Assessing the sociology of sport: On sexual harassment research and policy

Reflections

Sociology of sport as a field of inquiry had existed for many years before any study on sexual harassment and abuse in sport took place. This happened in the early 1990s, when media coverage of sexual harassment and abuse were brought to prominence by a number of high-profile scandals involving Olympic and other elite-level coaches (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2002).

The first article published in the International Review for Sociology of Sport (IRSS) on this topic was in 1990 by H.J. Lenskyj; ‘Power and play: gender and sexuality issues in sport and physical activity.’ However, prior to this many sport sociologists with a feminist perspective laid the groundwork for understanding sexual exploitation in sport by studying group cultures and showing how these could facilitate sexual harassment and also lead to sexual violence (e.g. Crosset, 1986; Curry, 1991).

There is a marked variety of approaches to the subject, both theoretical and methodological. Amongst this variety there is some common ground, however. This common ground lies in feminist politics and advocacy.

The field or the area itself has used, and is still using, many different concepts with slightly different meanings. But central in most definitions of gender, sexual harassment and abuse (GSHA) is that the behaviour experienced is unwanted or threatening, troublesome, insulting or offensive and an abuse of power. The motivation behind GSHA is predominantly power – the perpetrator having or wanting to have control over another individual. The studies of sexual exploitation, sexual assault, sexual harassment and gender-based violence have prompted changes in both policy and practices. The concepts mentioned above have often been used as umbrella concepts, covering different forms of harm and maltreatment (such as, for example, gender harassment, sexual harassment, sexual abuse, hazing, sexualized bullying, etc.). When sexual harassment and abuse are defined broadly, a database search shows that since 1990 167 peer-reviewed articles have been published in this area, and only 13 of these have been in IRSS. These relatively few publications over the last 24 years indicate that sexual harassment and abuse has not been a dominating field in our journal, but compared with the two articles published by the Sociology of Sport Journal, this is a case where an international concern gained more prominence and played a leading role in undertaking research and policy development compared with North America. Sociology of sport or (related) journals, however, published 41 articles compared with 15 in psychology of sport and only five in sport management journals. These statistics reveal that compared with other sport sciences, sociology of sport can be said to dominate the field of publications on GSHA in sport. But these numbers also reveal that GSHA is an under-researched area.

The few studies in the field report that the prevalence of sexual harassment (which sometimes includes abuse) in sport varies between 19 and 92%, and the prevalence of sexual abuse between 2 and 49%. As mentioned above, the definitions of the different concepts in this area vary. Accordingly, the measurement also varies. The few quantitative studies on sexual harassment and abuse in sport are therefore difficult to compare due to such differences. In addition, underreporting/non-response, ethics and consent, validity and reliability make studies difficult to compare (Timmermann, 2005). This also partly explains the huge variation in prevalence rates just presented.

Sexual harassment seems to occur in all sports (Fasting et al., 2004), and the likelihood of being harassed also seems to increase with the performance level (Fasting et al., 2010). Most of the published work on sexual harassment in sport has focused on men’s harassment of women – particularly that involving male coaches and female athletes. Recently, however, more studies have been published concerning the abuse of boys (Hartill, 2009), and some later studies have found that male peers harass and abuse more often than male coaches (Elendu and Umeakuka, 2011; Fasting et al., 2014).

As mentioned, much of the earlier work had a feminist perspective, which implies that the authors committed themselves to the task of using research to develop changes in policy and practice. As will be shown, in spite of the relatively little knowledge or evidence-based data, the findings from the relatively few empirical studies in the field seem to have had major policy implications.

Challenges

There have been, and still are, many challenges in doing research on GSHA in sport. In 1999 Celia Brackenridge wrote an IRSS article titled ‘Managing Myself. Investigator Survival in Sensitive Research.’ Here she noted the difficulties with getting grants and discusses her self-management conducting interviews with abuse survivors. But even when one has the resources to pursue a study there are large problems in getting access to the athletes, perpetrators, boardrooms, sport organizations, etc. Because of the sensitivity of the topic, there are sometimes also unexpected stressors related to the research itself. In writing about her experiences Brackenridge (1999) gave the following examples: “personal insults, attempted blackmail from an international coach, a threat of legal action from a national sport organization, hate mail and crank phone calls following a television appearance; media harassment and misrepresentation by journalists wanting access to my data on individuals” (p 403).

Other challenges are related to moral and ethical dilemmas. When and where is it legitimate to do data gathering, and with whom – the victims, perpetrators or the organizations? And what about the results that are revealed by a study? ‘Never tell’, i.e. ‘never reveal your data sources’ can be challenging when one has information about cases that belong in the penal court system. One way to avoid this is to gather data from other sources such as media reports and criminal court cases (Brackenridge et al., 2008; Fasting et al., 2013).

Future directions. From research to policy to research

As with doping, after years of denial, organizations seemed gradually to start changing their attitudes towards the existence of GSHA in sport. In spite of relatively few empirical studies, major organizations like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (2010) took action. The IOC invited the few researchers in the area to present their findings at a meeting in Lausanne in 2006. The outcome of this meeting was a consensus statement on sexual harassment and abuse, published in 2007 (IOC, 2007). The statement ends with the following recommendations to all sport organizations:

As more sport organizations nationally and internationally developed policy protection plans, the IOC developed educational programmes on the athletes’ right to safe sport via an interactive online platform. The latest version of the platform was launched in 2012. I had the pleasure of being member of a small working group that developed these tools, and we used and implemented in the programme the knowledge we had gained from our own and others’ research.

Other examples on policy development are the concrete suggested actions in a recent report about Gender Equality in Sport Proposal for Strategic Actions 2014–2020 from the European Commission, (EC, 2014). In arguing for the need for policy and protection development, the empirical studies from the sociology of sport have often been referenced. But, in many countries worldwide, sexual harassment and abuse in sport is still ignored as an important issue, and there is both a denial of the issue and a lack of evidence-based knowledge. In some countries this is used as an argument against the development of protection policies. Many politicians in and outside the world of sport want figures and numbers, which is particularly difficult when studying sensitive areas such as the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse.

There is a lack of systematic knowledge about the impact of the policies and action plans that have been developed in different countries. This concerns the influence of the work of the IOC and others. Sociology of sport should in the future focus on projects that monitor and evaluate policy initiatives that have been developed over the last 10 years, but at the same time there are still huge gaps in the knowledge we already have, particularly in relation to the harassment and abuse of boys and men, about female perpetrators and about transgender harassment, homophobia, bullying and hazing.

When the first articles in this area were published in the nineties there were also some ground-breaking articles about feminism and sport (e.g. Hall, 1988; Hargreaves, 1990). One critique of the research done so far in the area of GSHA is that, except for a couple of articles, there has been a lack of theory development. What I would like to see in the future would therefore be more development of why sexual harassment and abuse occur in sport, along with evidence-based knowledge about how it can be prevented. The use and development of sport feminist theories in combination with theories about power could perhaps contribute to this.