By GREG ANSLEY
This week the beleaguered Canterbury Bulldogs battened down the hatches and prepared to ride out the latest scandal to envelop the Sydney rugby league club.
Up to six of its players are under investigation over allegations of rape made by a 20-year-old woman after what by all accounts was a wild night in the northern New South Wales coastal resort town of Coffs Harbour.
Reports published in the nation's newspapers tell of binge drinking, punch-ups with the locals and, finally, allegations of rape in the pool of the Novotel Pacific Bay resort.
Last year, at the same resort, a 42-year-old woman complained that she had consented to sex with one Bulldogs' player but woke up to find another player having sex with her while another looked on.
No charges were laid in that case for want of evidence and, so far, no one has been charged over the latest allegations.
But charges or not, the story has a dark familiarity, noted by Sydney Morning Herald columnist Roy Masters: "This scenario has been repeated so often at the start of the football season there is a danger our eyes will develop the kind of double glazing recommended for energy efficiency."
Nor is it confined to rugby league, or even Australia. There is growing international concern at what is emerging as a pattern of sexual misconduct, and especially gang rape, by sporting teams ranging from soccer and American football to lacrosse and ice hockey.
Two years ago Christchurch police questioned players from Sydney's Cronulla NRL club after a complaint by a female hotel worker, but no charges were laid.
In Britain, the nation was shocked by claims that at least seven premier league soccer players had raped a 17-year-old woman.
Canada has been rocked by a series of investigations into gang rape and other sexual violence within ice hockey, its national sport, including 135 sex crime charges against senior players, owners, coaches and trainers of Ontario's Tilbury Hawks junior team.
Award-winning investigative reporter Laura Robinson wrote after more than five years uncovering ice hockey's dark secrets: "It was clear that junior hockey had what sports sociologists call a 'rape culture'."
In Japan, athletes from Waseda University became the subject of a similar scandal.
And in the United States, sexual violence and gang rape have become almost endemic among elite sporting teams, especially top-ranking college sides.
In the past few years allegations of gang rape have been made against teams as diverse as the University of Colorado football squad, teenage baseballers from Chula Vista, Arizona, and athletes from the Notre Dame Catholic university.
Psychologists and sociologists have begun specialised studies into links between sports and sex crimes - in Australia the NRL embraces the issue in its "cultural awareness" programmes - but it is a relatively new field.
Much of the work has been undertaken in the US, where a spate of gang rapes by sports stars (alleged and proven) set alarm bells ringing in the late 1980s.
While debate continues about the links - with a significant body of opinion supporting the argument that the scale of complaints is magnified exponentially by the fame of their subjects - some disturbing evidence has emerged.
One survey of US colleges found that sports teams were responsible for 40 per cent of campus gang rapes. Another found that while male athletes made up 3.3 per cent of the study group, they accounted for 19 per cent of those reported for sexual assault.
Similar results were reported by psychologist Dr Chris O'Sullivan of Pennsylvania's Buckness University, after a study of 26 gang rapes, and by Dr Bernice Sandler of the Association of American Colleges, who found that footballers, basketballers and hockey players were the most likely to commit gang rape.
Disturbingly, most studies found that the worst offenders were frequently the biggest stars, who often did not believe they had done anything wrong and who usually escaped with "little more than a reprimand".
Most admitted having sex with the victim, but claimed she had wanted group sex.
"The athletes who do this are usually on a star team, not just any old team," O'Sullivan reported. "It seems it is our most privileged athletes - the ones, by the way, most sought after by women - who are most often involved in gang rape."
University of Arizona psychologist Dr May Koss noted the lack of a sense of guilt among gang rapists in her survey of 6000 students at 32 American universities: "Of the 131 men who committed what we would legally define as rape, 84 per cent argued that what they did was definitely not rape."
Studies also pointed to peer pressure, sexual aggression and excitement produced by team sports, and a kind of wild sexual bonding encouraged by the closeness of team membership and the prestige of sports stardom.
One concluded: "The group environment binds men emotionally to one another and contributes to their seeing sex relations from a position of power and status."
Added O'Sullivan: "Sports foster this supermasculine attitude where you connect aggression and sexuality."
Dark familiarity over rape claims
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