ABSTRACT
Since ancient times, stories of great feats of skill, strength, speed and endurance have been a fundamental feature of human culture. In the twenty-first century, stories generated from our sporting endeavours are now more prominent than ever before. Sport stories are woven into the fabric of families, schools, villages, towns, cities, regions and nations. They are now dispersed quickly and widely and feature prominently in societies across the globe. Indeed, sport, and the stories generated from our engagement in it, often form a central pillar of our collective sense of community and identity, bonding us further with every re-telling of the endeavours of local, national and international athletes; small but significant acts of commemoration, in which we affirm, to ourselves and others, who we are. Therefore, as in other areas of late twentieth and early twenty-first century life, the intrusion of child sexual abuse in sport, and the relatively recent recognition that this isn’t a practice confined to social outcasts, pulls at the fabric of our lives because it threatens to undermine deeply held convictions and long-established ‘truths’. Although rather peripheral, the culture of storytelling within and around the world of sport includes more challenging and complex stories, such as those focused on racism, violence, doping and corruption. As with other popular coverage of the much-referenced ‘dark-side’ of sport, in some countries at least, stories of sexual violence in sport have been worthy of national news coverage, if not headline news, for the past two decades. In the UK, coverage of the Paul Hickson arrest, trial and conviction between 1992 and 1995 (Donegan, 1995) – also covered extensively in a docudrama by BBC television (BBC, 1998) – in fact followed nearly a decade of advocacy and research from academic Celia Brackenridge OBE, who had faced years of vehement criticism, within and without sport, for suggesting that sport was also the site of child sexual abuse (CSA) (see Brackenridge, 2001). There is, then, a history of sexual violence within sport that is as old as sport itself. Yet it is only since the early 1990s that stories of sexual abuse in sport began to emerge (see Lang and Hartill, 2015). A persistent feature of investigations into these cases is that other
people – coaches, officials, parents – were aware of the abuse but failed to report it. Therefore, it is a dimension of sports cultural history that has been, not simply unrecognized, but also concealed. The sociology of sport has played a significant role in revealing this problem (see Fasting, 2015). While this book represents a qualitative investigation, quantitative research in this field is of course crucial, not least to combat the charge that measures to protect children from sexual violence (and other forms of maltreatment) are, as one Spanish coach put it, ‘a bomb to kill flies’, or as a research respondent in the UK said ‘a sledgehammer to crack a nut’ (Hartill and Prescott, 2007). Fasting (2015: 438) reports 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%.’ It is important to point out, then, the most recent findings from prevalence research. From a representative sample of 4,043 individuals from the Netherlands and Flanders, with varying levels of sports participation, Vertommen et al. (2016) found:
Almost 38% indicated at least one incident of psychological violence, 11% at least one event involving physical violence, while 14% had experienced sexual violence at least once . . . Ethnic minority, lesbian/ gay/bisexual (LGB) and disabled athletes, and those competing at the international level report significantly more experiences of interpersonal violence in sport.
