We Must Not Play Into The Silence
The 27th of October saw Liverpool playing at the Emirates Stadium, drawing 2-2 in an important match apropos of title chances. As a Liverpool fan, it was a frustrating watch for multiple reasons. Trent wasn't at his best, Arsenal scored two goals in the first half that could've been stopped, lacklustre football, and so on. None of these, however, was the most frustrating aspect of the game for me. The part of the game that saddened me the most was sometime in the second half when Arsenal's Number Five Thomas Partey was applauded by the home crowd after a successful tackle that stopped Liverpool's attack. This was the breaking point for me, someone who keenly listens to what the commentators have to say, after noticing that throughout the game the commentators mention everything but one glaring aspect about Thomas - that he is accused of rape and is out on bail for it.
Soon after this news broke out, one of the women who accused him of the deed came out on Twitter to name Thomas as the culprit. Given the demographic that uses Twitter to talk about football and their collective knowledge/opinions/awareness about the topic of sexual abuse, the poor woman was harassed without extent, to the point she had to turn off replies on each of her posts. As of today, her account is suspended. The harassment was so bad that the official Twitter account of the Barnet police had tweeted out in support of the woman mentioning that she was not wrong in her accusation but in fact, as mentioned by the woman in her tweets, it was only due to a technicality that Thomas was not arrested.
https://x.com/MPSBarnet/status/1554853955917824000
As mentioned in the tweet, the man accused was 29 years old and Thomas was, indeed, twenty-nine at the time. This seems fairly straightforward, does it not? You have a man who is guilty of rape escaping his punishment because of some god-awful technicality. There is no excuse to have a person like that on the payroll of a football team. The most logical thing to do if Arsenal football club cared about women's safety was terminating his contract. Right?
On the second of November ahead of Arsenal's match away to Newcastle, their official Twitter account looked a bit like this while announcing the fixture.
Thomas has been coddled and protected by the club on multiple occasions since the accusations came out. As mentioned in the article below, Thomas has been playing for Arsenal while out on bail.
It seemed extremely suspicious that Thomas would keep missing away games in Europe due to alleged muscle issues as well. The injuries would all line up when Arsenal were playing outside of England.
Now I am not a journalist, and neither do I claim to know everything about this case or any of the other cases that I will be talking about in this post, but I am confident that this much evidence is sufficient to incriminate Thomas, and also to ensure that anyone who wants to reason with me after reading through all this that not being proven guilty does not, in fact, mean that a high profile football player is innocent of what he is accused of. But I want to make a bigger point. The silence surrounding this fiasco is horrifying. At what point does someone call a timeout and address the issue at hand, especially considering that Arsenal football club has a women's team as well? What is the message here? Okay, maybe for legal reasons you're not supposed to name the player and his deeds when you're a broadcaster or a presenter. But now the football club has taken this silence as a go-ahead to unabashedly protect and play him week-in week-out, what do you do now? What mechanism is in place to protect women in society from people like this?
Last year, ex-Man City footballer Benjamin Mendy was cleared of similar charges. It is important to denote, as explained in the above case, that he was not proven innocent, but rather found "not guilty". Multiple football stars, including Memphis Depay and Vinicius Jr., immediately came out with posts celebrating his acquittal and asking for 'protection' against cases like this. His ex-coach Pep Guardiola even gave a character witness stating Benjamin was a "good boy." In a day and age where women's football is on the rise and that hemisphere of football seems to be exponentially more progressive, their male counterparts are working tirelessly to ruin whatever impact they leave on humanity. Will the same footballers come out with posts condemning their compatriots who have been (although rarely) found guilty? Gylfi Sigurdsson, Dani Alves, Adam Johnson and the like?
At the risk of drawing ire from football purists, I have a confession regarding my status as a Liverpool fan. This is only the second season I am supporting them. Before that, I was a die-hard Manchester United fan. The primary reason I stopped supporting the Manchester United men's team was the way they handled two cases of alleged predators - Cristiano Ronaldo and Mason Greenwood. I am not discussing Cristiano's case because 1. His biggest fans will never agree to any point I make, denying the plausibility of all evidence I cite. 2. The evidence I do cite isn't exactly contentious, but I can see why someone who wants to believe otherwise thinks they have grounds to trust what they believe. I want to talk about Mason Greenwood. If the case against Cristiano is that there wasn't enough evidence, why is Mason not behind bars? His partner had posted ample evidence of rape and physical abuse on Instagram - it was horrifying. But now he is at Marseille getting the PR of a lifetime to make us forget, or worse, forgive his deeds. "He was a young man he deserves a second chance" - counterpoint: nobody who has engaged in sexual abuse deserves a second chance. It may seem to be a radical take, but I will stand by it forever. This is the only crime that I believe can never warrant a benefit of the doubt or rehabilitation, as there is simply no justification that anyone can ever provide that would make it seem any less inhumane.
Even if you do not agree with me, does this stuff surrounding Mason not seem nauseating? The Ligue 1 official English account posts about him nearly every game, you have United fans calling for the club's head for selling the player - even though the club was egregious enough to test the fans' reaction to a comeback for the player. Why does football trump basic humanity? For most other accusations. the argument is always about a lack of evidence. But when you do have the rare case of proper evidence being provided, the goalpost is shifted to forgiveness, and that anyone can make "mistakes."
I am aware that you cannot jail someone purely based on someone's accusation, but there have been so many cases of someone who is guilty that gets away with it, or as is unfortunately the case more often than not, the victim suffers even more. We need to have a more nuanced view of things like this. "Innocent until proven guilty" does not cut it. I am not sure what does, but I insist on at least having a healthy conversation on things like this. I believe there is a critical lack of understanding of what sexual abuse is, and how to react to it, and conversations help with this. What we cannot do is let these matters stay silent. Footballers are, unfortunately, role models to many people. Football means the world to me as well. But we must be able to see the bigger picture in cases like this. Sexual abuse is a persisting problem in all corners of the world, and more people than you know are victims of the same. Being a footballer does not excuse the crime, and we must do more to hold predators accountable.
Comments
Post a Comment