WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today grilled representatives from the four major sports leagues on the rate of domestic violence in professional sports, and whether the leagues are adequately protecting victims and holding perpetrators accountable.
“The bright light of public attention needs to be turned on at a very high wattage at a problem that exists in the shadows in a very dark and scary place,” said McCaskill, a former sex crimes prosecutor. “With great power and influence comes great responsibility… professional sports must do a better job of setting an example to young people and to victims of domestic violence, who face very difficult decisions as they struggle with holding their abusers accountable.”
McCaskill continued: “There has been little or no effort to independently get the facts, rather just use the predictable outcome that very few who are abused will have an adequate support… to come forward and hold their abuser accountable. And so by and large professional sports teams have relied on the failure of the criminal justice system to get convictions as their excuse as to why very few players have been held accountable.”
At today’s hearing, McCaskill posed a number of questions to representatives from the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League—on whether the leagues are adequately addressing, punishing, and adjudicated cases of domestic violence.
“What we really have to do here is look to see what you are doing independently to investigate these cases, and independently determine what the facts are, because that’s how the NFL got in trouble. Because Roger Goodell didn’t see it as his responsibility to ask the question, ‘is there another tape, and I need to see it before we do punishment?’ And I think we should say for the record that Major League Commissioner Bud Selig had never sanctioned a player for domestic violence. Never, in 22 years. Now, teams have, but at the commissioner level that has never occurred.”
McCaskill has also focused on issues of abuse in college sports, using a recent Commerce Committee hearing to grill NCAA President Mark Emmert on the professionalization of college sports. McCaskill recently sent a letter to the NCAA, along with Senators Jay Rockefeller and Cory Booker, questioning whether the NCAA is exercising proper oversight of its member institutions to ensure that they are taking the necessary steps to protect student-athletes from exploitation. She joined Senators Rockefeller and Booker in sending a separate letter to 65 schools that are members of the top NCAA conferences asking similar questions about school policies.
Earlier this year, McCaskill announced the results of her unprecedented nationwide survey of how sexual assaults are handled on college campuses, which demonstrated a disturbing failure by many institutions to comply with the law and with best practices in how they handle sexual violence against students. The survey, which represented 440 institutions currently educating more than five million students across the country, found that 22 percent of institutions give athletic departments oversight of cases involving athletes.
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