What ‘Code of Misconduct’ taught me about silence, survival, and consent in hockey culture

Content warning: discussion around sexual assault and sexual assault trials.

This weekend, I finally brought myself to watch Code of Misconduct.

If you have not heard of it, Code of Misconduct is a Canadian documentary directed by Sébastien Trahan that premiered at the Hot Docs festival in April.  It features investigative journalist Rick Westhead, who broke the story of the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal.  This is a case in which five former World Junior Hockey players were charged with sexually assaulting a woman in 2018, and in which Hockey Canada paid close to $3 million in a civil settlement to help cover it up. The documentary draws on text messages, conversations, and other evidence that did not reach the public during the trial due to publication bans. What it reveals is both infuriating, heartbreaking, and oddly clarifying. 

What struck me most was not the obvious horror of what those men did. It was the more fundamental rot the film exposes: a hockey culture that has never learned or taught the importance of consent. Not just consent between men and women, but consent as a value in how people treat one another as human beings.

Journalist Rick Westhead examines how young hockey players are systematically taught that consent is an impediment to team cohesion rather than a foundational value. The documentary explores hazing rituals that function in cult-like ways, normalizing coercive group dynamics from an early age. One young player describes a pervasive culture in which the “kill count” (i.e. the number of women a player has slept with) is openly discussed and celebrated. Rather than being taught what healthy adult relationships look like, these young men are encouraged to compete with one another around sexual acts. Women are reduced to numbers, not human beings.

This competitive, sexualized culture breeds a deep sense of entitlement—one that does not stay confined to the locker room. You see this culture front-and-centre during the trial and the evidence provided by the young woman known through the trial only as E.M. In one video provided by police, E.M. is visibly intoxicated on the dance floor, and the players close in around her, pulling her ponytail, slapping her on her buttocks. It is a disturbing image.  And as one journalist from The Walrus described it, it looked like “a pack of sharks circling a seal.” They were on the hunt. 

Detective Lindsay Ryan, the police officer who led the investigation and recommended laying charges against the player, pointed out something about the group chat amongst the players that speaks to the lack of consent culture amongst hockey players. Of the 19 men in the team group chat that evening, when asked who wanted to come to McLeod’s hotel room for a threesome, not one of them raised an objection.  No one said anything.  No one raised a single objection. 

When we hear the refrain, “not all men,” in response to accusations of sexual violence, this is why women laugh.  Of course, it’s not all men.  But more often than not, there are not enough men willing to break out of the culture of misogyny and violence to stop their peers from committing crimes.  

Breaking down stereotypes and rape myths

One of the most important parts of the documentary is the focus on rape myths and how they are so pervasive in the courtrooms and locker rooms. The documentary spends important time on the concept of dissociation as a trauma response. Most people are familiar with fight or flight responses, but far fewer understand the fawn response.

Fawning is a survival mechanism in which a person in danger appeases, complies, and tries to become whoever the threat needs them to be in order to stay safe. As the experts in the film note, E.M. exhibited this response. She did what she needed to do to stay safe.  When surrounded by a group of men (all of whom were larger and stronger than she was), she said that she disassociated from herself and did what she needed to be able to survive that evening.

People often mistake fawning for consent. This is not a surprise, as this is a feature of our culture that tells us that women lie, and men are victims.  It is a feature of a society that aids and abets perpetrators. When a victim’s compliance is reframed as consent, the men in the room are absolved. What is never asked is: what would have happened to her if she had not complied?  What would these men have done to keep her silent?

The documentary also examines the ways rape myths were perpetuated in the courtroom by the defence attorneys. E.M. was on the stand for nine days, being asked everything from what she wore, to how drunk she was, to whether or not she was cheating on her boyfriend.  The questions implied that she was to blame for what happened to her, not the other way around.

What was never centered in those questions was the conduct of the men. The men who looked at a heavily intoxicated, outnumbered young woman and decided, collectively, that this was their moment. The men who coordinated afterward to manage the fallout. The men who filmed a woman to demand consent be recorded for posterity.  The men who believed they could do what they did and just move on.

This is how rape culture survives in institutions: not through individual acts of cruelty alone, but through the systems that turn the attention away from perpetrators and onto victims and survivors. 

It’s not too late to change the culture

And yet, the documentary does not end in despair. It takes time to examine the people working to change hockey culture from the inside: the consent educators, the younger players, the journalists who refused to let this story be buried. One survivor who now teaches consent to young athletes said something I found genuinely moving: many of these young men are exhausted by the shame that comes with wearing a hockey jersey. These men want the culture to change too.

Watching Code of Misconduct is not easy, but it is necessary. What happened to E.M. is not an aberration. Instead, it is the outcome of a culture that has, for generations, treated consent as optional. 

But that culture is not limited to hockey arenas. 

It lives in boardrooms, workplaces, in classrooms, and in courtrooms.  It is in the ways we treat those who come forward and report harm, and in the agreements that ask victims to stay silent while institutions protect their reputations.  Never forget that Hockey Canada settled with E.M., but required her to sign an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement. 

The documentary makes an important distinction between what is legal and what is ethical.  As Rick Westhead states in the film, “just because the judge did not find that something criminal in the room did not happen in that room, it does not mean that what players didn’t say and do things that were depraved.” 

For E.M.’s sake, and for everyone who has survived something they were told to stay quiet about, I hope the shift happens sooner rather than later.

Liz LeClair is a fundraising consultant, writer, and gender-based violence advocate based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia (Mi’kma’ki).