Eeeekkkkk!
We’ve heard bits and pieces of this shocking sexual harassment scandal in China a few weeks ago and now we finally found more concrete details.
Fans wondered why Shanghai’s team were somewhat less dominant during a match a few weeks ago. Questions started to get answered when an anonymous blogger aka “Speak Out 111” tweeted a can of worms on Sina Weibo, China’s leading microblog, which involves coaching staff and players from Shanghai’s women’s volleyball team.
The Tweet:
“Shanghai women’s volleyball players were in a collective trance and not themselves at all! On the night of November 9th, the coaches, who had previously used corporal punishment and fines, developed some new ideas. They sexually harassed some team members in the name of helping players relax muscles during a massage. After it happened, with competition as an excuse, the culprits were only required to write self-criticisms. Now the players all have to face them every day. The players were required to undergo conflict management training and told to keep this quiet.”
The tweet started to get so viral which then started to explode and caught the media’s attention as well as tons of netizens. Sadly, the tweet was deleted but then out of the blue 2 time Olympian and 2008 bronze medalist Ma Yunwen posted this:
“It doesn’t matter if it’s our environment, the ecology, even human conduct, thoughts, actions, attitudes, the two words ‘being clean’ have already become distant from us, and nothing can be done about it. Tragic.”
As expected, Ma’s tweet ended up getting deleted.
Luckily, the Shanghai Sports Bureau was informed and started to investigate the shocking allegations.
Details from our source:
According to the statement, the coach in question had spent the evening “socializing and drinking, and didn’t recall his words or deeds very well.” Too bad for him, however, because the city’s statement notes players distinctly recalled him using “inappropriate words and actions” during the subsequent drunken massage.
The Sports Bureau announced that the preliminary terms of the coach’s punishment would be a suspension (the length of which was not revealed), a self-criticism, and a requirement that he formally apologize to the players and their parents. If Speak Out 111 is to be believed, this response seems disingenuous at best. The whistle-blowing tweet indicated that the coach or coaches had already been punished.
However, the release gave no indication that the Sports Bureau had prior knowledge of the events or the punishment.
Still, the bureau’s release might have been the end of the matter were it not for a basketball player on the Henan province professional team who took to Weibo on Nov. 15 to announce that his girlfriend — a volleyball player on the Henan team — had been harassed by a coach in a similar, drunken incident in October 2011. That tweet was deleted by the basketball player (who, apparently, thought twice about the attention it would draw to him), but enterprising microbloggers and reporters took notice and subsequently scoured the player’s tweets from 2011 to find that he had posted cryptic tweets at the time, which — in light of his new tweet — backed up his account.
Late last week, inspired by the Shanghai and Henan tweets, a reporter with Chengdu Business Daily decided to investigate the 2011 incident. The basketball player confirmed the tweets and alleged events — including that the official in question blamed his behavior on alcohol and, in part, on the fact that the players wore pajamas in his presence, and that his girlfriend had retired from the volleyball team in the aftermath of the incident, though the coach remained employed by it.
On Nov. 16, Lin Xi, a Shanghai photojournalist, summed up these feelings in a tweet to the Ten Cent microblog, China’s second most popular Twitter-like service:
“Days ago, news came that Shanghai’s female volleyball players suffered sexual harassment at the hands of their coach. And today’s news is that the volleyball coach in Henan assaulted players when he was drunk. Actually, in contemporary mainland China, no matter the level of department or public institution, so long as there is a superior-subordinate relationship, this happens commonly. The reason is clearly that one’s power is too big, without supervision, and the oversight is out of control.”
Dang!
This is way too complicated than we previously thought.
With all the drama and the abuse every victim went through, we’re happy to share the news that the coach has been removed from his position and he’s also ordered to apologize to the players and their parents and will be transferred away from women’s volleyball.
We hope wherever he’s getting reassigned to, he will NOT be committing the same acts.
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(image: zimbio.com)
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