West Coast Eagles player Jack Graham was suspended last Saturday for four weeks after voluntarily reporting that he had used a homophobic slur against a Greater Western Sydney opponent the week prior.

The story raises many questions - not least 'why does this keep happening?' - but according to one education expert, it also offers numerous teachable opportunities.

The AFL said Graham self-reported to his club six days after the incident, who on-passed the information to the league, prompting an integrity unit investigation.

“Graham used a highly offensive homophobic slur against a GWS Giants opponent, which demeans and denigrates persons regardless of their sexuality,” the AFL said in a statement.

Graham, in a club statement, said he was “very remorseful for the word I used and know such language has no place in our community or our game”.

In Australia, most schools are working to combat homophobia and create more inclusive environments for LGBTQ+ students. 

This involves addressing homophobic bullying, promoting understanding of diverse sexualities and genders, and ensuring schools have policies and practices that support all students. 

Initiatives like the Safe Schools program aim to create safe and supportive school environments, recognising that feeling safe and included is crucial for student wellbeing and learning. 

But prejudices and discriminatory language and behaviours continue to blight school, community and elite sports environments.

Associate Professor Karen Lambert lectures in HPE at Monash University’s Faculty of Education, preparing teachers of the future, and her research has mostly encompassed gender, sexuality, place, health education, and teaching pedagogies.

While health and wellbeing are covered from Foundation to Year 12 in Victorian schools, VCE Year 11 physical education has a sociological lens, with Unit 2 looking into identities, discrimination and power in sport.

She says the incident, in the way that it has been reported, the reaction of the clubs concerned and the AFL – and the broader footy-loving public, indicate that while we’ve come a long way in sport and society, there’s much work to be done yet – especially in schools and in ITE.

“It links across numerous curriculum learning areas beyond health and physical education,” Lambert tells EducationHQ.

“Broadly, we have to keep provoking and mobilising curriculum content and to challenge young pre-service teachers to think about the world beyond themselves and the impact of their behaviour, their activities, their thoughts, their resources, their teaching on young people in their classrooms.

“Because they will have gender diverse, queer, young people of colour, young people with all manor of disabilities, right in front of them, but to assume that they’re coming into a homogenous group every time they walk into a classroom is deluded.”

It means educators really have to “leave their stuff at the door” – to reflect critically on their positionality, subjectivities and role as an educator/leader – and embrace this as a teachable moment.

“It’s a teachable moment around who gets supported, who gets protected,” Lambert says.

“It’s a teachable moment around ‘jock’ culture. It’s a teachable moment about difference, diversity, inclusion, identities.

“It’s a teachable moment definitely about language and harm of language.”

While family environments undoubtedly play a huge role in shaping children’s attitudes and values, Equality Australia legal director Heather Corkhill agrees that the classroom, playground and early sports fields are critical environments where we learn what is acceptable treatment of each other.

“Schools have an important part to play when it comes to teaching students about what respectful language looks like and why it matters,” Corkhill tells EducationHQ.

“Education in our schools, including calling out unacceptable behaviour in the school yard, also plays a vital role in challenging the attitudes that underpin such comments, building understanding and encouraging acceptance.” 

Lambert argues that for ITE providers the cyclical nature of ingrained discriminatory attitudes provides a sizeable challenge.

“The curriculums themselves offer a platform for educators to deal with social issues, especially in health and physical education,” she shares.

“The responsibility, as for most things, then falls to the queer teacher, the teacher of colour, the disabled teacher, the queer disabled teacher of colour, to do something about it.

"And that's entirely not fair because this is mostly a dominant culture problem that needs a dominant culture response, and that dominant culture is part of these big systems that control how we operate and then down to the individual level.”

In terms of future educators, Lambert says she's seen a clear social conditioning of young people from schools and school settings who then come to university.

They are often coming from privileged backgrounds, she says, and “require a great deal of work undoing some of those privileges. It’s often very difficult.”

Lambert was part of a team from Monash and VicHealth that conducted a landmark study in 2020 evaluating Pride Cup programs and resources.

The aim was to understand further approaches to the inclusion of LGBTQ+ players within sport, and the negative experiences within sporting clubs and communities towards LGBTQ+ athletes.

Pride Cup events include education for club leaders, sport participants and the hosting of a rainbow-themed ‘pride game’ and are celebratory statements of love and acceptance for LGBTQ+ players, spectators and members of a local community.

Equality Australia legal director Heather Corkhill says schools have an important part to play when it comes to teaching students about what respectful language looks like and why it matters. 

The report showed the LGBTQ+ community then still experienced a range of social barriers to participating in community sport and physical activity across Australia, including being subjected to continued homophobic slurs and behaviour from players and coaches.

Things are no better now, according to Corkhill.

“Homophobic slurs have no place on or off the field and more needs to be done to combat the alarming uptick in anti-LGBTQ+ hate in public spaces,” she says.

“In recent years we have sadly seen an increase in hate against our community including online and verbal attacks, vandalism and physical violence.”

Corkhill says recent national research has found that one in three LGBTQ+ community members had experienced verbal abuse because of their sexual orientation or gender identity in the past year. 

“Hate speech is harmful wherever it occurs and it needs to be called out, whether it happens in our homes, workplaces, schools or on the sporting field.

“This requires all of us, especially our political, community and sporting figures, to condemn discrimination and abuse in all its forms.” 

Pride Cup has now grown into a national organisation dedicated to promoting LGBTQ+ inclusion in sport, and challenges homophobic behaviours through the delivery of educational materials and community outreach initiatives.

Lambert says a lot of what’s acceptable and unacceptable on a school sports field already exists under equity, diversity and inclusion policies.

“There’s often policies about what we will and will not tolerate – and it’s against the law to discriminate based on these things at federal and state law level.”

There are also governance policies that most sports organisations have – the AFL, for example has its own equity, diversity and inclusion strategy and an Indigenous strategy – yet these things continue to happen.

“So the problem is ... it’s great to have a policy, it’s how the policy is enacted,” Lambert says.

“And that often falls on the people who are the marginalised group to enact, and when it falls there in a sporting club and like everyone needs to be trained from the person in the campaign through to the coach of the first grade team.”

 It’s tied up in language, but that’s all tied up in cultural norms and what’s expected.

“In community sports, for example, have they heard uncomfortable language at training?

“Have their coaches said it? Have the players said it? And what’s been done about it?

“So if they’re hearing it at training and doing it at training, and it’s a feature of their training, then of course it’ll come out on the ground.”

Australian rules football is the nation’s most popular sport, and at its highest level its administrators and clubs have a responsibility to go beyond tokenism and lip service – and to call out hate speech and condemn discrimination and abuse in all its forms. 

Lambert says one thing we do know is that one-off programs or initiatives in elite sports organisations, schools and in community sports simply don’t work.

“They need to be followed up with other things. Policies, strategies need to be part of a suite of things to change the socio-cultural structure of the organisation.

“It does involve capacity building, like education, but it also involves asking some really hard questions about who do we value most in our schools, in our clubs, in sport in Australia, and who do we not value?”

The Graham incident comes after three AFL players were suspended for using homophobic slurs last season.

Gold Coast defender Wil Powell served five matches and Port Adelaide forward Jeremy Finlayson three matches over incidents that occurred in AFL games.

St Kilda’s Lance Collard served a six-match penalty for “unprompted and highly offensive” slurs towards two Williamstown players in a VFL game.

Lambert is far from surprised.

“It’s not like it’s gone away,” she says.

“We are naiive if we think it’s gone away ... and coaches are still using these motivations of put downs in order to belittle players.

“That’s not on. We shouldn’t be doing that to players, we should be supporting them, giving them critique, giving them instructional information, not telling them they ‘kick like a girl’ or they ‘throw like a fag’ – it’s just not on, it’s ridiculous.

“It’s a systemic thing and my fear is that these things are happening in their clubs and they’re happening regularly enough for people to still have neural pathways about these things being reinforced and without having those neural pathways changed through education, through a consistent targeted education that is not just reactionary, ‘yeah, we’ll send you off to do the Pride round, or for some Pride Cup training’ – you know, everyone should be doing it.”

Lambert says homophobia, along with racism and the aberrant, dehumanising treatment of First Nations athletes and people, and sexism, are systemic problems that continue to fester in sport, education “and all structures that uphold colonialism in Australian society”.

Ultimately, she concludes, the Graham ‘incident’ is yet another indicator of the structures in place that continue to privilege and benefit some at the expense of others – where those others are marginalised and oppressed because they are ‘outside’ and kept there through slurs, policies and practices and then expected to ‘get over it’ after apologies are issued.

What’s clear is that systemic consistency is needed, the AFL needs stronger policies around everything from racism and sexism to homophobia and ableism, Lambert says.

The culture needs to be addressed, it is individualised at present, clubs aren’t taking much responsibility and neither is AFL House.

Aussie rules fans should be over this behaviour, and many are.

The biggest thing to ponder however is, if they are not, why aren’t they?