Sydney Swans

As a Sydney Swans supporter I am slightly outraged that my team, which had no real chance this year anyway, now has absolutely no chance.

But I am happy that their bullshit bloods culture has finally been exposed for the media sham that it is. Now they can get on with being proper footballers.

As a person I am outraged that a worker in the sex industry that has agreed to go back to a hotel room with a bunch of footballers can complain about getting touched up, and get listened to by the forces of blue.

Now of course, the general counter argument is that touching wasn’t consented to, and that all people, no matter the circumstances have the right to say no, unless of course you are a player talking to an umpire.

Now lap dancing and snorting cocaine off boobs and butts under the influence of alcohol and cocaine was consented to, and, yeah, it’s going to be under those conditions that verbal contracts are at their best.

The natural outcome is that we will need an AFL-accredited sex-worker with occupational classifications, danger loading and industrial paperwork. They would need extra danger money of course, and pre-NDAs covering their whole career and all their clients.

Prostitution is a legal trade in Australia and Australian employment law does not give employers an unrestricted right to control lawful private conduct outside work. However a footballer’s employer in this case has created a contractual obligation for the players not to use the services of this legal trade at any time during their period of employment.

So unless they sort it out properly this problem will keep occurring.

After all they are the two oldest trades in the world – football and prostitution – and they are not going anywhere.

There is an Overton-window equivalent in law: a culturally acceptable range within which police, prosecutors, judges and juries interpret concepts such as consent, reasonableness and seriousness.

If this case really comes down to three consensual slaps and one disputed extra slap during an intoxicated sexualised encounter (I lost count, M’lud), it may test the outer limit of that range.

The law can technically treat the fourth slap as sexual assault, but if ordinary people regard that outcome as absurd, the law risks losing legitimacy even if the legal reasoning is consistent.

The legal system however has a good implied and inferred relationship with their own version of the Overton window. So I don’t think it will overreach.

Courts, prosecutors and police are usually quite sensitive to the practical boundary of what the community will regard as a legitimate application of criminal law, even when that boundary is not formally stated.