Part 3 GLOBAL ISSUES: HARASSMENT AND ABUSE RESEARCH

It was in the middle of these early publications, reports and stories, that
the 1994 Commonwealth Games Conference in Victoria, B.C., Canada,
presented perhaps the first opportunity to take these issues to an international
academic sport audience. In late 1993, with the then recently disclosed sexual
harassment and sexual abuse in the Canadian and British contexts, 7 that
Kirby and Greaves had applied for funding from Sport Canada to conduct
research on sexual harassment and abuse in sport. Although the data from
this research were not ready in time for the Conference in 1994, the
researchers were able to identify the nature and scope of the problem of
sexual harassment and abuse from the perspective of high performance
athletes in sport. These findings were presented at the 1996 Pre-Olympic
Games Scientific Congress in Dallas, Texas. That presentation broke new
ground. The statistical data were presented and, as Celia Brackenridge wrote
in the Preface to the subsequent book on the study, were “linked to the wider
debates on the prevalence of sexual violence in modern life”. 8
Research design
With the financial assistance of Sport Canada and support of Athletes
CAN, a Canadian-wide survey of national team and recently retired national
team athletes was completed in 1996. 9 As indicated earlier, it was the first
national, quantitative study addressing the nature and scope of the problem
amongst high performance athletes. Although studies outside sport had
indicated the kind of sexual violence experienced by women and children,
none to that point specifically addressed such violence to females and males
within the sport context. 10
Using a survey-design based on and tested for validity in the 1993
Canadian Women’s Safety Project, a bilingual sport survey was constructed
for athletes. It had four parts. The first addressed whether or not athletes
thought sexual harassment and abuse were issues of concern to them. The
second tackled the issue of the ‘rumour mill’ - what athletes had seen and
heard in sport. The third was composed of questions about what athletes had
themselves experienced within the sport context, focussing on what
experiences had upset them most. Finally, athletes were asked what, if
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