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In 2006, the now-deceased Muslim cleric Sheik Taj Aldin al-Hilali caused outrage when he gave a sermon comparing women who do not wear a headscarf to “uncovered meat” who invited sexual assault.
“If you take uncovered meat and place it outside … without cover, and the cats come and eat it … whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s?” he lectured a group of about 500 worshippers at a Ramadan sermon.
“The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.”
According to reports, Sheik al-Hilali alluded, in the sermon, to the crimes of the notorious Skaf brothers, who, along with others, received long jail sentences for the gang rapes of four young women in a series of brutal attacks in Sydney’s south-west in 2000.
He talked about women who “sway suggestively” but then “you get a judge without mercy and he gives you 65 years … but the problem all began with who?”
Following a public uproar, al-Hilali clarified that “I condemn rape”, and said that “women in our Australian society have the freedom and right to dress as they choose; the duty of the man is to avert his glance or walk away”.
I was reminded of these egregious comments this week, following the arrest of three Scots boys for aggravated sexual assault – the most vicious category of sexual assault on the statute books.
The alleged crime has deeply upset the close-knit, highly privileged Scots community, although not all, apparently, are upset for the alleged victim, who is 14.
The focus of much of the hand-wringing has been the school’s management of the alleged rape, particularly its handling by the school principal, Ian Lambert, whose two-metre-tall oil portrait takes pride of place in the school hall.
The lament of some Scots parents has been that their boys’ reputations might be damaged by association, just because they attend the same school. The paramount fear, it seems, always defaults to the fear of damage to the male reputation.
In a WhatsApp group chat of old boys of the school, one old boy named Arthur Tzaneros piped up to protest that “before anyone jumps to conclusions, this is no Skaf case”.
He then went on to victim-blame with a virtuosity that would have made Sheik al-Hilali proud.
The alleged victim was a “willing participant”, Tzaneros wrote. Descriptions of the alleged attack as a rape were “fake news”. He said worse, but it wasn’t reported by this masthead, out of respect for the alleged victim.
Following publication of the message, Tzaneros resigned from his position as chief executive of ACFS Port Logistics, a large freight logistics company that has recently been placed in administration, owing nearly $300 million to creditors.
In a statement, Tzaneros said he deeply regretted what he had said, and apologised “for showing a complete lack of sensitivity to that situation”.
Sometimes it’s refreshing when men like this – sheiks, CEOs – reveal what they really think. No doubt Tzaneros felt the old boys group chat was a safe space, one where he didn’t have to dance around the “facts” like he would in public, where the woke police were watching. Just as al-Hilali believed his audience was sympathetic to his views.
Tzaneros is a man who is firmly seated at the centre of what you might call the capital-E establishment. He is a boss and a job-creator. He is wealthy and well-connected. His family is worth billions. In other words, he is not nobody, and nor are the Scots boys who allegedly attacked a girl in a back alley of Bondi Junction. They are the sons of important eastern suburbs men.
It is not so easy to dismiss these men, and their sons, as monstrous and antithetical to Australian values, as it is to dismiss the families of some brutal Lebanese-Australian kids from western Sydney.
The same goes for the three other 17-year-old boys facing “abhorrent” allegations of sexual assault this week, two of whom are students of another Sydney private school, St Gregory’s College. That school is described as a “well-known nursery” for future NRL players.
Police allege the three boys engaged in a multi-hour assault on the 14-year-old girl they were drinking and hanging out with last Saturday. Again, the multiple charges against all boys are of the most serious order – they include aggravated sexual assault in the company of others.
Nor are the Sydney Swans nobodies. Far from it. Male football players are afforded a particularly special status in Australia – they are something between a celebrity and an Olympian god.
Crowds adore them. They command enormous sums of money, and they make enormous sums of money for the people who profit from the games they play.
Isaac Heeney, who is reportedly the focus of the sexual assault allegation made this week, has marketed himself as a role model for children, and has taken money for that posture – his children’s books were this week dumped by retailers and bookstores.
So reports this week that five Swans players, including Heeney, were involved in a drug-fuelled post-match party that turned ugly, ending in allegations of sexual assault, caused quite the conundrum.
These boys had finals to train for. Their careers were at stake. The Swans would be out of contention now.
Online, the victim-blaming has already begun – the women involved in the incident were reportedly lap dancers, and whatever transgression allegedly occurred was outside the bounds of what had been agreed upon, according to reports.
The majority of sexual assaults occur between people who know each other, and where there is some level of consent to some contact. This is why consent education has been such a policy focus for educators in the post #MeToo era. Just because a person consents to one thing, does not mean they want this other thing too.
This is a valuable thing to teach because inexperience, alcohol and power dynamics can all confuse the boundaries of consent.
But some men and boys will always regard gateway consent as merely the starting gun for an encounter that will proceed on their terms, and will end when they decide it ends.
You might attribute this behaviour to a lack of control. You might attribute it to a sense of entitlement over female bodies, and a profound lack of empathy that amounts to an inability to see women and girls as fully real.
This is why victim blaming comes in so useful, whether it’s a sheik likening girls to uncovered meat, or an “old boy” telling his mates that a 14-year-old girl wanted to be (allegedly) brutally assaulted by three boys at once.
Because if you don’t blame the victim, and if the alleged perpetrators are not easily scapegoated as marginal to Australian society, then you have to confront a harrowing truth.
That male entitlement and its violent corollary, sexual assault, can find a cosy home at the heart of the establishment.
And that sometimes the men and boys who commit violence against women, or enable it, are the men who belong to the “good bloke” galaxy so lionised in this country – the men who back-slap and drink beer with each other, the sort of men who belong to the right schools and sports clubs, the very institutions that rest on their reputation for providing the leaders of tomorrow.
Jacqueline Maley is an author and columnist.
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