Essay by Mona Eltahawy on Feminist Giant.
Patriarchy is an overwhelming issue on top of the sport, violence, alcohol, toxic gender norms, misogyny, and entitlement.
"It is not football that makes cisgender men abuse women and children. It is not the alcohol those men readily consume while watching football that makes them hurt women and children. And win, lose or draw, the score doesn't make a man beat a woman. Patriarchy does."
Relevant statistics:
During lockdown, Refuge logged a 61 percent surge in calls to its domestic abuse helpline in England. In Italy, women who could not call a helpline or directly report domestic abuse to the police could call a police emergency number and say: "I'd like to order a margarita pizza" which would alert the operator to send round a patrol.
...Moreover, researchers from UK's Lancaster University who analysed domestic violence figures from England's games in the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cup found that incidents of domestic abuse were 11 percent higher the day after an England match.
More alarmingly: incidents of domestic abuse rose by 38 percent when the England team lost and increased by 26 percent where England won or drew, compared with days when there was no England match.
...Whether England is the home of football or not matters little to women and children whose abusers make home hell after major football games. It is a hell that decreases by 5 percent during the 2-hour duration of the game, but that starts increasing and peaks about ten hours after the game, researchers at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance found. They examined eight years of call and crime data from Greater Manchester police, correlating with the timing of almost 800 games played by Manchester United and Manchester City between April 2012 and June 2019.
The researchers say that "all increases are driven by perpetrators that had consumed alcohol, and when games were played before 7pm,"; games which start during the day give supporters more time to drink.
As useful as it is to know all of that, it is imperative to resist the temptation of thinking that simply moving all football games to evening start times will end domestic abuse associated with games. The starting time of games is the trees. We must stay focused on the forest: patriarchy.
...During the 2014 and 2018 World Cups, cases of intimate-partner violence against women rose by an average of 38 percent and 25 percent respectively when Colombia played. And by nearly 50 percent during the 2015 Copa America, compared to days when Colombia did not play. Colombia won third place in this year's Copa America tournament.
Abusive men will abuse you whether their team wins or loses or draws, whether there is a lockdown or not, because it is about the abuser and about the ways patriarchy enables and protects his belief that he is entitled to control you. As lockdowns are being lifted in Europe, there has been a resurgence of deadly violence against women as abusers experience a "loss of the control" they enjoyed throughout the coronavirus lockdowns.
Violence isn't just towards women:
The violence that goes home with the men's game is a wholly-owned subsidiary of patriarchy. You would be naive to think that such violence is limited to women and children. It is what fuels the boos when players take a knee and the racial abuse yelled at Black and players of colour; it is what fuels homophobic chants that are brushed off as "jokes." Misogyny is not patriarchy's sole crime.
How when we know that at least 10 percent of any population belongs to the LGBTQ+ community, is there not a single out player in the men's top leagues while the women's game has a long history of openly gay players?
Patriarchy. That's how.
What men can learn from women and LBGTQIA+ friendly competitions:If queer is the opposite of heteronormativity, the queerest--and joyously so--sporting environment I've witnessed were the Women's World Cup matches in Montreal in 2015.
There were no reports of abuse going home after the matches; no campaigns that warned that "If England is beaten, so is he,"; and the players on the pitch were there to play, not engage in bombastic flops and fake injuries.
