#olding

**Shots of the Episode**

The Crown (2017)

Season 3, Episode 1: “Olding” (2019)

As the cricket industry continues to wring its hands over ball tampering and the disrepute this no doubt brings to the game, an outrage of a different nature involving sportsmen has been brewing in Ireland.

The incident involved the alleged sexual assault of a young woman at the hands of young men who later described her variously as “very, very loose” and “causing so much trouble for the lads”.

So, you know, not that big a deal.

But here are the bare bones of it. On Wednesday, Ireland and Ulster players Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding were found not guilty of rape by a jury consisting of eight men and three women. Blane McIlroy and Rory Harrison were also found not guilty - McIlroy of exposure, and Harrison of perverting the course of justice and withholding information.

Charges against the four men related to an alleged incident at a house party in 2016. The complainant alleged a consensual kiss had occurred between her and Jackson, but that he later raped her in a bedroom as she prepared to leave.  She told police the assault only ended after a third man, McIlroy, entered the room with his penis in his hand. As the young woman told the court, “It was at that point that my fight instinct kicked in.”

Key witness testimony to the court came via the taxi driver who drove the young woman home as she was comforted by Harrison, the fourth man charged with perverting the course of justice. The driver told the court the young woman “definitely seemed very upset” and was “crying and sobbing throughout the journey” while Harrison spoke with an unnamed person on the phone.

Evidence offered to the court in the form of What’s App conversations later showed Harrison telling his friends the woman was “just a silly girl who has done something then regretted it” and “she is causing so much trouble for the lads”.

Conversely, the woman spent her morning texting friends, “So I got raped by 3 Ulster f*****g scum” and “second then a third guy tried to get involved...I was crying.” After a friend urged her to go to the police, she replied, “Going up against the Ulster rugby. Yea because that’ll work.”

It appears her fears were well-founded. Not only were her alleged assailants found not guilty, but she has also suffered a backlash of abuse, made worse by her name being leaked to the public.

I wish that there were different outcomes for young women who choose to take on groups of powerful young men, but the reality is that male codes of silence and bonds of brotherhood frequently win out.

Ewen McKenna recently addressed this in a column for the Irish Independent. After the Belfast verdict was handed down, he wrote, “There's still a startling number of men happy to hide behind the boys-will-be-boys and she-was-asking-for-it undertones. It makes you wonder what goes on in the mind of a person who celebrates a rape trial verdict as if a victory for their gender and as if vindication for acts that shouldn't ever have taken place?”

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with a number of times over the last few years. There are always people willing to defend men accused of rape by yelling that 'she consented!' But why does consent to them look like women being ambushed by numerous men and placed in an untenable situation?

The "consent" that's really in play in situations like this is agreed on by men pursuing sexual activity with each other. The woman is never a part of those conversations - she is only meant to provide the outcome of them. (Even in the Belfast case, McIlroy’s defense team argued he had texted Jackson prior to entering the room to ask if there was “any chance of a threesome”. He received no reply to that text, but entered the room anyway.)

I am reminded of so many similar incidents involving groups of men against lone women. The Cronulla Sharks, Sheffield United’s Ched Evans, Stephen Milne and Leigh Montagna - these are just a drop in the bucket of stories that show certain kinds of men collude with each other to sexually outnumber women. There are members of the public who refuse to acknowledge this as grounds for rape, but I am perhaps more astonished by their reluctance to see the behaviour as even questionable enough for critique. How can we hope to promote affirmative consent and respectful sexual interactions when there are still so many swathes of people willing to support the degrading, dehumanising pack behaviour of men who just happen to be good at a sport?