the lack of principle at play.
In the context of what's being reported as some very torrid verbal exchanges, it's reasonable for Andrew Dillon to be asked why one of the words used leaves a player unavailable for the entire final series while some of the other exchanges escape any sanction whatsoever.
In any other workplace multiple people would be facing disciplinary action based on the media reports.
Thanks, Tyler. Always respect your views. Those are hard questions that I doubt the AFL has good answers for, especially given its susceptibility to any kind of edge case. I agree that one of the takeaways from this should be that we sanction the wrong number of actions/sledges/slurs. I guess whether one thinks we should sanction more or less probably depends on one's views in other domains. Certainly no one could accuse the AFL of consistency.
This also gets to something I only briefly alluded to in the piece - Houston's sledge, if it was as reported, is pretty damned vile. Yet there's no codified framework by which it currently elicits a suspension.
People keep dismissing the effect the whole situation that night definitely had on Rankine which is narrow and naïve thinking. Deeper than that, many of the moralising ‘takes’ seen on socials, in the media, and even from the AFL itself, have failed to acknowledge the lack of power and privilege that Rankine comes from as an indigenous person in our society. I believe it’s highly relevant when balancing the punishment, or are we only happy to work towards ‘closing the gap’ when it doesn’t mess with our highly privileged lens of fairness?
Awesome article, I think the stuff about the club being entitled to defend Rankine made me think. I am definitely guilty of hoping (maybe expecting) the club would take a harsher stance on this. I can see that that is probably unreasonable. Still hurts though
Thanks for reading. It does hurt. He's let a lot of people down. But I also have no trouble understanding the club's actions. They're not our moral guinea pigs.
I feel like we are missing so much context in what the vultures in the media have fed us.
I’d love to know what the Pride in Sport training actually means because it doesn’t seem to work and neither does the flat game bans (maybe Izak missing big finals will be a bit different).
If I think about how you’d remove in from ever coming in to your brain it would be to replace the word that comes out when you feel that way with something that could be hurtful but not a word that is always hurtful to a specific group. I think there’s always words in everyone brains that you unconsciously (for lack of a better word) say when you feel under threat and you have to make them words that aren’t slurs to a specific group.
I’d love to know if they’re education on matters like this involves people that are from the discriminated community and not just about how the can feel threatened in threatening situations but how the specific words being used cause them to feel when not used in the direct context of attacking them. I haven’t personally seen an explanation of the feelings elicited by the word being simply uttered.
Regarding the suspension process, the delay doesn’t help anyone the LGBTQ community because of it being brought up everyday and the people that come out of their holes.
The Crows because of the distraction and sentiment other fans will direct at us now.
Izak because it will be harder for him to better himself and move forward, you just know there’s enough shit people that won’t forget it and not allow anyone to move on, we’ve seen it with Tex (the comments about him talking on Triple M) the only to really prove to others that you’ve improved yourself with something like this is never do it again because it happens when you aren’t from that community.
With the actual suspension, I think anything less than 5 brings with it a lot of extra baggage that will mean no one really gets better from it. I think the quicker it’s forgotten the better, I don’t mean that there are no repercussions but that we’re at a point where the word isn’t used.
From what we’ve been told but without the context of the sentence it was in, further than it being used at all I’m disappointed that Izak used the full word because that generally carries more hatred than the shorter form.
I wish the Crows had used a different suspension (like Laird’s last week) to fight the AFL on all of their inconsistencies but you only go that far when the missed games mean more.
They just announced 4 games as the ban. I hope the Crows win the QF and win it in 3 so much. The team to deliver success, whoever fills Izak’s role to have the chance to go all the way and not get dropped because of the suspension for the gf. And for Izak he feels the burn of missing out and comes back a better person and better player next year.
I can’t and don’t want to think about the media if the Crows are in the GF with Izak available to return, I think I’d rather go out in straight sets than that.
Great article. Apologies in advance for this long rant on your post :)
I think this case is interesting from a judicial and psychological perspective, because (i) that's my expertise, and (ii) the AFL is charged with running a system of justice here. The position the AFL is taking with homophobic language essentially boils down to a zero tolerance approach with mandatory minimum sentences for specific words. The primary sentencing option the AFL has open to it is suspensions. It's a blunt but highly deterrent instrument, and for an AFL player, missing 5+ matches (including all of finals) is a crushing sentence. The AFL despairs that homophobic insults continue despite all this, ignoring decades of evidence that analogous sentencing approaches in the criminal justice system have been ineffective at addressing crime because they ignore the underlying social and psychological functions of problem behaviour.
People engage in antisocial behaviour for different reasons, and in the criminal justice system these reasons are important because they can speak to one's moral culpability and the general deterrent effect of sentencing (and to be clear, this policy from the AFL is solely about general deterrence). I don't want to hypothesise too much about Izak specifically because it just sounds like I'm defending him, and my experience trying to voice my thoughts on social media was an unpleasant one. And I get that the AFL judicial system needs to be expedient and doesn't have time to consider everything. But there may be context here that we just don't have.
I just ask people to please keep an open mind about Izak and his basic character, and perhaps try to separate the action from the man. Remember that you don't know his story. Mateo, you say that everyone should feel disappointment and disgust towards Izak. Disappointment, sure. But disgust? Come on. Watch some of the vision back. The Collingwood players are getting stuck into him all day, taunting him both physically and verbally. Izak is losing his cool, mouthing off, and the Collingwood players are all laughing at him. Picture a young Aboriginal kid in an Adelaide public school. Do you think what was happening at AO might have reminded Izak of something?
Yes, I'm a bleeding heart. And yes, Izak needs to work on whatever personal issues he has that cause him to act out like this. You can't be a grown man acting like an angry child, and you can't use that language anymore. I just hope that, whatever happens, Izak can serve his sentence, get help and support, and then be welcomed back to the game with open arms as the brilliant player that he is. Based on the discourse on both traditional and social media of late, I'm not optimistic about the last part.
Thanks Mateo for the great article. Sam, I completely agree. The entire discourse has been focused on punishment and precedence (or lack thereof) with little to no consideration as to whether suspension (and escalation of suspensions) is actually a meaningful way to change behavior and reduce homophobia in sport.
We don't know whether Izak is homophobic or not but the reality is that use of homophobic language on and off the pitch is much more nuanced than has been presented this week. There has been consistent research that athletes who use homophobic language are generally not doing this to express hate or prejudice towards gay people, and that only a small proportion of athletes seem to be using homophobic language because they're homophobic (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1440244020308094).
That is a much harder story to tell. It's much easier to confine the issue to the offence and the offender. Where is the evidence that this will change social norms? Honestly, I think this week has shown that this approach does more harm than good.
We have different views on this as you know. The AFL chose (rightly) to punish the use of homophobic language in the sport. They've also chosen to make those rules somewhat opaque and arbitrary, with some possible allowance for vibes around relative player contrition. It's unclear whether this ban just applies to 2-3 obvious words but that seems to be the case. Would izak be suspended if he'd used a slightly less direct expression with the same homophobic intent? I doubt it, which might not be entirely unreasonable but highlights the lack of principle at play.
In the context of what's being reported as some very torrid verbal exchanges, it's reasonable for Andrew Dillon to be asked why one of the words used leaves a player unavailable for the entire final series while some of the other exchanges escape any sanction whatsoever.
In any other workplace multiple people would be facing disciplinary action based on the media reports.
Thanks, Tyler. Always respect your views. Those are hard questions that I doubt the AFL has good answers for, especially given its susceptibility to any kind of edge case. I agree that one of the takeaways from this should be that we sanction the wrong number of actions/sledges/slurs. I guess whether one thinks we should sanction more or less probably depends on one's views in other domains. Certainly no one could accuse the AFL of consistency.
This also gets to something I only briefly alluded to in the piece - Houston's sledge, if it was as reported, is pretty damned vile. Yet there's no codified framework by which it currently elicits a suspension.
People keep dismissing the effect the whole situation that night definitely had on Rankine which is narrow and naïve thinking. Deeper than that, many of the moralising ‘takes’ seen on socials, in the media, and even from the AFL itself, have failed to acknowledge the lack of power and privilege that Rankine comes from as an indigenous person in our society. I believe it’s highly relevant when balancing the punishment, or are we only happy to work towards ‘closing the gap’ when it doesn’t mess with our highly privileged lens of fairness?
Awesome article, I think the stuff about the club being entitled to defend Rankine made me think. I am definitely guilty of hoping (maybe expecting) the club would take a harsher stance on this. I can see that that is probably unreasonable. Still hurts though
Thanks for reading. It does hurt. He's let a lot of people down. But I also have no trouble understanding the club's actions. They're not our moral guinea pigs.
Great read as usual. It’s depressing that despite how much progress the game seems to have made towards inclusivity there’s still so far to go.
I feel like we are missing so much context in what the vultures in the media have fed us.
I’d love to know what the Pride in Sport training actually means because it doesn’t seem to work and neither does the flat game bans (maybe Izak missing big finals will be a bit different).
If I think about how you’d remove in from ever coming in to your brain it would be to replace the word that comes out when you feel that way with something that could be hurtful but not a word that is always hurtful to a specific group. I think there’s always words in everyone brains that you unconsciously (for lack of a better word) say when you feel under threat and you have to make them words that aren’t slurs to a specific group.
I’d love to know if they’re education on matters like this involves people that are from the discriminated community and not just about how the can feel threatened in threatening situations but how the specific words being used cause them to feel when not used in the direct context of attacking them. I haven’t personally seen an explanation of the feelings elicited by the word being simply uttered.
Regarding the suspension process, the delay doesn’t help anyone the LGBTQ community because of it being brought up everyday and the people that come out of their holes.
The Crows because of the distraction and sentiment other fans will direct at us now.
Izak because it will be harder for him to better himself and move forward, you just know there’s enough shit people that won’t forget it and not allow anyone to move on, we’ve seen it with Tex (the comments about him talking on Triple M) the only to really prove to others that you’ve improved yourself with something like this is never do it again because it happens when you aren’t from that community.
With the actual suspension, I think anything less than 5 brings with it a lot of extra baggage that will mean no one really gets better from it. I think the quicker it’s forgotten the better, I don’t mean that there are no repercussions but that we’re at a point where the word isn’t used.
From what we’ve been told but without the context of the sentence it was in, further than it being used at all I’m disappointed that Izak used the full word because that generally carries more hatred than the shorter form.
I wish the Crows had used a different suspension (like Laird’s last week) to fight the AFL on all of their inconsistencies but you only go that far when the missed games mean more.
They just announced 4 games as the ban. I hope the Crows win the QF and win it in 3 so much. The team to deliver success, whoever fills Izak’s role to have the chance to go all the way and not get dropped because of the suspension for the gf. And for Izak he feels the burn of missing out and comes back a better person and better player next year.
I can’t and don’t want to think about the media if the Crows are in the GF with Izak available to return, I think I’d rather go out in straight sets than that.