AFL ‘not doing enough’ to manage concussion and brain trauma effects, wife of late coach tells inquiry

Anita Frawley, the widow of AFL player and coach Danny Frawley, tells the inquiry the organisation must care for ‘the human beings who have given their lives to sport’. Photograph: Morgan Hancock/AAP

The AFL is not doing enough to manage concussion and the long-term effects of brain trauma, Anita Frawley, the widow of AFL player and coach Danny Frawley, has told a parliamentary inquiry.

Giving evidence at a hearing of the federal senate committee inquiry into concussions and repeated head trauma in contact sports, Frawley described the circumstances of her husband’s suicide in 2019, and the posthumous finding that he had suffered from stage two chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the debilitating neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head trauma which is increasingly linked to long-term exposure to contact sports.