Opinion: Consensual sex is not the issue we need to focus on

So the reliance of commentators to use the words "sex scandal", "schoolgirls", "Port Macquarie" and "Bulldogs players" in a headline is doing absolutely nothing to focus attention on the real issues surrounding these matters.

Two Bulldogs players Corey Harawira-Naera and Jayden Okunbor transgressed the Canterbury-Bankstown Club's, and the NRL's, codes of conduct at a number of levels.

There is no police investigation. There is no illegality yet to be determined.

The salaciousness of the very words being widely and repeatedly used again shows we still hide in an old white male privileged society, sitting behind desks visioning "schoolgirls having sex".

We need focus on why these two men made the choice to bring two females back to their motel rooms when it is so clearly against the league's guidelines. Why is the message, apparently, not getting through?

Seriously, you are getting paid a lot of money to play a sport. You are given plenty of information, attend plenty of club- and NRL-sanctioned sessions where it is no doubt writ large on a whiteboard: women are not to be treated as "things".

It is absurd to think that this privilege remains entrenched in the rugby league culture, given the depth of information available.

But then again, perhaps this culture remains more widespread than just football.

How we treat women in this country is sometimes appalling. And this is where we also need to put more emphasis.

The latest trend is to provide perpetrators with counselling and training in order to better understand what they have done and why it is wrong. That's after they've bashed their ex or current partner.

If you take the two Bulldogs players as examples where they have received what we'd suggest as intense training sessions on how to not objectify women yet they still chose to go ahead and break the codes of conduct they signed up to, what hope has someone in the wider community got to change their views on women where the only information they receive is after the fact?

If you want to change the culture in Australia on how we treat women, the only way forward is to start the education process at the earliest of ages. It will take a generation, or perhaps two or even three, to achieve the understanding that women are not "things". But that's what we must do.

Corey Harawira-Naera and Jayden Okunbor will find that their mistakes and errors of judgement will cost them dearly - it has already cost their club at least two major sponsorship deals. And so it should.

They were placed in a position of trust when they visited several schools in the Port Macquarie-Hastings. They are role models - no matter what anyone thinks, they are positioned in an exalted place in Australian society - they play a sport at the highest of levels.

They have responsibility.

They made choices by bringing those two women back to their motel room in direct defiance of their own club's code of conduct.

Perhaps the late US comedian Robin Williams best summed up this situation when he said: God played a joke on the male of the species when he gave him a penis and a brain but only enough blood to run one at a time.

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