‘Players need to understand this language is hurtful’: Anti-homophobia training in sport had no effect

Sensitivity training sessions designed to stamp out homophobia in sport have been found to have no effect on team attitudes or behaviour.

Monash University research published overnight in the prestigious British Journal of Sports Medicine tested the effectiveness of a new “silver bullet” educational program designed to combat homophobic language.

Melbourne United’s Isaac Humphries came out to his teammates late last year.Credit: Getty Images

Young Victorian rugby players involved in the study reported that the number of slurs they heard in the two weeks after the intervention had actually increased.

The research casts doubt on the efficacy of awareness training in sport, and fresh light on a recent decision by a National Basketball League team to opt out of wearing special Pride Round jerseys. (The Cairns Taipans decided in January not to wear uniforms with a small rainbow logo, despite having gone through a carefully managed league-wide awareness training program.)

Isaac Humphries, the Melbourne United centre who came out to his teammates late last year – in the process becoming the only out gay male top-level basketball player in the world – isn’t surprised. He wondered whether any kind of educational program can change minds on homophobia.

Lead researcher Erik Denison helped design the best practice intervention.

“This topic has such a stigma,” Humphries says. “Whenever someone comes in to give a talk, it’s always ‘They’re forcing me to learn about this’, and ‘Who cares?’ Because if it doesn’t affect them, they just don’t know how important it is to understand.”

Humphries, who shares his story in Good Weekend, well remembers the confusion he faced as a teenager, which he couldn’t quite label at the time but nonetheless wanted to change within himself. “I would constantly think of ways to not be gay,” he says. “It just never crossed my mind to come out. Ever.”

Lead researcher Erik Denison – a member of the Behavioural Science Laboratory at Monash – helped design the best-practice intervention, and had high hopes for its success.

The program was authored by a crack team of researchers, in consultation with experts from the LGBTQI+ community. It was even delivered to players at 13 teenage rugby union teams in Victoria by a handful of Super Rugby stars from the Melbourne Rebels.

“The theory was they’re respected athletes, so they’ll have cut through where others won’t,” says Denison. “If they can sell shoes, surely they can change behaviour.”

Denison, 43, had been subject to homophobic abuse as a teenager – involuntarily outed and then ostracised at 14 – yet felt certain this program would succeed, and couldn’t wait to share the good news with the world. “When I saw the intervention had no effect,” he says, “I was gutted.”

Humphries, speaking on the latest episode of Good Weekend Talks, points out that he never felt homophobia when playing basketball, yet simultaneously suspected that being gay would be incompatible with team sport.

It makes sense. Research shows that boys are first exposed to homophobic language around eight years old – wimp and pussy later becoming homo and fag – but that such abuse isn’t spurred by true homophobia so much as garden variety toxic masculinity. Gay slurs are basically used to conform and bond, sometimes to insult or bully, but mostly for boys to signal membership of the group. “It’s so normalised,” says Denison. “It’s almost like wallpaper.”

Tom English, the former Rebels captain who helped deliver the intervention, says players need to understand homophobic language is “hurtful”.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong

Tom English, the former Rebels captain who helped deliver the intervention, says he remembers the way his mum used to notice him coming home from team sports using bad language, seemingly to prove his toughness.

“I think this is also what happens with homophobic language,” English says. “But players need to understand this language is hurtful, that it is deterring people from playing rugby, and also causing people to try to hurt themselves.”

The landmark peer-reviewed study – Effectiveness of an educational intervention targeting homophobic language by young male athletes: a cluster randomised controlled trial – calls into question the usefulness of the standard sensitivity training model used not just in sport but also in most workplaces, and provides yet more evidence of an intractable social problem.

“Because if that kind of program doesn’t fix anything, then what does?” asks Denison.

There are a few things that have been shown to change minds. Pride matches are sometimes derided as having little value, but research shows that for the team hosting such events, homophobic behaviours and attitudes decline by as much as half.

Other studies have shown that engaging leaders within sporting teams, and having those captains and coaches lead conversations about homophobia, might be the most effective method of all. Certainly, more effective than using external facilitators. Messengers such as Humphries – but also his supportive coach Dean Vickerman, and captain Chris Goulding – then become more important than the message itself.

“I don’t know the answers,” says Humphries, 25. “What I’m learning in my process is that answers aren’t coming immediately, and no change is coming immediately. It’s going to take more time, more examples, more education. It’s probably the next generation that we’re looking at to fly the flag.”

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