33
The
Grooming Process in Sport: Narratives of Sexual Harassment and Abuse
SAGE Publications, Inc.200510.1191/0967550705ab016oa
CeliaBrackenridge
Celia Brackenridge Ltd, Harburn, UK, celia.brackenridge@btopenworld.com
KariFasting
Norwegian University of Sport and Physical Education,
Norway
Address
for correspondence: Celia Brackenridge, Coalheughead Cottage, Harburn, By
West Calder, West Lothian, EH55 8RT, UK; Email: celia.brackenridge@btopenworld.com
Drawing on interviews with
two elite female athletes from different sports, one from a study in Norway
and the other from a study in England, this article explores the process
of `grooming' in the context of sport. Both athletes experienced grooming
for sex by their male coaches yet were able to stop the process at a particular
point. Grooming has been used to demarcate `sexual harassment' and `sexual
abuse' as separate points on a continuum of sexually exploitative behaviours.
Grooming involves slowly gaining trust before systematically breaking down
interpersonal barriers. Elite athletes can become trapped into compliance
because they trust and like, or even love, their abusers. The motivation
behind sexual harassment and abuse is often power, whereby the harasser seeks
to take control over another individual. The abusers use threats (such as
being cut from the team) and rewards or privileges to secure co-operation
and manipulate the victims to maintain secrecy. Our primary purpose here
is to use these adapted realist tales to provide a richer and more personal
illustration of these events (within-case) than is presented through extrapolated
checklists of `risk factors' (cross-case). The stories also illustrate vividly
elements from the different stages in the grooming process in sport, as described
in previous literature. Finally, they reinforce the need to identify protective
factors as part of anti-harassment and abuse prevention programmes with
both coaches and athletes.
Sexual
harassment and abuse have become accepted as problems within sport since the
early 1990s (Lensky, 1992; Holman, 1995; Cense, 1997) and, as a result, have
also become a focus for research attention (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2002).
Much of our knowledge about these issues is derived from previous research
on workplace sexual harassment (for example, Hearn et al., 1989; Cockburn,
1991; Stockdale, 1996) and
34
on intra-familial
sexual abuse (such as Finkelhor, 1984; Doyle, 1994; Fergusson and Mullen,
1999). Research within the specific context of sport has extended the knowledge
base and has also investigated whether sport might be a distinctive location
for sexual harassment and abuse (Brackenridge, 2002). Quantitative studies
have been conducted in sport in Canada (Kirby and Greaves, 1996), the USA
(Volkwein et al., 1997), Australia (Leahy et al., 2000) and Denmark (Toftegaard
Nielson, 2001) and Norway (Sundgot-Borgen et al., 2003); all of these studies
included qualitative phases. In addition, interview-based research has been
conducted in both England (Brackenridge, 1997a) and the Netherlands (Cense,
1997). Most of the qualitative studies on this subject thus far have been
`author-evacuated' in that they have adopted the passive voice, failing to
acknowledge either the social construction of the participants' narra- tives
or the locus of analytic authority. This article presents narrative segments,
in the form of adapted realist tales (Sparkes, 2002), drawn from interviews
with two elite female athletes representing two different sports, one from
a study in Norway (Fasting et al., 2002) and one from a study in England (Brackenridge,
1997a).1 Both have experienced grooming for sex by their male coach.2 The
two narratives, presented here for the first time as individual stories,
are discussed in relation to the different stages in the `grooming' process
as described by Brackenridge and Kirby (Brackenridge, 2001). The primary purpose
of the in-depth examination of these tales, however, is to hear through the
athletes' own voices exactly how the grooming process is experienced and how
this might illustrate risk behaviours and protective factors. Our authorial
voices intervene in these tales, however, and we are therefore obliged to
problematize our roles as `interpreters' and `experts' in reflecting on the
need for policy and practice about preventing athlete abuse. SEXUAL HARASSMENT,
SEXUAL ABUSE AND THE GROOMING PROCESS It is difficult to distinguish between
sexual harassment and abuse as there is definitely a grey area between the
two. Some authors define them separately while others subsume abuse under
the concept of sexual harassment. Earlier work by Kelly (1987) discusses the
concept and application of continua in the field of violence to women. She
emphasizes that continua draw attention to wider forms of violence and help
to show the link between both `everyday' violence and more severe forms,
and also between `typical' and `aberrant' forms (1987: 50–51). Kelly's
empirically grounded continuum (Table I) was based on the incidence of different
experiences of sexual violence that emerged from interviews with 60 women.
35
TABLE
I Women's experiences of sexual violence – Kelly's continuum of incidence
*These
three categories include those women who initially volunteered to take part
in the research specifically because of their experiences of these types of
violence. Source: Kelly, L. 1987: The continuum of sexual violence. In Hanmer,
J. and Maynard, M., editors, Women, violence and social control. London: Macmillan
Press, 53. One of us (Brackenridge, 2001: 28) has also attempted to resolve
the definitional problem by adopting a conceptual continuum – also
asso- ciated with interview data – that encompasses sex discrimination,
sexual harassment and sexual abuse (Figure 1). We define sexual harassment
as unwanted attention on the basis of sex (lewd comments, pinching, touching
or caressing, sexual jokes, etc.) and sexual abuse as groomed or coerced
collaboration in sexual and/or genital acts where the victim has been entrapped
by the perpetrator. Grooming is central to the abusive relationship and is
a term taken from the social work and clinical sex- offending literatures
(Doyle, 1994; Morrison et al., 1994). It involves slowly gaining the trust
of a potential victim before systematically break- ing down interpersonal
barriers prior to committing actual sexual abuse. This process may take weeks,
months or years with the perpetrator usually moving steadily so that he is
able to maintain secrecy and avoid exposure. Grooming is important because
it brings about the appearance of co-operation from the athlete, making the
act of abuse seem to be consensual. In other words, whereas harassment is
definitely unwanted, abuse may appear to be wanted (or consented to) when
the victim has been subjected to grooming. Leberg (1997: 26) suggests that
there are three types of grooming: physically grooming the target victim,
for example inappropriate touching that appears to be legitimated by the need
for support in a gymnastic event; psychologically grooming both the victim
and her family, for example a coach constantly telling an athlete and her
parents that she needs to spend more time with him for training; and grooming
of the social environment or the community, for example a coach building such
a good
36
FIGURE
1 Brackenridge's sexual exploitation continuum (Source: Adapted from Brackenridge,
C.H. (2001) Spoilsports: understanding and pre- venting sexual exploitation
in sport. London: Routledge. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan)
reputation for competitive success that nobody dares to challenge what he
does, so his reputation acts as an alibi. In sport, grooming is facilitated
by the gradual building of the athlete's trust in her coach (or other authority
figure) because he offers her the opportunity of achieving tangible outcomes,
such as winning competi- tions or representative honours and medals. The grooming
process also involves intangible rewards such as feelings of being special,
high self- esteem, confidence, superiority and security. The coach nurtures
and protects the female athlete in a parent-like relationship, providing a
mixture of discipline and affection upon which the athlete gradually becomes
reliant. The athlete can become totally trapped because compli- ance is assured
by using threats, such as being cut from the team, and the giving or withholding
of rewards and privileges. The gradual development of trust between abuser
(coach) and victim (athlete) often leads to strong emotional and affective
ties between them and even to the athlete falling in love (or appearing to
do so) with her coach, which compounds both the definition of consent and
the attribution of responsibility (Brackenridge, 1997a; 2001; Cense, 1997).
In both
37
Norway
and England, the legal definition of a child is someone under 18 years old,
and the age of consent is 16 years old. In Norway, there is no specific legislation
or legal guidance about such relationships of trust (although abuse of someone
under 14 is more severely dealt with by the courts). Such is the concern
about abuse of trust in England, however, that a law has been passed to criminalize
sexual relationships between authority figures in particular roles (teachers
and residential home staff) and the young people in their care, even after
the young person has reached the legal age of consent, that is, 16. Government
guidelines have also been issued to deter such relationships between other
types of author- ity figures (such as youth leaders or coaches) and young
people of 16 or 17 years old (Home Office, 1999). Age statuses and boundaries
are also con- fused in some sports where, by the very nature of the activity,
relatively young athletes perform at elite level (Brackenridge and Kirby,
1997). Brackenridge (1997a and b) and Kirby (Kirby and Greaves, 1996) used
interviews with athletes who had been sexually abused by authority figures
in the context of sport to construct a generalized model of the grooming process
in sport (Brackenridge, 2001: 35) (see Table II) with the following stages:
targeting a potential victim; building trust and friendship; develop- ing
isolation and control; building loyalty; and initiation of sexual abuse and
securing secrecy. The place of grooming as a `test stage' within the overall
abusive relationship has also been traced by Cense and Brackenridge (2001),
using interviews with abused male and female athletes in the Netherlands.
The previous studies suggest that, for the abuser, grooming is a conscious
strategy. The athlete, on the other hand, is usually an unwitting party to
the gradual erosion of the interpersonal boundary between her and the coach.
The power afforded to the coach in his position of authority offers an effective
alibi or camouflage for grooming and abuse. Incremental shifts in the boundary
between coach and athlete go unnoticed, unrecognized or unreported by the
athlete until the point where she has become completely entrapped and is unable
to resist his advances. The physicality of sport requires not only close proximity
of bodies in states of undress and/or exertion but also intimate actions that
might, in non-sport contexts, be regarded as invasive. In this way, sport
also fosters a degree of interpersonal closeness between athletes and coaches
that might otherwise only be seen within the family or care home settings
(Brackenridge, 2000). Many of these apparent invasions of privacy – whether involving touch or other forms of interaction – are thus legiti-
mated in sports coaching, such as technical correction, physical support or
the use of terms of endearment. Severe sexual exploitation is not always the
result of a prolonged grooming process. It may also arise from moments of
sudden violence and the use of force to coerce a victim into sexual compliance.
However, such
38
TABLE
II The grooming process in sport
Source:
Brackenridge, C.H. 2001: Spoilsports: understanding and preventing sexual
exploitation in sport. London: Routledge, 35. instances are, thankfully, very
rare in the sport research literature. Most of the data from studies on sexual
harassment and abuse reveal that these experiences follow from violations
of the trust relationship between the athlete and the coach.
39
ATHLETE
NARRATIVES Whilst the power of the coach in sport has long been recognized
(Tomlinson and Strachan, 1996), and trust between coach and athlete has been
encour- aged as a positive ingredient of performance success, abuse of trust
by authority figures has received far less attention. Although `baseline'
studies of sexual harassment and abuse typically involve questionnaire surveys
to establish prevalence (Cawson et al., 2000; Leahy et al., 2001), the long
or in-depth interview has been the method of choice for researchers conduct-
ing exploratory work on sexual exploitation in sport. One of the authors (Brackenridge,
1997a and b) conducted unstructured interviews, from which risk factors for
sexual abuse in sport were extrapolated, and this work provided a framework
for the interview schedule used by both Cense (1997) in the Netherlands and
another of our projects (Fasting et al., 2002) in Norway. As yet, no researchers
are known to have conducted serial inter- views or gathered full life histories
of either victims or perpetrators of sexual exploitation in sport. However,
the clear conclusion from our review of the field (Brackenridge, 2001: 146–47)
is that most extant methods fail to engage with the contextual, historical
and personal nuances of sexual abuse (for either the victim or the perpetrator)
and that narrative analysis is one of the most important methods by which
to correct this. Most of the qualitative studies on this subject thus far
have used the passive voice, failing to acknowledge either the social construction
of the participants' narratives and/or the locus of analytic authority (Brackenridge,
2001: 148–60). To this extent, then, they have been `author-evacuated'
(Geertz, 1988, cited in Sparkes, 1995: 160). Resultant exhortations for abuse
prevention policy and practice in sport have thus been presented unproblematically
as `evidence-based' without consideration of, or concern for, the sources
of authority involved. The `data' from participants' interviews have also
been analysed across- case, that is, segmented and compared thematically,
reducing them to categories and thus ignoring the athletes' ontological reality
or `biographical time' (Corbin and Strauss, 1987, cited in Sparkes and Smith,
2003: 298). Two narrative segments are presented here, the first is translated
from our joint research into sexual harassment among elite female athletes
in Norway (Fasting et al., 2002) and the second is from a project that one
of us conducted with abused athletes in England (Brackenridge, 1997a). The
English athlete, also a female, was identified through a snowball technique
and gave informed consent for an unstructured interview. The Norwegian athlete
was selected, also with voluntary informed consent, from a survey sample and
interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule based on Brackenridge's
original inductive analysis.
40
The
original purpose of the interviews was not cross-cultural compari- son since
they were collected for separate studies, albeit it the Norwegian study built
upon and adopted many of the research design and analytic characteristics
of the English one. Although we have worked closely together on the analysis
and reporting of the Norwegian study for the past three years, this is the
first time we have adopted a biographical approach to the data. Although it
might be argued that we are conducting a second- ary analysis here, we would
not agree since the biographical contours of the data have not been presented
before.3 We chose these two transcripts because they include rich descriptions
of the athletes' relationships and interactions with their coaches over time
and because of the striking parallels between their experiences of grooming
and the model of grooming previously outlined by Brackenridge and Kirby (Table
II). The primary purpose of the in-depth examination of these nar- ratives
is to hear through athletes' own voices exactly how the grooming process is
experienced and what this might tell us about risk behaviours and protective
factors for athletes. In both of the original studies, the text was subjected
to thematic analysis, using Miles and Huberman's (1994) analytic method. In
the English study the analysis was conducted manually using Word and EXCEL
(© Microsoft) and in Norway using the WIN.MAX (© Sage) computer pack- age.
`Cross-case' thematic analysis, as advocated by Miles and Huberman, is concerned
with `patterns', `themes' and `variables'. Here, using this different, `within-case'
or biographical analysis we thus concep- tualize risk as a developing and
complex set of social processes rather than as a series of discrete behaviours.
Key elements of the narratives that relate to the grooming process in Table
II are italicized. It is important to acknowledge that our authorial voices
intervene in these tales. We are therefore obliged to problematize our roles
as `inter- preters' and `experts'. Our voices are interspersed with theirs
and our interpretations mediate their tales. We have authority not only over
the edited and paraphrased text but also, to some extent, over the athletes'
replies since we conducted the interviews ourselves and took into these settings
our own cultural, epistemological and linguistic preferences and prejudices.
To this extent, then, we heed Sparkes' (1999: 20) warning and `proceed with
caution into the domain of narrative analysis'. NARRATIVE 1 – ANNA
Anna was 16 years old at the time of the grooming. She comes from a village
not a large town or city. Her coach is around 55 years old, a little older
than her father. He has coached her for 6–7 years but in the last year
something happened and her performance deteriorated markedly. Anna
41
had
a very good relationship with her father but one year before the grooming
he began to suffer from an industrial illness that changed him a lot, making
him depressed and difficult. She withdrew from her relation- ship with him
because he was no longer the father that she remembered. At the same time,
Anna was spending more and more time on her sport and became more friendly
with her coach than she been before. I trusted him very much and, in a way,
he became … my father and hugging and cuddling became normal but I
had, in a way, a need for it so in the beginning I looked at it as positive.
It began at the start of the season. Everything was so nice at the beginning
but it began to become more and more that he would demonstrate techniques
and stroke my bottom and my breasts … and if I had done something really
good it became customary for him to hold me and kiss me on the mouth and whisper
`You're my girl' in my ear. And then I heard from my sister who had been in
a restaurant and she had overheard him talking about me and how clever and
nice I was and boasted about it and his wife said that he talked more and
more about me than he did about his own children … but I took it as
a compliment in the way that he was fond of me because I substituted him,
in a way, for my father. And then it just went further and further and when
we were driving to competitions he wanted to sit and hold hands and maybe
stroke me on the shoulder and give me a lot of hugs and kisses on the mouth
and so on. And then the season was finished and I stopped training and did
other things. In a place where we have weights I was alone and he came. I
thought `That's OK' and he came and gave me a hug and a kiss but then he went
further and he wanted to hold me sexually. I really don't remember very much
about it but that I turned my back on him and then someone else – one
of my younger training partners – came into the room and I am grateful
for that because I think it saved me from a very embarrassing situation because
I think that he believed that I was really into it and he may have thought
this because I had never said no before. I never resisted when he kissed me
on the mouth but I understood that something started to go wrong with my coach.
You cannot stop being his friend because he is a very powerful man. If you
are on the edge with him then you can easily get into trouble with everyone. … I turned around and I acted as if nothing had happened. I have told this to
a girlfriend since then because she also had a similar experience with her
coach but not in the same way as me. This man is still Anna's coach but her
performances have declined: she was previously one of the best in her sport
in the country. He [still] tries it on but now I am much more wary and I try
to withdraw and avoid any such situations and I am little afraid to practise
alone – when you are there alone you really hope you don't hear the
sound of his car. Then you become afraid.
42
The
coach is married with two children, both in the same sport at a high level.
Anna has never discussed her feelings about the situation with him. Also,
although she knew what he did was wrong, Anna also said that she should have
stopped him at an earlier stage. She therefore blamed herself for letting
things go so far. Anna implied that a man of 50 years of age should know that
it was inappropriate to approach a girl of 16 in this way. She gets on reasonably
well with her mother but said she could not dis- cuss this with her. Anna
talked more with her friend and said, `Yes, she knows about it and she is
on guard in some situations so I don't have to be alone with him.' At the
end of the next season, during which she had tried to avoid being alone with
him and had been training as normal but not allowing him to kiss her, they
fell out at a major competition. She did not do well and was ill but she felt
obliged to compete. Towards the end of the competition she went to him for
a pep talk. He was sitting with other adult male coaches around and she told
him that she did not want to compete but had to so she needed his help. He
said `If you don't compete you can take the train home because I will not
have you in my car' and then the other coaches laughed heartily. And then
I suddenly had enough and I went. After that I didn't talk to him and I avoided
him. I competed but I didn't go to him at the end as normal. It's OK for him
to kiss and cuddle me when he wants to but if I need a pep talk before a competition
it's not right if he's sitting around with other coaches drinking coffee.
So after that we haven't talked together for several months. Now he's gone
to my mother and asked why my behaviour is so strange. He put it in a way
that made it my fault. She then became irritated and asked why I have behaved
so badly towards him and wanted me to tell her why I did that but I haven't
told her because I think that he's started to get a bit afraid now. Anna thinks
that he panicked when she did not go to him at the end of the contest – he simply left in his car without her and she had to find her own way home.
She then did not talk to him for several months. I really don't want to [talk
to my mother] but will go directly to take it up with him. … I think
that now I'm strong enough to do this myself because I feel that I have a
little power over him because he is a little bit afraid now, in a sense, so
maybe I could talk to him myself now. I don't want my mother brought into
this. … If I'm going to deal with it I want it to be between me and
him. But now I don't want to deal with it because things can be just as they
are. It's in my unconscious the whole time. She has the chance to move elsewhere
but not without telling her mother why. `I believe that maybe my mother would
let me [go away] if
43
I had
told her the story.' A new young coach has joined the club and will take over
most of her coaching next year but, as Anna states: … in many ways
it would be very nice to get away because there will always be some times
when I have to practise alone. There are three men and three women on the
[club] executive board and those women are very positive and try to do a lot
but the old men won't let things get through. … They would never have
[sacked] him because he is so powerful and one of them works for him … he is so powerful and he has always been there and … has made this
place famous [through his coaching successes]. … I am a very good friend
of his children so I would never have dared to say in public what he has done. … He could hug me when there were other people around – that was quite
natural – but he didn't kiss me on the mouth or pet me. During the
interview, Anna kept returning to the same incident: He did not try to rape
me but held me too tight and wanted to touch me sexually – but it wasn't
right. … It has been very hard this season because I have been a substitute
but I want to finish my junior years at least. It will always be in my unconsciousness
even if I move. He will always be at competitions anyway so, in a way, I can't
escape him. … I want to be here one more year but as soon as I finish
high school then I will leave. … I think I will have less contact with
him because of the new coach but I have to be friends with him, or pretend
that nothing ever happened, because I have to be on good terms with him – I wouldn't dare not to be because he is so powerful. If he wanted to make
real trouble for me then I think he could manage it. It's not that I think
that he's evil in any way really but you become insecure towards someone that
you have trusted and looked on as your father when he does things like this
when you are 16 years old. There were rumours about this coach's behaviour.
He also had a child by someone else outside his own marriage and it was Anna's
perception that `… he can get everything he wants and everyone that
walks on two legs and is a woman. … The most hurtful thing is that
he was the one that I trusted and was, in a way, my father'. When asked what
a sport organi- zation could do about such behaviour, she said `When you are
alone with your coach it's for sure that this sort of thing can happen', but
she also thought that `if there were clear ethical boundaries … then
it would be very easy to know if your coach had gone too far'. NARRATIVE 2 – BELINDA You could smell a man who was coached by him – they all wore
the same aftershave … I was 15 when I started [my sport] through a
boyfriend. He was a junior national squad member – love me love my
sport! I decided after
44
six
months to get serious about [the sport] so I went to his coach, a former national
coach. He [the coach] had set up his own [unregistered] club after having
had a row with the governing body. He is now rejoining the fold as a big wig.
He now coaches the number one man in Great Britain. You don't ask him to coach
you, he selects you. You are somebody if you are coached by him. I thought
`Wow!' when he said he'd coach me. Belinda's relationship with her boyfriend
went on for about a year: … then we split up. I went to see [the coach]
to confirm in my own mind that he wanted to coach me not just that I was [my
boyfriend's] girlfriend. We talked for about three hours. He commented on
my haircut and suggested clothes. I thought it was nice because he'd noticed
my image change. [She had deliberately changed her image after splitting up
with her boyfriend.] I went away feeling really good. We talked at his home.
Whenever I rang him to say anything he already knew! If you knew any rumours
you had to tell him, [about] men or women, [competitors] or not. He's married – his wife had bad arthritis – but often when we went there [to his home]
it was just me and him and she was still working. [By then] I was 17. During
my year with [my boyfriend] there had been nothing untoward. My parents weren't
interested in it really, it wasn't a big deal. He [her coach] took the place
of [her boyfriend]. I'd been catapulted up to junior squad level in one year.
I got a lot of flack – `She's only doing it because of her boyfriend – blonde bimbo …' To [my coach] I was the golden girl for about six months.
I was putting in personal bests. After national squad I felt very close to
him. He never went to events. We worked through the winter in X town at the
sports ground. Things were going great and then he suggested that I start
going out with another of his pupils. He was very keen on matchmaking so I
did. I quite liked my new boyfriend – he was a couple of years older.
We split up around Christmas. [The coach] played cupid. He'd started asking
more personal questions – very subtle, he's very clever. [He'd ask]
`What turns you on' etc. He also put on a rude video and watched it with me
[while] his wife was at work. He talked about sexual jokes. This happened
three or four times in the weeks up to Christmas. He asked me about the split
[with her boyfriend]. He [the boyfriend] had given me a tank top but it was
tight. I went up to my coach's to show him – he must have asked to
see it. We did some training in the garden for a bit then, in a break – at his home – he said `Go and put it on' so I did just to prove it
wouldn't fit me. I was at the top of the stairs and he was at the bottom … alarm bells began to ring in my head. He said `Come a bit closer' I went half
way down the stairs. He said `Take it off' but I said no. He said `I'm your
coach, you can trust me.' I said no again. He said `If you trusted me as a
coach you'd take it off … I'm not going to tell anybody, just appreciate
a thing of beauty'. I was shocked and so aware he wasn't going to let me out.
He just stood there waiting.
45
Belinda
said: `This has happened before and then I couldn't deal with it.' She related
that she had been unable to resist pressure for intimacy with someone else
on a previous occasion. For some reason I couldn't go back upstairs … but then I did and changed [her clothes]. He'd gone from the stairs when I
came down. We went outside and [trained] again. I was petrified. I had heard
a rumour earlier that he was a bit like that but it was from someone I thought
was jealous of not being coached by him. We never travelled to [events] together.
I [trained] for a while then he said `If you ever tell anybody what happened
I'd deny it and it would be my word against yours and who would they believe?'
I felt gutted – this was the bloke I'd trusted … he knew everything
about me – more than my parents. I never went [to the coach's house]
alone again. My first boyfriend came with me – I told him in the end
because he didn't want to come training at [the coach's house] at first. I
went for about another two months … each time he got more vindictive
with sarcastic comments. He said if I ever told anyone he'd bury me. I guess
I was trying to get it back to the way it was because I saw him in a position
of power over my [performance]. I didn't want to chuck away what I had. Every
time I went it was on my mind. His whole coaching approach changed. All of
a sudden he didn't like my [technique] and he changed everything about [it].
Without telling me a sort of excommunication from the club [happened] – he let it be known that he wasn't coaching me any more. I couldn't get him
by phone and he wouldn't ring me. At the time my parents didn't know but after
he cancelled my coaching session by phoning my mum I broke down and told my
mum. They [her parents] were almost indifferent – they weren't [sports]
people. I resented them not caring and almost blamed them but dad's immediate
reaction was `Where does he live and I'll go and thump him.' I somehow woke
up to myself then. I never thought of giving up [the sport]. The rest of the
season I [performed] rubbish. When I was asked why I had split up with [the
coach] I said we'd had a disagreement. I felt I couldn't report him … it would have been suicide bid on my [sports] career. He used to turn up at
[competitions] events that year and he always used to position himself where
he could see me and I could see him as I [performed]. It put me off. My [performances]
dropped but not only because of that … also because I didn't have the
knowledge why or how to improve. Three national coaches came to offer their
services and I said no because they were male. At the time of the incident,
she thought that the sport governing body had no code of ethics, no reporting
procedures and no charter of rights for athletes. She did not know about the
generic national code of conduct and ethics for coaches. `I don't know how
you do it', that is, open a debate about abuse within sport.
46
I am
now twenty one. It now affects my selection because he's one of the top [national]
coaches. He's a very clever man, likes to play mind games and rub one person
against another to get his own way. Because he coaches the best people in
the country no-one questions him. He's got the run of the [sport] field. … I know I'm not the first. I know of at least three or four women it's happened
to … I've spoken to one – it happened over ten years ago – she doesn't see it as part of what's happening now. As far as I was concerned
he was the one with the power. My parents have never seen me [compete]. … It makes me feel vulnerable because I was totally alone. Maybe if [my parents]
had been more forceful I would have felt more supported. They weren't in the
[sport] scene. I'd lost my first boyfriend and my coach and both of them had
done the dirty. Belinda's first boyfriend had started seeing someone else
from the national junior squad after she and he had split up. He's at least
50–55 now. He coaches a lot of girls from twelve upwards, a lot around
sixteen. To this day I still feel guilty that I can't stop him. … I'm
sure he's still doing it. It would still be put down as sour grapes. My parents
didn't even know where he lived. I was very independent – I did it
off my own bat. You've got to be close knit and work as a team and trust them
100% … and then they abuse that trust. It will be a long time before
I trust another man to coach me, a long time. It's a contradiction in terms
to say `He's a brilliant coach.' Look at my brilliant coach – it's
taken me three years to get back to where I was! DISCUSSION Both stories clearly
illustrate elements from the different stages in the grooming process (Table
II). Importantly, however, neither of the athletes suffered actual sexual
assault since the grooming process was terminated – in Anna's case
by an interruption and in Belinda's by her own decision to leave. This indicates
that Anna's coach took insufficient care in preparing the setting for his
intimate approach and that Belinda's coach misjudged the likelihood of her
co-operating with his advances. In both cases these were therefore `failed'
attempts at generating intimate sexual contact. `Successful' abusers ensure
that their target victims co-operate fully and use the early stages of grooming
process to test out whether or not it is safe for them to take things to a
more serious level. Ironically, the most successful abusers are neither rebutted
by the athlete nor apprehended since they put in place many social and situational
safety mechanisms to ensure compliance and to disguise their assaults. These
mechanisms include recruiting the victim's peer athletes and family members
into
47
their
support system (which is a form of community grooming as outlined by Leberg,
1997), threatening to shame the athlete publically, terminating their status
on the team or, in the most extreme cases, blackmailing or harming the athlete
through physical violence (Brackenridge, 2001). Certain kinds of narrative
are associated with the shift from acceptance – `I took it as a compliment
in the way that he was fond of me because I substituted him, in a way, for
my father' (Anna) – to personal resistance to sexual exploitation
in sport, whether because the athlete is infatuated with the coach or because
she fears the consequences of non-co-operation. Anna, for example, said `I
had never said no before. … You cannot stop being his friend because
he is a very powerful man' but then indicated how she had taken charge: `I
try to avoid any such situations. … I didn't talk to him and avoided
him.' She tells how she increases her control by planning to confront him
directly, rather than going through her mother, and inverting the power dynamic
by making him fearful that he will be exposed by her. Belinda tells a similar
tale of acceptance, at first, of rudimentary intimacies followed by gradual
awareness and then resistance. Both tales also exhibit elements of victimization
after the fail- ure of the coaches' advances, something noted by Cense and
Brackenridge (2001) in their analysis of temporal patterns in the sexual abuse
of athletes. In the case of Anna, she was ridiculed by the coach in front
of other coaches and made to find her own way home from a com- petition. In
the case of Belinda, she was plagued repeatedly by the coach writing her disparaging
letters and attempting to intimidate her by appear- ing at her competitions.
Both subsequently suffered a decline in their per- formance standard. To this
extent, then, the consequences of both their experiences were severe. The
coherence, certainty and predictability with which elite athletes construct
their sporting identities (train hard – try hard – compete success-
fully) is disrupted by their experiences of sexual grooming, perpetrated
by the very person who has the power to confirm this identity, their coach.
Their identity suddenly becomes transformed from embodied sports- woman to
embodied sex object. Sexual violation, whether actual or symbolic, challenges
the athlete's previous knowledge of her body as systematically trained for
high-level competitive performance into one that is caught unawares and ever
after watchful of sexual contingencies.4 Since these two athletes did not
actually experience `coerced collabo- ration in genital acts' – our
original definition of sexual abuse – it could be argued that they
had not been abused but merely harassed. However, although both athletes became
conscious of their discomfort and then questioned the rightness of what was
occurring, their awareness of the experience as `unwanted' came late in the
process and only just in time for them to resist abuse. In addition to their
performance decrements, the
48
psychological
trauma experienced by both athletes left them unable to regain their high-level
sporting status. It can also be argued, therefore, that the grooming process
was, in itself, a form of abuse and that these partic- ular narratives therefore
confirm our original separation of harassment and abuse via the grooming process.
It is relatively easy to look with hindsight at how a healthy, everyday coaching
relationship slides into an abusive one. What is much more difficult to do,
however, is to predict whether or how apparently innocu- ous behaviours can
lead to more serious or sinister ones and whether they might be predictors
of sexual abuse. In their study of ambiguous behaviours between swimming coaches
and their athletes, Bringer et al. (2002) describe how the perceived acceptability
of certain behaviours (a touch on the arm or a hug, for example) can alter
with particular contexts and how such ambiguous behaviours can be, at one
and the same time, both innocent and also the start of the grooming process.
It is precisely because of the equivalence of innocuous behaviours and initial
grooming behaviours that perpetrators are able safely to test out the response
of their target victim and to retreat or back off without consequences should
they meet with resistance or opposition. The manip- ulation of ambiguity is
thus one of the skills in the successful perpetrator's repertoire of grooming
behaviours. Toftegaard Nielsen (2001: 170) sug- gests that the sports perpetrator
moves from `confidence', through `seduc- tion' to eventual `abuse'. His work
builds on the earlier empirical studies of grooming within sport contexts
(Brackenridge, 1997a and b; Cense, 1997) and clearly shows that `there is
a connection between the mild confidence-building activities [by coaches]
and the later sexual harass- ment or abuse' (Toftegaard Nielsen, 2001: 79).
Indeed, from their focus groups with elite swimming coaches, Bringer et al.
(2002: 92) found that `“perceptions of appropriateness” often
conflict with … coaches' schemes for “good coaching”' and
that this constitutes a `grey area' in coaching practice. Identifying and
clarifying protective factors in the coach–athlete rela- tionship are
urgent tasks for those delivering anti-harassment and abuse prevention programmes
in sport. This task should be assisted by close analysis of the narratives
of both athletes and coaches about their experi- ences of sexual harassment
and abuse allegations. Bringer et al.'s (2002) work has already helped to
illuminate the tensions and ambiguities involved in the coach–athlete
relationship. In workshops we have deliv- ered on child protection, coaches
from a wide range of sports have repeat- edly expressed concerns about being
falsely accused of harassment or abuse when they construct these situations
positively, as expressions of closeness to their athletes through touches,
gestures or affectionate comments. Further understanding of the grooming process,
and of how
49
and
why it develops in specific sport contexts, should help to allay such fears
and also to demarcate protective practices. CONCLUSION The athlete narratives
presented in this article come from two different countries yet reflect very
similar social and interpersonal conditions and processes. The primary purpose
of the in-depth examination of these case studies was to explore their experiences
of the grooming process in ways that escape attention during cross-case thematic
analysis. Close examination of the two narratives shows that, even in the
absence of genital sexual contact, grooming may lead to psychological abuse
and associated trauma. This suggests that an understanding of grooming may
be useful for those seeking to establish guidance on coaching practice and
athlete safety and for promoting both prevention and self-protection in sport.
From this brief sortie into telling tales in sport, we conclude that research
on this topic would benefit from greater use of narrative and biographical
analysis in order to expose the multiple meanings of grooming as part of sexual
harassment and abuse in sport. In particular, the protec- tion of athletes
from sexual exploitation, and avoidance of allegations or entanglements by
coaches, requires us to focus more closely on the gen- dered relational aspects
of coach–athlete interaction. Greater awareness of how certain interactions
can be constructed by one party as legitimate and by the other as invasive
or illegitimate is required in order to educate both coaches and athletes
about these issues and to help them avoid compromising situations. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks go to the two athletes for permission to use their stories. We
should also like to thank Andrew Sparkes and two anonymous reviewers for their
enormously helpful and constructive criticisms of a previous draft. The study
from which the Norwegian data are cited was funded by the Norwegian Olympic
Committee.
NOTES
1 Full details of the methodology
of these two studies may be found in Brackenridge (1997a and b) and Fasting
et al. (2002).
2 We acknowledge that females
are sometimes perpetrators of sexual exploitation and that males are sometimes
victims. However, the male pronoun is used throughout this article to denote
the harasser or abuser since the reported rates of harassment and 50abuse
by females are statistically very small (Nathan and Ward, 2002). In both of
the studies from which our narratives here are drawn all the perpetrators
were male.
3 One reason for not
publishing the interviews in biographical formats previously has been our
concern that identities might be revealed. Despite our care in rendering
data anonymous by deleting times, places and the names of people and sports
from the transcripts, it might still be possible for `insiders' to identify
the individuals concerned and we therefore have to accept responsibility
for this. It remains one of the hazards of researching sensitive topics (Lee,
1993).
4 Interestingly, none
of the athletes interviewed in the English study actually realized elite
level success after having been groomed or abused, despite their high level
of talent (Brackenridge, 1997b).
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NOTES
ON CONTRIBUTORS CELIA BRACKENRIDGE works as an independent researcher and
is based in Edinburgh. She has researched equity issues and child abuse and
pro- tection in sport for the past three decades and is the author of Spoilsports:
understanding and preventing sexual exploitation in sport, published by Routledge
in 2001. KARI FASTING is a full professor at the Norwegian University of
Sport and Physical Education and has been a visiting professor at univer-
sities in the USA, Canada and New Zealand. She writes on feminist issues in
sport and leisure. Together with Celia Brackenridge, she co-edited Sexual
harassment and abuse in sport: international research and policy perspectives,
published by Whiting and Birch in 2002.