How to keep children safe from abuse in sport
Abuse in sport, exposed as rampant at all levels, has been on the Canadian radar for a few years. The federal government is listening and trying to address the issue, but it’s struggling. I’ve been laser focused on this issue since my son was abused—along with other athletes—by his coaches. It’s been over 10 years, but the more I examine the problem of peer and coaching abuse, the more I see solutions.
These solutions aren’t difficult or expensive, but they require insight and a courageous commitment to walking away from a dysfunctional system and embracing a new one. From lived experience to extensive research and advocacy, I have learned a great deal about abuse cultures and how we can fix them.
How abusers make harm look normal
Abusers are skilled at making harmful behaviour seem normal. They rely on the brain’s natural tendency to get used to events that happen over and over—a process called habituation or normalization—and they use it to remove boundaries progressively.
The sexual abuser will start with little gestures, such as attention on the target, providing advantages and opportunities, connecting slowly but surely with their caregivers, grooming their organization’s higher-ups, and befriending all who are connected to the targeted child. Affectionate gestures over time become slowly sexualized.
Those who abuse have patience, play the long game, and are talented at making many people complicit. When these people are shocked to find out they’ve been complicit, or worse, negligent, they throw themselves into cover-up to survive the crisis. It only deepens the crisis, as we’ve seen with abusive individuals like ski coach Bertrand Charest, track coach Ken Porter, Dr. Larry Nassar, and Mike Rice.
You need to be aware that if you go to a sports organization in good faith, but they’ve been just as manipulated as your child, they’re likely to save themselves and not athlete-victims. We’ve seen this so many times, but it can still be a shocking and traumatizing experience. You should also mentally prepare for retaliation, which is a common response when abuse is occurring.
Psychological and physical abuse
You can apply the long-game grooming approach to psychologically and physically abusive perpetrators as well. Abuse cultures are built on three pillars: humiliation, fear, and favouritism. The favoured athletes earn positions, time, and privileges they don’t deserve. This intensifies the abuser’s command and control. Moreover, when abuse reports come in, the favourites defend the abuser.
The abuser makes targeting certain players and favouring others seem like a competitive strategy, even though players and parents often see there’s something wrong. Talented players are benched and less skilled athletes are promoted. It doesn’t make sense, but the brain may be quick to normalize it, especially if everyone else is.
If you witness this kind of confusing approach, trust your gut. Don’t leap to conclusions, don’t act hastily, don’t accuse anyone, but stay the course. Demand proper interventions to be clear on exactly what is happening. Anonymous surveys and outside assessors can identify if abuse is occurring. Abuse of all kinds does serious harm to the brain, so it’s time to demand clarity and transparency.
Your child will likely struggle to report to you what’s happening, because it doesn’t make sense. But if you supply them with the knowledge, correct vocabulary, and safe communication, they will be able to recognize the abuse far better and be better equipped to report it to you.
How harm hides behind “tough love”
Abusive individuals may ignore an athlete’s illness, injury, or pain. They may disregard signs of mental health distress. They are the proverbial “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The cloak used to cover up how dehumanizing this kind of maltreatment is will be “toughening them up,” “teaching them grit,” “turning boys into men,” “old-school coaching,” “breaking them down to build them up,” and so on. Those who abuse are masters at making others believe the maltreatment is for the athletes’ “own good.” Likewise, a pedophile claims their sexual abuse happens because they “love” the athlete.
Those who abuse are highly skilled at reversing what’s happening. For a player, parent, or administrator, it can be very confusing. One minute the abuser is identified and reported on; the next minute the perpetrator claims they’re in fact the target of entitled athletes and over-involved parents. In abuse culture, this textbook response is referred to as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
What to do if you suspect abuse in sport
Now, in some cases, it might be true: a player is entitled and the parents are overly involved. How do you figure out what’s going on?
Do an anonymous survey
As I write in my book The Gaslit Brain, female employees at Nike sent out an anonymous survey to all women who worked at the company, asking about maltreatment. They received extensive information on how widespread bullying and harassing were for the women who worked there. They sent the survey responses to the CEO, and over the next few weeks, six top male executives announced they were leaving the company. This is a textbook example of how abusive conduct forms patterns and can create a dysfunctional system.
An anonymous athlete survey could have a series of questions, asking for experiences and concerns, with a section at the end opening it up for further comment. It’s not about numbers or stats. The survey needs to be focused on whether or not athletes feel safe, supported, fairly treated, able to fulfill their potential, and empowered to speak up without fear of reprisal. It needs to address the four pillars of abuse cultures: humiliation, fear, favouritism, and retaliation. Survey results could be sent to a sport psychologist for assessment, with all families contributing to the cost.
It’s important to know that if you receive two opposing sets of data—one that says the coaches are wonderful and the other that describes them as abusive—you are most likely dealing with psychopathology as documented in the surveys and work of Drs. Robert Hare and Paul Babiak. Abusive individuals are difficult to identify as they so often present as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Find out what’s happening from multiple sources
Most sports organizations and coaches have a history. If you wonder whether abuse is occurring, it may be beneficial to consult with people who have different perspectives and experiences. Often, past athletes, parents, and administrators can shed some light and help clarify your doubts. When I was dealing with an abuse crisis in sport, I was asked by a board member to reach out to other parents to find out what their experiences had been. This canvassing of upwards of 30 parents revealed that the abuse was systemic and repeated year after year. Unbeknownst to one another, parents had been reporting abuse to the team’s and school’s management. I was then asked by the headmaster to gather testimony from students. Fourteen took the risk of speaking up and they ranged from Grade 10 to second-year university, all reporting the same abuse year after year. Talking to multiple sources is an effective way to be sure that an abuse culture is established.
Listen to athletes’ voices
If athletes aren’t educated about abuse and trained how to report effectively using the correct terminology, they may struggle to tell parents what is happening. I made this mistake with my son. About his coaches, he’d tell me: “I hate those guys” and “They’re freaks.” I failed to translate this teenage language and didn’t recognize he was being repeatedly targeted and harmed. I should have trained him to tell us: “Most practices, I’m singled out for scenes of public humiliation. One coach yells in my face: ‘You’re the best player out there—why aren’t you trying? Do you even like basketball?’ When I try to get away, he holds me in for more. The other coach watches.” Educate athletes about how to report, have frequent discussions about healthy and harmful coaching, and be present for practices and not just games. If coaches tell parents not to attend practices, that’s a red flag.
Bring in an outside assessor
Abuse cultures are structured on four pillars: humiliation, fear, favouritism, and retaliation. Favourites are key to insulating abusers from accountability. Favourites often don’t deserve their position. They haven’t earned it through meritocracy, but rather through loyalty to the leader or coach. The favourites look the other way when targets are harmed. When targets speak up about maltreatment, favourites rush in to defend and praise the abusers. Favourites are put up on pedestals and insulated from the abuse. They get privileges, benefits, and opportunities denied to the targets.
As beneficiaries in the abuse culture, the favourites want to maintain status quo and are also afraid of becoming targets themselves. When targets or their parents speak up about favouritism, the abuse culture turns on them and says the parents are trying to “get more playing time” or privilege their child with better “positions.” If this kind of manipulation occurs, a group of assessors—other coaches and referees—should be brought in to a public forum where players are assessed on their skills, not on the role they play in the abuse culture as either favourites or targets.
More advice
Favouritism is a red flag that an abuse culture may be at play. In your anonymous survey, questions about the indicators of an abusive environment—favouritism, humiliation, and fear—can be enlightening. Abusive coaching expert Dr. Alan Goldberg has put together a checklist of behaviours [PDF] that could also work as a way to survey athletes.
Anonymous surveys and outside assessment are not costly or difficult, but they can save athletes from abuse and save sports from the taint of abuse. They can clear coaches’ names and reputations from unfair attacks. They can make athletes and parents think twice about maltreating coaches. There are many benefits to such surveys and assessments, which should make us wonder why these interventions are not implemented all the time. Prior to abuse reports—whether sexual, psychological, or physical—anonymous surveys are the best tool for athletes, parents, coaches, and sport organizations.
Here are the kinds of questions parents should ask when putting their child in a sports program:
- What are the checks and balances?
- Has the coach signed a code of conduct contract? If not, why not?
- If it’s because they’re volunteers, ask the key question: does volunteering with children mean you’re not held accountable? Anyone who demands a lack of accountability could be a red flag.
If you’re dealing with an abusive individual, players will know that if they’re identified as reporting, or if their parents report, retaliation is likely and it could ruin their passion and dreams in the sport. A coach’s outsized control and influence over athletes means parents have a heightened duty to ensure abuse is not occurring in any form.
Education, repetition, and deliberate practice are how athletes learn about safety from abuse
If children are not educated and taught about abuse in a repetitive way, with practice scenarios, they won’t learn how to stay safe. They won’t have the vocabulary to accurately detail and narrate what’s happening. Before they can save themselves, they will come to believe they deserve it, it’s their fault, and they are complicit. This is the mind-bending world of abuse.
The more sport administration, coaches, parents, and athletes put abuse on the table as a risk, talk about it, discuss how it manifests in diverse ways, be clear on ways to safely report, report without retaliation, and build a shared vocabulary to discuss and report it, the less likely it will occur.
Athlete safety from abuse has to be built into the very foundation of the organization if safety is indeed something an athlete and a parent can expect from sports. It has to be seen as skill development. We’d never teach an athletic skill like passing or scoring as a handout or a one-day workshop. It has to be taught over and over because the brain learns by repetition at timed intervals.
Just as athletes build their skills, strength, and resilience on the playing field, let’s build our collective capacity to prevent abuse in sport.
