Does athletics take sexual violence seriously? Jessica Luther calls out college sports for lack of a

Jessica Luther visited Muhlenberg College this Monday for a speech on her book Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape. The book, which Luther didn’t even consider writing at first, details both the problems and possible solutions related to the problem of sexual violence committed by collegiate football players.

Luther graduated from Florida State University in 2002 with degrees in Classical Civilization and Greek/Latin. After earning her master’s degree and in the process of getting a Ph.D in History, she decided to quit academia and pursue something she enjoyed more. When a friend told her that she could get paid to write, something she had done in college through blogging, she leapt at the opportunity. Luther turned out to be good at pitching and has been a freelance writer ever since.

“Early on I figured out that I could write about sports and that was wild that someone was going to pay me to write about sports at all,” said Luther. “It worked organically on some level because I was still pretending like I was going to get my Ph.D, so I was doing some work there but also slowing learning how to freelance.”

From there, according to Luther, she kind of fell into the more specific investigative journalism she does now. She was interested in issues surrounding sexual violence, and knew survivors—it was something she cared about. But her love of college football is what pushed her into specifically pursuing the relationship between college football and rape. She was born and raised an FSU fan and loved college football practically her entire life. That affection was quickly lost after her investigations on sexual assaults at institutions like Navy and Vanderbilt. At the time, both schools had football players being investigated for gang rapes. While she followed the movement of these cases, Luther noticed that most of the media was focusing on whether or not Johnny Manziel had been paid for his autograph. These cased and their media coverage inspired Luther’s career.

“In November 2013, Jameis Winston, who was then the quarterback of Florida State, it was announced that he had been under investigation for sexual assault for eleven months. It was at that point when I was reading all the sports media and I didn’t like how they were talking about it; and I started to intervene at that point.”

Luther says the issue with the media coverage of these cases is how guarded what they choose to talk about is. She wants writing about sexual violence in a bigger context, and she took on that responsibility. In terms of bigger context, according the Luther, when sports media gets ahold of these stories they take a narrow perspective in their coverage. The media focuses on the athlete, the impact on their performance and what’s going to happen to the team. However, they leave out two things that are important to both the story and to Luther – the violence and the person who reported it.

“At that point I started writing about it and apparently I’m never going to stop writing about it, as of right now,” Luther stated.

Unfortunately, that is probably true.

Almost two years after Luther and fellow writer Dan Solomon broke the story about Baylor football player Sam Ukwuachu, people are still talking about it. And more unfortunate still is the research she uses to back her book shows that the intersection of college football and sexual violence dates back to the 60s and 70s. That’s only based on instances reported by the media. It’s a systemic issue, going all the way up to the NCAA, and that’s what Luther wants readers to focus on.

To her, it’s more than just an issue among football players. The problem extends to the coaches, to athletic directors and other administrators, to the top of the NCAA—a collection of mostly white males protecting not necessarily the players’ images but rather their own. The worst part, according to Luther, is the NCAA’s lack of conviction.

“They [the NCAA] just don’t care,” Luther explained. “No one cares enough to do something about this and like I said I don’t like the NCAA. So, I don’t know if they should do anything because I don’t think they’d do it well. But, I get very tired of this pretending, this idea that they talk a really big game. It matters who’s in charge and what they care about.”

Muhlenberg has taken steps to combat this issue. Programs like It’s On Us and Step Up Mules have developed over the past couple years to combat sexual assault on campus and sexual assault related to athletics, respectively. All athletes are required to participate in Step Up Mules in order to play on varsity athletic teams.

Despite the emphasis placed on this program by the athletics department, no sports teams were required to attend the talk, and only half of the field hockey was represented. Even though the softball and track & field teams were partially responsible for bringing Luther to campus, neither was overwhelmingly present in the audience.

This reflects Luther’s belief that coaches and administrators don’t care enough. Failing to encourage or require Muhlenberg sports teams to attend a lecture about the intersection of college football and sexual violence, despite being on a smaller scale, perpetuates this problem.

For a school and athletic department that prides itself in educating athletes about preventing sexual violence, one has to wonder whether those involved with Muhlenberg sports really take this issue seriously.

Photo courtesy of Muhlenberg College Public Relations