While this is an improvement on the sink-or-swim non-policies of earlier generations, the pastoral care for victims pushes aside the needs of the person who often has the bigger problem: the perpetrator, who also needs counselling but seldom gets it.

Why is that? All too often, the bully's problems are unseen because he or she also happens to be the star of the athletics team or the captain of the football team or the champion netballer; the personal qualities that make a bully are often the same that make a dominant presence on the sporting field. Unaddressed, indeed validated by teachers, coaches and parents, these traits grow until one day that kid is playing for their country or a professional club, and their comeuppance only arrives when they are flayed in the public eye. Bullies need help, too, but if they are gifted at sport, it's star-struck adults who let them down in their childhood and set them up for a delayed and horrible public humiliation as young adults.

The toughest test of character I have seen on a sporting field this year was at an under-16 girls' soccer semi-final. One player, evidently the star of her team, was conspicuous before her match for the verbal abuse she showered on her teammates, the time she spent fraternising with players from other teams – she knew them as fellow "rep" players – and her separate warm-up, avoiding stretching and running with her team so that she could blast balls at an empty net. You could see a whole future unfold. She was Kurtley Beale (the vile comments about her teammates' body shapes, in a twisted attempt to be funny); she was Kevin Pietersen (I mix with people on my own level, not you lot); she was Luis Suarez (I am the special one, the normal rules don't apply).

But she was also only a kid. What were the grown-ups doing? The parent, who saw and heard the abuse, turned a blind eye and stood in a proud posse of men admiring her skills. The coach, meanwhile, made zero effort to bring her into the team warm-up, grinning at her maverick ways while barking at the others. You wouldn't want to be the adult who alienates the big star.

What hope has the kid got? Weak coaches, indulgent parents, teachers who admire charisma and are scared to displease the sporting hero – these are the people who, every week, are passing the buck onwards and upwards until a most devastating reckoning occurs.

Some professional associations, including, from recent evidence, the Wallabies, have turned this kowtowing to gifted children into an institutional framework: they have, in fact, professionalised it. The bullying and sense of entitlement that starts in schools and local clubs is replicated all the way up to national level.

In the spin battle following the Beale affair, Di Patston has unfairly been re-victimised. But Patston's actions, in response to Beale's initial atrocities back in June, show how "player management" can simply be a euphemism for perpetuating the problem. Having received Beale's disgusting texts, did Patston discipline this sadly screwed-up child? Instil accountability? Call in the grown-ups? What appears to have happened is that Patston compacted with Beale to keep his behaviour secret. Weeks later, Beale was handed the No.10 jersey against the All Blacks. Not for the first time, bad behaviour was rewarded to keep the wayward child happy and the time bomb was passed on. Revolting actions were compounded by weak management.

Beale's actions betray, more than anything, boredom. If he goes to rugby league, at least that will give him something to do on weekends. Beale has wonderful running and passing skills, which at lower levels he has been able to demonstrate to exhilarating effect. But in the Wallabies, a so-called impact player's daily life consists of endless meetings, drills, practices, weights sessions, before running onto the field for 20 minutes at the end of a match to watch scrums being reset and to receive the ball a few times behind a back-pedalling pack. The waste of talent is painful to watch, but it must be excruciating to be part of.

Australian rugby looks like no fun. The culture's poster boy now is Adam Ashley-Cooper, who, like all players at that level, must once have possessed prodigious talent, but he has managed to parlay it into an expertise at getting picked for the next match. Next month, he will have played more Tests than David Campese. Enough said.

Two decades into professionalism, Australian rugby finds itself in a similar position to English county cricket in the late 20th century: a rigid, over-staffed bureaucratic machine dedicated to filling excess time, eliminating risk and burying natural talent under conservative "structures" and "systems". Look at what it's doing to Israel Folau. Thinking of Wallabies of the 1980s and early 1990s, who could possibly say that professionalism has increased anything more than players' size? There doesn't seem to have been any increase in skill, and there is a visible depletion of joy.

No matter what Patston's errors, she was the victim and did not deserve the character assassination that followed the initial bullying. Too late, she must have learnt that kowtowing to spoilt children is no way to earn respect. For someone like Beale, the best hope is that he finds a club, in whatever code, that really does walk the fashionable talk of making players into "better human beings".

Wish him the best. Maybe he can find a canvas on which to express his talent. Better still, maybe there's a coach or a group of peers who can start to undo the damage left by years of the highly resourced indulgence that calls itself, with a straight face, professionalism.