“Safe to say we’re extremely shocked and disappointed that this has taken place and that the players have found themselves in this situation.”
That’s how Sydney Swans Chief Executive Matthew Pavlich described the alleged incident at a Melbourne hotel this week, as Victoria Police investigate a report of sexual assault. No charges have been laid. No details have been confirmed. What we do have is a short statement from the club, and it’s worth reading closely.
Read that statement again, slowly. Notice who is named. The players are named, specifically: they have “found themselves” in something, the way you might find yourself locked out of a room or stuck at an airport. Whoever the alleged incident affected isn’t acknowledged anywhere in the statement, not even in general terms. No line for anyone impacted. No line for anyone else involved at all.
I’m not here to relitigate the allegation. That’s for police, and legal process matters, for everyone involved. I’m here because I spend my working days educating leaders on gender-based violence prevention, and language like this is exactly what I teach them to notice, whether anyone intended it or not.
Start with the phrase itself. “Found themselves in this situation” is an idiom we usually reach for when describing something that happens to someone by chance. You find yourself locked out of your house. You find yourself out of a job. It’s the language of accident and circumstance, not of choice or conduct. Reaching for it here, to describe players alleged to have been involved in sexual violence, tells you where the sentence’s sympathy has settled, even if nobody chose that consciously.
Then there’s “this situation” itself, doing its own work. Not incident. Not allegation. Not the more serious word that a police investigation into a report of sexual assault would usually warrant. Just situation, a word so soft it could describe almost anything, a delayed flight or a scheduling clash. Vague language isn’t neutral. It’s a way of keeping the temperature down, and it’s rarely accidental, even when it feels reflexive.
Language matters.
Organisations advocating for better public reporting on violence against women, including Our Watch here in Australia, have spent years pushing exactly this point: that whose experience gets named, whose harm gets centred, and whose predicament gets sympathy in a public statement shapes how seriously an audience takes what’s being described. None of that requires knowing what actually happened. It only requires reading what was actually said.
I hear this exact reflex constantly in leadership rooms that have nothing to do with football. A serious complaint described in careful, procedural detail, with every sentence oriented around what it means for the organisation, the accused, the process, and none oriented around the person who says they were harmed. Sometimes it’s a HR report where a worker “became involved in a dispute.” Sometimes it’s a board update where an executive “faced questions about conduct.” The shape is always the same: the person harmed disappears from the sentence first.
Our Watch names sport as a priority setting for preventing this kind of harm in Australia. As they put it, “across all sports, we all have a role in creating clubs, teams, workplaces, venues and communities where all women are safe, respected and valued.” That’s a role clubs play through culture and conduct, but also through the words they choose the moment something goes wrong.
None of this tells us what happened in that hotel. That’s for the investigation. What it does is give us a small, live example of a much bigger pattern, one I ask leaders to sit with all the time. If we want workplaces, and clubs, that actually prevent this kind of harm, we have to start by noticing whose experience our language holds, and whose it leaves out.