TWO

On De­cem­ber 30th of last year, the Brazil­ian foot­baller Dani Alves - who has played with Barça for six sea­sons - was in the Sut­ton night­club in Barcelona (a faux el­e­gant es­tab­lish­ment pop­u­lar with al­most-mid­dle-aged of­fice work­ers who like dress­ing up as top-tier ex­ec­u­tives). CCTV cam­eras showed Alves ha­rass­ing a young woman: he pushed her hand down hard on his penis a cou­ple of times be­fore pulling her into the VIP lava­tory. Once in­side, ac­cord­ing to the vic­tim, whose ac­count has al­ways been con­sis­tent, he sat down on a toi­let and forced her to sit on top of him, ask­ing her to call her­self ’his lit­tle whore’; be­cause she tried to get away, he threw her to the floor and started hit­ting her, be­fore de­mand­ing that she fel­late him; when she re­fused, he pushed her against the toi­let and raped her (she re­ported the events to the Cata­lan po­lice just two days after the as­sault). Alves at first said he didn’t know her at all, then later claimed they had had con­sen­sual sex, ini­ti­ated by her. These con­tra­dic­tory state­ments con­vinced the judge to put him on re­mand; he is cur­rently stew­ing in a cell in Bri­ans 2, a prison close to Mar­torell.

Thirty days be­fore Alves ru­ined that woman’s life, a Cata­lan jour­nal­ist called Saül Gordillo, the di­rec­tor of a small dig­i­tal news mag­a­zine (’Prin­ci­pal’), started to sex­u­ally ha­rass one of his own jour­nal­ists by shov­ing his hand down the front of her shorts in the Apolo music venue, also in Barcelona, after the com­pany’s Christ­mas din­ner. While he did as he pleased with her, she froze, and re­mained in a state of shock until she man­aged to get away, which is when she had an hours-long panic at­tack (she is now in ther­apy). Not long af­ter­wards, an­other of Gordillo’s women jour­nal­ists ac­cused him of sex­u­ally ha­rass­ing her, this time in the course of the afore­men­tioned din­ner. Gordillo, while not as fa­mous as Alves, has had sev­eral im­por­tant jour­nal­is­tic jobs, rang­ing from writ­ing oddly self-cen­tred ar­ti­cles for var­i­ous pa­pers to run­ning the Cata­lan News Agency and, no­tably, Catalunya Ràdio.

Alves and Gordillo have caused shock waves in Cat­alo­nia be­cause they’re well-known here and closely as­so­ci­ated with em­blem­atic, if very dif­fer­ent, Cata­lan in­sti­tu­tions. But sex­ual abuse (in­clud­ing rape) is also com­mit­ted by men who have never had so much as their big toe in the lime­light. What is it that makes a man feel the need to sat­isfy his sex drive using vi­o­lence? Why doesn’t he make an ef­fort to find a con­sen­sual part­ner? Or go to a sex worker? Or just jerk off? In the US, clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gists have been re­search­ing male abusers (rapists in­cluded) since the 1970s. When the New York Times tried to sum­marise all their find­ings in 2017, it con­cluded that very few gen­er­al­i­sa­tions could be made. For the record, here are the ones that can (aside from the ob­vi­ous fact that every last mother’s son of these per­pe­tra­tors is an ar­se­hole): nar­cis­sists are more likely to abuse, es­pe­cially if they have ex­ploitable po­si­tions of power; as is a man who be­longs to a peer group that has an in­sult­ing at­ti­tude to­wards women; as is a man who is au­thor­i­tar­ian, es­pe­cially if stressed or ner­vous; as is a man who drinks heav­ily, yet lack­ing in self-con­fi­dence; as is a man who doesn’t think rape is wrong (most of these es­chew the R word, pre­fer­ring to use the non­sen­si­cal eu­phemism ’non-con­sen­sual sex’, which they find per­fectly ac­cept­able). The only so­lu­tion - of course - is zero tol­er­ance for ever and a day. Start­ing with Mr Alves and Mr Gordillo. Now.