The NHL has no domestic or sexual violence policy. The Hockey Canada scandal is another reminder of how badly it needs one.

Four days after five professional hockey players, including Flyers goalie Carter Hart, were charged with sexual assault, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman sat at a dais on All-Star weekend and claimed his league has a domestic violence/sexual assault policy in place. Here’s the problem: The policy is nowhere to be found. It exists in Bettman’s head.

A small section of the league’s collective bargaining agreement — Section 18-A — allows him the power to discipline any player who is “guilty of conduct that is detrimental to or against the welfare of the League or the game of hockey.”

That is the core of the “policy.”

» READ MORE: Gary Bettman addresses 2018 Hockey Canada sexual assault case involving Carter Hart

There is no statement about what the league will not tolerate. No thorough explanation of how the league investigates alleged misconduct. No mention of treatment plans, or of experts who can enforce treatment plans.

No mention, even, of the words “sexual assault,” “domestic violence,” or “victim.” The policy is Bettman, and how he’s feeling that day, and what his opinion is. He, alone, decides who in the NHL will be punished for acts of sexual violence, and what that punishment entails. An NHL spokesperson recently redirected The Inquirer to the following quote from Bettman after sexual assault allegations by former Chicago Blackhawks prospect Kyle Beach against the team’s video coach Brad Aldrich came to light in 2021:

“We do have a sexual misconduct policy. We don’t tolerate it. And we punish as appropriate,” Bettman said then, despite the league’s not having an official policy.

To be clear: no other major professional men’s sports league operates this way. The NFL, the NBA, and MLB all have dedicated policies. MLB’s policy is 13 pages long. The NHL is refusing to do the bare minimum in this specific area, while its policy for on-ice misconduct, in Section 18 of the CBA, goes into extraordinary detail.

This is even more galling when you look at the NHL’s history of sexual violence.

You could start with the most recent debacle: the aforementioned five pro players — Hart, Dillon Dubé, Michael McLeod, Cal Foote, and Alex Formenton — who were charged with sexual assault in London, Ontario. They are accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a hotel room following a June 2018 Hockey Canada event. None of those players have been suspended and are currently on paid leave through the end of the season.

Or, you could look to last November, when a second former Blackhawks prospect sued the team for “overlooking his complaints” of sexual assault from Aldrich. Later that month, Boston Bruins forward Milan Lucic was arrested for assault and battery against his wife, to which he pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors dropped the case against Lucic on Friday.

The list goes on and on, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Bettman, who remains steadfast in his view that the league is doing just fine. Thanks to this vague, so-called policy, the man who recently said that “99.9% of [NHL] players conduct themselves appropriately” is the only person deciding if they are, in fact, conducting themselves appropriately. Given his refusal to create an actual policy that is tailored specifically to domestic violence and sexual assault — the most basic of steps — it’s fair to question his ability to make that decision. And history shows Bettman’s track record to be inconsistent, at best.

On Oct. 30, 2013, Colorado Avalanche goalie Semyon Varlamov was arrested on domestic violence charges that included kidnapping and third-degree assault. Two days later, he was back on the ice, and he was never suspended by the league. Charges against him were later dropped.

» READ MORE: What we know about the Hockey Canada sexual assault investigation

A year later, Los Angeles Kings defenseman Slava Voynov was arrested on felony domestic violence charges, and was suspended with pay the same day by the NHL. (A judge later dismissed the conviction, but an NHL investigation determined he had engaged in “unacceptable off-ice conduct.”) The Kings later terminated Voynov’s contract and he returned to his native Russia.

In 2014, a lawsuit was filed against Nashville Predators center Mike Ribeiro in a sexual assault of his family’s former nanny in 2012. The Predators knew of the lawsuit but signed him to a one-year contract anyway. They signed him to a two-year contract in the summer of 2015. He settled the lawsuit out of court in July 2015 and was never suspended by the league.

Ribeiro, who last played in the NHL in 2017, was acquitted of two counts of sexual assault earlier this month, after three women accused him of raping, groping, and trying to attack them in 2021. The jury was deadlocked on the third count, of attempted sexual assault, and it’s unclear whether Ribeiro will be retried on that count.

In 2018, Predators forward Austin Watson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor assault charge, and was handed a 27-game unpaid suspension. The suspension was later reduced, and Watson’s girlfriend at the time recanted her allegations. He returned to play directly following his suspension.

The inconsistency could easily go both ways. What if Bettman punishes a player who is falsely accused? What if that player receives a lengthy suspension? The CBA states that players can file an appeal to Bettman’s discipline, but they are not allowed to play while the appeal is pending. Are we really supposed to operate under the assumption that this commissioner is always right, and always fair?

During the NHL’s All-Star weekend, Bettman said the Hockey Canada scandal was something the league “inherited,” as if this alleged sexual assault was a junior hockey issue, and a junior hockey issue, alone. But the NHL is not some innocent bystander.

For too long, the world’s best hockey league has signaled to its up-and-coming players that the protection of survivors is not a top priority. Deborah Epstein, who directs Georgetown University’s Domestic Violence Clinic, says the league’s perceived inaction isn’t inaction at all.

“They are actively failing to stop a problem that we all know is real,” said Epstein. “So, it’s not that they’re not doing anything. They’re doing something.

“A policy sends an important message to players, that committing intimate partner violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, will have real consequences for you in your professional life. It sends a message that domestic violence and sexual assault matter to the people regulating professional sports. It sends a message that victims are human beings, and we care about what’s done to them. And the absence of such a policy sends an implicit opposite message.”

There is a legitimate case to be made that young hockey players, specifically, need this type of messaging delivered to them in their formative years. Journalist Laura Robinson, author of Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport, has studied junior hockey’s culture issues for three decades. She has consistently found that it is a culture of sexual violence that not only protects abusers but actively enables them. The 2018 Hockey Canada scandal was a product of this culture.

“These players are celebrities,” Robinson said. “In a small town, a male hockey player gets away with whatever he wants.”

» READ MORE: Flyers leaders reflect on Chicago Blackhawks sexual assault investigation

Robinson added: “Even as young as 13 or 14 years old, anything goes, and it’s very tied into hazing. My book looks at these gang rapes, but also the sickening and violent sexual assault of rookie players. These assaults are almost always in a group, almost always taped on a video camera.

“In that culture of junior hockey, you have to constantly prove that you’re a real man. You have to show everyone else what you did. It is their dirty secret and, even though they don’t consciously see it that way, it bonds them. It’s a mentality of, ‘We all did this together.’”

When Robinson published her book in 1998, more junior hockey players came forward to her with their stories of assault. Some of them detailed gang rapes that occurred as far back as the 1950s. None of this information is new, and none of it should come as a surprise to Bettman, which makes his refusal to create a specific policy all the more dumbfounding.

The majority of the NHL’s players hail from the Canadian Hockey League, the organization that oversees the country’s three major junior hockey leagues, where sexual violence is still rampant. If a player is taught at an early age there are no consequences to his actions, that sexual assault and domestic violence will be enabled, why would he change his behavior once he reaches the NHL?

He likely wouldn’t. It is beyond time for the NHL to be proactive. To not just react to cases of domestic assault, but to deter players and officials – anyone involved with the NHL, really – from committing them in the first place.

Bettman has pointed to the NHL’s work with the Respect Group as evidence that the league is doing enough, but in a statement, its co-founder, Wayne McNeil, said his group, which works to prevent “bullying, abuse, harassment, and discrimination” mentions sexual assault and domestic violence only“at a very high level in some of our programs.” He added that “[sexual assault and domestic violence] is not the core focus of our programming or skill set within our company.”

Bettman has also cited the league’s anonymous phone hotline as a preventative measure, but it’s worth wondering whether survivors will report an act of violence to a league that refuses to acknowledge them in print.

In 2016, the NHL hired a group called “A Call to Men” to educate its rookie players on “healthy, respectful manhood” and how to prevent gender-based violence, but the group works with players only during the three-day rookie orientation program. It’s unclear how much of that time is devoted to talking about sexual assault and domestic violence.

Bettman often presents a false dilemma between reviewing incidents on a “case by case basis,” as the NHL does, and creating a specific domestic violence policy. But the reality is that there is no dilemma here. They could do both. Every other major men’s professional sports league has a specific policy in place, and those leagues are able to give each case individualized attention.

So, there are no excuses left. Perhaps it’s time for the NHL and Bettman to think long and hard about why the idea of creating a domestic violence/sexual assault policy is so unappealing to them. To think about why they are so unwavering in this stance, while MLB, the NBA, and the NFL all created policies about a decade ago. If the NHL truly doesn’t have a culture problem, as Bettman says, what is there to worry about?