Part 3 GLOBAL ISSUES: HARASSMENT AND ABUSE RESEARCH

“Repeated unwanted sexually suggestive glances,
comments, teasing and jokes about your body, your
clothes, your private life, your sexual orientation etc.”
“Being the subject of humiliating treatment or situations
which have undermined your self-respect and/or had a
negative influence on your sport performance.”
The athletes experienced the last two forms more often from
authority figures in sport than from peer athletes. The opposite
was true for the first two categories. As many as 62% of those
athletes who had experienced sexual harassment and abuse
from peer athletes had experienced ridicule.
It was also only ridicule that had been experienced much more
often by the athletes than the controls. The controls had also
experienced much more serious forms of sexual harassment
than the athletes, such as ‘forced into sexual behaviour’ and
‘rape and attempted rape’. vi
In summarizing the results from this survey the following groups
seemed to be particularly at risk:
The oldest athletes who had participated in World
Championships and/or Olympic Games. Among this group as
many as 39% had experienced sexual harassment and abuse in
a sport environment
Among the youngest athletes with eating disorders 30% had
experienced sexual harassment from some authority figures in
sport.
As mentioned above, the second part of the study was qualitative
interviews with 25 female athletes who had marked that they had been
sexually harassed by an authority figure in sport. These athletes represented
15 different sport disciplines and more than half practised for 16 to 20 hours
per week or more and 15 of them had competed in the Olympic Games, world
championships or world cup. The interviews revealed that most of them had
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