I understand what your saying But I have two comments to make.
One is that we are a working class sport and being a working class sport, we will encounter the struggles of working class people coming into top grade. This includes people who have inherited bad habbits (alcohol, drugs) or been exposed to their affects due to this. Ultimately I would like to see them be an agent of change for their communities.
Secondly for their to be less victims the actual likely perpetrators need assistance (yes the victims do too), but as an example, those who are at risk of losing their temper I would assume are less likely to be violent if they learn the discipline and self control. Sport can be great at improving this. Society can benefit from this including Lodge.
I sat through a 45 minute presentation from the Broncos’ mental health guy last year. It was an enlightening experience.
A LOT of successful rugby league players had really shitty lives growing up, and the club puts a massive amount of effort in to making players have work-life balance, have mentors within the playing group etc. , and they do a lot of ongoing monitoring of players’ mental health and welfare.
He said that over the last 6-7 years they have had any problem you could name. They are a cross section of society, so they get all of the same problems that the rest of society do… but they are potentially even higher risk because kids who had shitty upbringings are over represented.
So yeah - rather than just saying “it’s a working class sport”, there are people doing actual research into the backgrounds of footy players, and the numbers say that an NRL player is more likely than an average Joe to have been exposed to those sorts of negative influences as a child.