Sexual misconduct is rife in elite sport – women are paying the price

Content warning: sexual abuse

When a report revealed last month that 88% of women working in elite sport have been the target of sexual misconduct, I was shocked. As a survivor of sexual abuse which began when I was a young gymnast on the Olympic pathway in Australia, I know how this trauma can scar you for life.

Lindsey Simpson’s study (PDF) is based on 260 anonymous responses from a survey sent to members of the Women’s Sport Collective. Women working in national, professional and semi-professional high-performance sport, where people are paid to work, were asked about sexual harassment, assault and rape. And the figures are horrific.

An astonishing 88% of the respondents – women and girls working in roles including administration, communication, coaching and athletics – said they had been targeted by sexual misconduct in the last five years. They reported behaviour such as jokes with a sexual content, unwanted touching and rape.

In the last five years, a staggering 40% said they had been targeted by sexual assault and 2% said they had been raped. That’s more than one rape in UK elite sport every year.

And it’s clear who’s doing it: 93% of women who reported sexual misconduct said that the perpetrator was always, or in most cases, male.

High-profile cases, such as Larry Nassar in the US, Dick Caine in Australia and Michael Haynes in the UK, are just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the headlines, women working in sport across the UK are repeatedly placed in harm’s way.

Just like in the film industry or in academia, Simpson’s study reveals that perpetrators often use promises of advancement to carry out abuse. More than one in five women said that over the last five years they were “forced into physical contact for career opportunities”.

And the institutions that are supposed to protect them are failing them instead. Only 46% of women employed in elite sport said they were either absolutely or somewhat confident their employer addresses issues of sexual misconduct “adequately” – a figure which falls to 39% when women considered the governing body of their primary sport.

Even more telling is that the women who have suffered the most have even less confidence it will be addressed. For women who said that the harassment, assault or rape they had experienced was at the level of “sexual misconduct”, only 21% said their employer was doing enough to address the issue, while just 12% had the same confidence in their sport’s governing body.

These failures reveal systemic abuse through elite sport which can have lifelong impacts. According to the UK’s Child Sexual Abuse Centre, if it occurs in childhood and young adulthood – as it does for countless gymnasts, swimmers and footballers – it can have “lifelong consequences for mental health and wellbeing” (PDF).

It’s something that I know all too well. I joined Australia’s elite gymnastics programme at nine – the same year that a senior national coach started to abuse me. The abuse carried on for seven years, until its physical and psychological toll caused a catastrophic injury that ended my professional sports career.

Seventeen years on, I’m still reckoning with the impacts. I live every day with a physical disability that doctors have linked to this abuse. And I struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder as well as the distress and attachment disorders that come with having your spirit crushed by the person who promised to nurture it.

In her report, Simpson writes that the alarming levels of sexual misconduct she has found “may be harming elite sport’s ability to attract and retain female talent”. Talented young women may be abandoning their careers before reaching their full potential – or even entering the field.

But as someone who has survived sexual abuse in sport, what matters to me more is the enormous, awful toll. The pain and the suffering that men are dealing out to women and girls all around the world for simply wanting to take part. It’s time to root out the culture of impunity which has let them get away with it for too long. It’s time to flip the fear and make sport a place where everyone is safe.

• The author has asked to remain anonymous.
• If you have experienced sexual misconduct in sport, or know someone who has, get in touch securely or email us on legal@goodlawproject.org.