‘Role Model’ Ched Evans Is A Rapist But At Least He’s Not Racist
DAVID Walsh writes about Ched Evens in the Sunday Times. Ched Evans is the footballer who is also a convicted rapist whose become a talking point. Newly released from prison, the Sun reported that Evans has been offered £5,000 a week to return to Sheffield United’s team.
Despite newspaper reports to the contrary, no decision has yet been made about whether or not he will be returning to Bramall Lane…
There are many who believe that if Sheffield United and all other football clubs were united in not offering Evans a route back to professional football, then the game would have made a powerful statement demonstrating its abhorrence of all forms of violence against women…
It is claimed, and not unreasonably, that Evans’ situation is exacerbated by his refusal to express remorse for a crime which ended in a five-year prison sentence… Evans continues to proclaim his innocence and if he genuinely believes that he was wrongly convicted, then how could be possibly be expected to express remorse?
Anyone who cares to read the details of the case will discover that, at the very least, Evans and his friends behaved appallingly that evening in Wales…
Yet it is hard to see how a life ban from professional football can be justified. A young woman has been through an horrific experience, Evans has spent two and a half years in prison and lost perhaps a third of his career. And his reputation. But the punishment should not go any further. A message does need to go out there but that should not mean a different kind of sentence for Evans.
He has served his time and, like everyone who comes out of prison, the hope is that he has learnt from the experience.
A statement on Ched Evans’ website says:
“Chedwyn Evans maintains his absolute innocence and his family, friends and many who know the true facts of the case believe that his conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice.”
Prisons are full of men who insist on their innocence. They say you can tell who the guilty are in prison by seeing who sleeps well. The guilty sleep well.
Also on that website, we read:
“Much has been said about the ‘role model’ label given to Ched by the media, Ched believes in his fight for justice, believes in fighting for what he knows is right, has been incredibly disciplined to maintain his fitness and has learnt from this whole incident, isn’t that being part of a role model[?]”
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Shadow Sports Minister Clive Efford, Labour MP for Eltham, says:
“There are many areas of employment where when you’ve committee a crime like that you’re not allowed to be employed in that form of employment and I think football is one of them, because I think you are a role model within a community. I know this is sad for Ched Evans who’s been to prison and payed a price but I think that in these circumstances it’s not appropriate to have someone with that record in a profession where you’re idolised by young people.”
What a fool. He’s bought into that PR-diven bilge about footballers being role models. They’re not. Their job is to kick a ball to the best of their abilities. The State and vested interest goups piggyback on football’s popularity with the working classes to push their own agendas. So, you get footballers wearing anti-racism bibs to remind the fans that race riots are wrong. Footballers are the State’s useful tools in keeping the mob morally ok.
Ched Evans is no role model.
In the Telegraph, Jason Burt misses the point:
Some footballers embrace the concept of being a role model; some point out that they are sportsmen and no more. But whatever their standpoint they cannot ignore the fact there is a social and cultural responsibility that comes with their position. The right to return to work is then secondary
Daisy Goodwin adds:
Of course rape is a heinous crime and must be punished, but does that mean all debate on the degree of culpability should be quashed? Take the case of the recently retired circuit judge Mary Jane Mowat who made the point that it was very difficult to get a jury to convict in rape trials: “I will also say, and I will be pilloried for saying so, but the rape conviction statistics will not improve until women stop getting so drunk.”
The point she was making was a legal one on the difficulty of securing rape convictions in “he said, she said” cases. But, as she predicted, she was attacked by anti-rape campaigners for “victim-blaming”. Yet would anyone really want to live in a world where men can be jailed on the basis of uncorroborated testimony by a woman who may not have been entirely sober at the time? Isn’t the reluctance of British juries to convict in rape cases a result not of victim-blaming but of a real squeamishness about rushing to judgment in cases where the facts can never be established beyond all reasonable doubt?
There must be a case, as Germaine Greer has suggested, for making a difference in law between rape and sexual assault: “One of my greatest struggles over the past 30 years has been to persuade women that they should be victims no longer — in particular, when it comes to rape. In so far as rape is the assault via the penis, it’s one of the least destructive assaults. And it bugs me that women are still so impressed by the penis that they think it can destroy their personality and their life.”
Discuss..
Posted: 19th, October 2014 | In: Sports Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
