Sunday 29 March 2015

Book Review: Yar Majid (2014) Crime, Deviance and Doping: Fallen Sports Stars, Autobiography and the Management of Stigma Palgrave Pivot

Occupational drugs - the amphetamine of the people?


My reason for reviewing this book is that I thought it would help me write a book I'm currently writing called Sports Criminology for Policy Press.  It did; and whilst Yar talks about criminology and the sociology of deviance in early chapters he does not use the term 'sports criminology'.  But as the inventor of the term I'm happy to induct Yar's book into the canon.

Yar admits in a preface that his interest in sport as a site of criminological interest came during a period of enforced inactivity that found him in front of the television watching sport, particularly the Tour de France. Clearly cycling and the Tour will feature strongly as a sport in my book but it should be noted that the Tour will also be treated as a spectacle, a narrative, a business.

Yar specifically examines a number of ‘fallen-star’ autobiographies to reflect on how they manage the crime-like stigma that they live under.  The key and ongoing exemplar in all of this is US Cyclist, and one-time record breaking Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong but he also examines the cases of British Sprinter, Dwain Chambers, Armstrong’s antagonist Tyler Hamilton and UK cyclist David Millar (who becomes David Millar in a couple of places earning himself a separate index mention! and even becomes Mark Millar on back cover blurb!!).  The only woman is US sprint star Marion Jones.

Turning to the specifically criminological Yar (p2-4) asserts, ‘Criminology and allied disciplines are no strangers when it comes to sport’ but goes on to say, ‘even if its study remains a rather marginal and somewhat neglected area.’  Hence my book. He sees criminological engagement in 3 areas: that of desistance; cultures or sub-cultures, specifically hyper-masculinity and finally sport as the site of the crimes of corruption and doping.  However there are also some other criminological mentions.
desistance
Yar notes the belief in the power of sport, and tests of it, as one of the few engagements that criminology has has with sport.   It is Yar’s interest in desistance that led him to examine the management of stigma by ‘fallen sports stars’.  Participation in sport can be seen the sort of activity that might bolster an individuals, ‘investment in conventional social values by imparting a belief in fair play, cooperation, persistence and rule-following’ (p3)  He mentions Zamanian et al (2012) who specifically locate their work in a differential association framework but still warn against overestimating the role of sports in tackling social problems. His mentions cultures or sub-cultures are specifically of the ‘hyper-masculinity’ (p4).  See my review of Meek's work on sport in prison for fuller discussion of the utility of sport in crime prevention/desistance.
cultures or sub-cultures
Yar specifically mentions theories of social control and differential association (p3) cultures or sub-cultures, specifically hyper-masculinity (p4) and ‘techniques of neutralisation’ (Sykes and Matza, 1957) (p6). He touches lightly on the possibility that Sutherland et al’s (1995) social learning theory might suggest sport as promoting the pro-social.  
sport as the site of the crimes of corruption and doping
This is the focus of his book; Yar concentrates on the wrongdoing of a number of 5 sports stars but he also lists: John Daly (golfer charged with assaulting wife); Mike Tyson (boxer, rape); O J Simpson (NFL, charged with murder and convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping); Michael Vick (NFL, interstate dog fighting); Mickey Thomas (soccer, counterfeiting); Graham Rix (soccer, indecent assault and unlawful sex) and Wolfgang Schwarz (figure skater, kidnapping and human trafficking).  This is a wider list of crimes and sports but emphasises again the joint maleness of sport and of crime.
method
Yar’s longer list further highlights the randomness of his list and suggests it to be almost as serendiptious as his Tour de France watching.  No reason is given for the inclusion of any of the athletes.  Only Armstrong's case can be seen to be beyond question and Jones's inclusion necessary for gender reasons.  Other sports have had drugs test crises but cycling and athletics ‘shine’ in this competition.
His discussion of gender issues is deficient as Penfold-Mounce makes clear in her review in Theoretical Criminology whilst only lightly touching on his failure to mention her work on celebrity and crime from their shared publisher.  Given that women criminals and sportswomen are doubly deviant this makes Jones deviant 'cubed'.  No wonder that she still labours under the stigma.  Even before her own drug ban Messner (2002: 109-111) notes that when Jones’s husband C J Hunter failed a drugs test in the build up to 2000 Olympics she moved from ‘our’ (USA’s) ‘girl’ (gender) to that ‘black’ athlete under a cloud.
Sykes and Matza
Given the emphasis on stigma in his book it is no surprise to find Yar leans heavily on Sykes and Matza (1957) but whilst it structures his investigation of the star's autobiographies it constrains him too.  Thus discussions of early childhood parental loss, abuse or separation is seen as 'denial of responsibility'.  But just because you are ‘neutralising’ does not necessarily mean you are deluding yourself or others. I think he is right to see such appeals as drawing on a 'folk criminology'.
He sets out Sykes and Matza' 5 'techniques' and suggests another (described on page 29 as a ‘fifth’, but surely sixth, see also page 71) derived from his reading, that of 'denial of the deviant self'.  That is the stigmatised athlete's 'discreditable' behaviour has now become known and the athlete is now 'discredited' (Goffman, listen to Thinking Allowed special).  Having become discredited they seek Resolution (his chapter 7) through temporal distance (as celebrities they can't move) by arguing 'I'm no longer that person'.  He notes all the athlete's accounts start with tales of innocence (chapter 3) so during their Initiation (chapter 4) and Commitment (chapter 5) they must also have become 'not that person’.  That person we find paid his taxes (Dwayne Chambers) and was brought up to tell the truth (Tyler Hamilton) (p41).
other criminological mentions
Yar protects his use of ‘moral panic’ with scare quotes and makes not mention of Cohen merely stating, ‘media discourses of doping have also inevitably been subject to analysis through the time-honoured sociological lens of ‘moral panic’ theory’ (p6) noting, ‘such accounts suggests the problem has been exaggerated and sensationalised, with anti-doping moral entrepreneurs playing a key role in defining the issue according to their own particular interests.  He cites Christiansen (2007) and Goode (2011) but we might now also have mention Coomber (2014) or Critcher (2014).

Christiansen uses the term ‘moral’ he does not speak of ‘moral panic’ though Critcher specifically does so.  I’m less convinced that these constitute ‘moral panics’ as panic is present and ‘folk devils’ may abound but their is no amplification spiral where more deviance/deviants is created by the social reaction.  I’ve long grizzled about the degradation of Cohen’s original concept.

A final criminological mention is Shaw’s (1930) The Jack Roller: A Delinquent Boys Own Story (which has no mention of sport) which leads to a discussion of the use of autobiography citing the likes of Maruna and Copes (2005), Maruna and Matravers (2007), Gadd and Farrall (2004) and Gadd and Jefferson (2007) and his own (2011).  The times may be passing when we feel the need to explain (auto)biography in social ‘science’.

neutralisation
In his discusion of neutralisation he leans heavily on Ophir Sefiha (2012) ‘Bike Racing, Neutralization, and the Social Construction of Performance-Enhancing Drug Use’ 
The abstract of which reads;
Drawing from participant observation and interviews, I examine the attitudes and beliefs of elite and former professional cyclists and team personnel regarding performance-enhancing drug (PED)  use and the neutralization techniques they employed to excuse and justify PED  consumption. Participants most frequently  adopted accounts in which they condemned the condemners, viewing as hypocrites those labeling PED  use as deviant, and arguing that all manner of PED  use is commonplace throughout society. Participants further expressed distrust of sporting federations, law enforcement, and medical professionals, whom they viewed as exaggerating and distorting information about the dangers of PED  use. Riders also appealed to higher loyalties and defense of necessity, claiming that PED  use was for many professional cyclists nearly an occupational necessity. Members viewed PED  use as a rational means to an end while also embodying fundamental tenets of professional cycling culture which prizes risk taking and commitment.
Sofia’s work might have lead Yar to baseball star Barry Bonds on whom (auto)biographical material is available though allegations remain largely unexamined and remorse absent.  And Walsh (2013), who he quotes on Lance Armstrong, might also suggest looking at swimmer, Michelle Smith.  Smith sets out her story in the ghosted autobiography Gold: A Triple Champion’s Story (1996).  Allegations of doping were made against her at Atlanta, had been proved against her husband/coach Erik de Bruin, and two years later she received a four year ban for tampering with her urine sample.  She is now a barrister. 

Interestingly Sykes and Matza make observations about sport directly in their short paper:
the juvenile delinquent may exhibit great resentment if illegal behavior is imputed to “significant others” in his immediate enviornment (typo in original) or to heroes in the world of sport and entertainment (1957: 665).
So Yar’s work is clearly in my field of sports criminology but he too easily assumes the star’s criminality.  He is a criminaliser and uses Sykes and Matza to condemn them.  It is more complex.  Thus Walsh is passionate in his defence of sport and proud of his part in Armstrong’s ‘fall’. But in his work you see that when the dopers claim ‘everybody is at it’ this is not just neutralisation but truth.  Walsh’s book contains some mention of recreational drugs but, and thi my coining, we are talking about industrial amounts of ‘occupational’ drugs.

As Fotheringham (2009) reminds us there is a history in the Tour, for instance 
Fausto Coppi twice winner of the Tour and Giro d’Italia double (1949 and 1952):
was upfront about his use of drugs, particularly "la bomba", a mix of caffeine, cola and amphetamine pills. His great rival Gino Bartali preferred more natural stimulation and would drink up to 28 espressos a day.


Moreover, Yar ignores too easily the pressures on the riders to perform and on the journalists not rock the boat.  The Tour was invented by a magazine (L’Auto) and its successor publication L’Equipe is owned by the Tour’s organisers who promote and cover other sports too (Paris Marathon, Paris-Dakar rally).  Again Walsh is recommended on these angles.  Yar was drawn in by the spectacle but too easily forgets how it is provided - capital and cycling labour.  
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Monday 23 March 2015

Book Review: Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2013) Athletes, Sexual Assault, and ‘Trials by Media’: Narrative Immunity. United Kingdom: Routledge.

Waterhouse-Watson is a academic who writes extensively about sexual violence and the media.  This review is about her book on the ‘Trial’ of athletes by media but I will also refer to the work of Anna Krien Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport (2013).  They both cover sexual violence associated with sport in Australia and take some of the same examples.  Here is Waterhouse-Watson’s review of Krien - that she is insufficiently feminist and too close to the accused footballer.

Waterhouse-Watson book opens with a note on Terminology and - spoiler alert - concludes with an Afterword in which she declares herself once to have been the No 1 fan of the Aussie Rules team the Hawthorn Hawks but now has hung up her scarf and cancelled her membership.  It is sometimes disparagingly said of sports journalists that they are fans with typewriters perhaps we might now warn of academics that to study their favourite sport will end in disillusion.  Sports journalist Walsh is eloquent on the disappointment he felt in discovering his beloved Lance Armstrong was a ‘drugs cheat’, and then resolute in pursuit of him.

She declares in her Introduction:
Disproportionate numbers of elite athletes, at high school, university and professional levels, have been accused of sexual assault as compared with men in the wider community. (2013:1).
She gives no reference for this but a few pages later she later mentions Crosset and Benedict.  Messner (2002: 26) notes that Crosset found in 1995 ‘athletes’ made up 3.7% of the student population but accounted for 19% of sexual assault reports.  But that 30% of the athlete population were in the money-spinning, contact sports of basketball, football and ice-hockey and they accounted for two thirds of those sexual assaults.

Crosset (1999) is very specific in his abstract:
The current sociological debate on whether male athletes commit more violence against women compared to those who do not participate in organized sport is unproductive and simplistic. Theoretical constructs such as athletic affiliation and rape culture are too broad to capture the unique dynamics of athletes' violence.
And yet Waterhouse-Watson inclines to these wider tropes.  However, she is not a sociologist, letalone a criminologist, but a narratologist and does not rely on those matters.  She seeks to show that footballers are given ‘immunity’ by the media in its ‘trials’ of the players by the ways in which they are spoken of.  Benedict is seen, perhaps correctly, to incline to viewing the actions of sports stars as arising from individual pathology unconstrained, then covered up, by the authorities.  Messner is treated more kindly but still seen to ignore the failure of the criminal justice process.

Waterhouse-Watson states that 55 elite AFL or NRL players since 1999 had ‘been involved in alleged rapes’ (p2) and in an endnote (n2, 219) makes the point that many were not named and that there may be overlaps.  She gives an Appendix (1) that sets out some of that detail but doesn’t refer to that in the body of the text and only in a later end note.  The appendix itself adds some further confusion as both team members and non-playing staff are mixed in (not her fault as relying on news reports).  A quantitative summary and some discussion of methods might have helped.  My small effort in that direction follows.
She lists 22 incidents (that may cover the 55 figure mentioned above) from 1998-2011 plus six others believed to be ‘before 2009’.  The greatest number of men mentioned was an incident in 2002 involving ‘a dozen Cronulla Sharks’ and 2002 the year with the greatest number of incidents involving 12 men in total.  And in the text (p2) 2004 is noted as the third year in a row when the opening of the season began with an alleged sexual assault.  In the 28 incidents in total: 19 ‘no charges’; 4 show the victim pressed no charges; 3 ‘charges laid and later dropped’ and 2 acquitted at trial.
She properly notes the Ched Evans case (and the timing is fortuitous in enabling her to incorporate it) and contrasts it with the Australian cases, in that he was convicted.  Evans, a   Wales football international, was jailed for five years in 2012 after being found guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman at a hotel.  He maintains his innocence. The facts of his case seem very similar to those that she covers. One can see that Evans may think that since his circumstances are no different to cases he does know then he too is innocent.  No supporter of rape, McKinnon notes:
.. men who are in prison for rape think it’s the dumbest thing that ever happened …It is just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex.  The only difference is they got caught.  That view is non remorseful and not rehabilitative.
Waterhouse-Watson does not quote McKinnon, nor when, she discusses Mike Tyson, does she mention Tony Jefferson who has written about as a pro-feminist.  This is a shame because one weakness of the book is the issue of race and ethnicity and it might have assisted her discussion of the footballer’s body (ch 4).  Ethnicity is discussed in respect of some players from the indigenous communities (p 86 and 158) but they are seen largely as ‘footballers’ so receive the immunity due them (chapter 2). 
The first mention of Tyson is aligned with his attorney at appeal, Alan Dershowitz’s, claim that, ‘Whenever I come into a case my client has already been tried and convicted in the press’ (Chancer, 2005: 134). Here Waterhouse-Watson doesn’t pick up enough on the issues of ‘race’ or that Tyson was found guilty in a criminal justice ‘trial’.  Deadlines mean she missed that Alan Dershowitz himself is currently actively contesting sex accusations made against him.
In Chapter 3 she notes the silencing of women victims in both the legal and media trials but this would require a change in the law and the willingness of women to speak out.  Later (p 169) she notes how ‘Sarah’ a victim is allowed only to talk on a TV show about her personal experience but experts and others get to talk about ‘rape’ and ‘football’.  However Krien mentions one young woman Kimberly Duthie, a 16 year old school girl who willingly slept with two St Kilda players and had a relationship with a third.  She was briefly a media sensation when she released naked pictures of the men. She blogged as ‘The small girl, with a big voice’ and still has 13.3k followers on Twitter as @NotASchoolgirl.  She refused to be silenced and possibly because she was voicing the ‘Party Girl’/‘Groupie’ was given much media attention.  Krien is not condemnatory or celebratory but tackles the issue; Waterhouse-Watson does not.  However, she touches on the matter in this journal article.
In chapter 4 on the footballers body it is suggested that the automaticity of and the concentration on the athlete’s body means that whilst the actus reus may be present the mens rea is not.  He is a weapon.
Chapter 5 concentrates on alcohol and team building and brings no surprises; but in modern professional sport it should, perhaps, be more surprising how much alcohol abuse still occurs.
In Chapter 6 she uses Messner (2002: 157/158) to dismiss the ‘education’ offered by the clubs and authorities under their programmes like the AFL’s Respect and Responsibility or the NRL’s Play by the Rules:
I suspect these programs will have little effect, especially when they are one-shot interventions that are not organically linked to longer-term institutional attempts to address men’s violence at its psychological, peer group and organisational roots.
I agree but she does not continue the quote to the point where he still support such efforts in hope that one participant ‘might then take the risk to break the silence and speak out against the dominant discourse and practices of the group’!
In Chapter 7 she addresses the possibility of ‘alternative strategies’.  I cannot address the narratological issues but note the naivety of her reliance on a guide to journalism, Reporting in Australia.  It suggests a level of objectivity and fair-dealing that her own work suggests is rare.
She approvingly quotes two journalists coverage (Jessica Halloran and Jacquelin Magnay’s ‘Bulldogs Party Ended in Woman’s Screams by Pool’) and picks out some good practice then opines that the use of ‘accommodation’ avoids the ‘sordidness’ of ‘hotel’ and ‘the sexualisation of the woman and consequent implication of consent’ (p162).  I think this is far too strong a suggestion when journalistic practice of stylistic variation suggests itself.  Moreover, the term ‘hotel’ appears six times in the article and ‘novotel’ once against two appearances of ‘accommodation’.
Equally contentious are her readings of Cindy Wockner’s interview with a victim who came forward after the report of a similar case to hers (‘Secret Victim Breaks Silence — “It’s Time People knew the Truth”’ - no trace on internet but this article tells of police views on the case that brought her forward).  Waterhouse-Watson suggests that introducing the complainant as, ‘a 43-year old mother’ (About 84,800 results on Sydney Daily Telegraph website!) ‘immediately positions her as an object of illegitimate violence, as the mother marker de-emphasises her sexuality and positions her as a subject of (stereo)typical feminine virtue’ (p164).  Apart from being potentially ageist it ignores the burgeoning number of MILF websites and ‘the rise of the cougar’!
Waterhouse-Watson very successfully puts the Australian media in the dock for their faulty ‘trials’ of these footballers and notes herself
Somewhat ironically the best chance that victims have of seeing players penalised may be the football leagues themselves, as they have no burden of ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’ to uphold. (p183)
I hope that it is not just because I am a man that I have criminological and legal concerns about replacing criminal justice trials with narratological or sports authority ones whilst recognising she is right to contest the power of the media to conduct their trials.
She has shown that Australian male sports stars appear to have considerable immunity in rape and sexual assault cases.  But is this more than men more generally? How many non-celebrity men have the same immunity? And is it the celebrity that grants immunity? And is the fan’s worship - including her own - also part of the problem?  We give celebrities too much slack (see Penfould-Mounce).  And, criminological point, we also give them more opportunities. Whether feminist academics or Gold Diggers we feed the delusion that we have given prior consent.
Here I suggest how sport might be used to discuss issues of consent.

——————————————-
She mentions her previous work in various journals for many of the chapters.
Ch 1
Ch 2
Ch 4
Ch 5
Ch 7
Afterword


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