ABSTRACT
Children are integral to the practice of contemporary sport, and the child’s participation in sport is overwhelmingly considered to be a virtue. Therefore, children are explicitly encouraged, recruited, from a young age, to participate in sport and conspicuously rewarded for doing so. Sport is, then, integral to many children’s lives and to how we construct, globally, a ‘good’ childhood. If, then, as Kitzinger (1997) argues, the risk of child maltreatment is built-in to the ‘institution’ of childhood – it is important to consider the role that the institution, or rather field, of sport plays in constructing the child, childhood and adult-child relations. Contextualized historical understanding is crucial in Bourdieu’s sociology. Thus, he states, ‘through the practical knowledge of the principles of the game that is tacitly required of new entrants, the whole history of the game, the whole past of the game, is present in each act of the game’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 74). He adds, ‘the history of sport is a relatively autonomous history which, even when marked by the major events of economic and social history, has its own tempo, its own evolutionary laws, its own crises, in short, its specific chronology’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 118). Indeed, according to Brackenridge (2001), it is precisely this autonomy that has frequently enabled sport to remain resistant to external scrutiny and impervious to criticism from forces outside the sports ‘universe’. In Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, agents actively determine their lives, but they ‘don’t do just anything’; the field, and the structure of capital therein, is central to any understanding of social practice. Fields are semi-autonomous and have their own history and logic and social action is related to the context in which it occurs. In developing a Bourdieusian-informed account of the sexual subjection of children in sport, it is, then, crucial to interrogate the nature of the social space that the institution of sport constructs for girls and boys. In the following chapters, I explore this space specifically through the experiences of individuals that were subjected to sexual abuse in sport. However, in this chapter and following Bourdieu (e.g. 1998a, 2004), analyzing social
action in any field necessitates an analysis or ‘sketch’ of the field to which that action pertains. Bourdieu (1990: 160) states:
Rather than remaining content with knowing really well a small sector of reality . . . one must, then, in the manner of academic architects who used to present a charcoal sketch of the building as a whole within which one could find the individual part worked out in detail, endeavour to construct a summary description of the whole of the space considered (emphasis added).
