International Research Network on Violence and Integrity in Sport (IRNOVIS)

STEPs for Safe Sport Newsletter: #1 Trauma Informed Care in Sport is out! It hit the inboxes of subscribers around the world Monday morning, and to say I was excited to see this first edition go out would be an understatement. The newsletter talks all things trauma informed care in sport and includes some great graphics, research articles and resources for individuals, researchers or organisation to consider and apply the trauma informed principles in their organisations and practices. This is the first of many to come so if you aren't on the list yet, sign-up link is here: ✨https://lnkd.in/gTnYjvGn For those who missed edition one, I've posted it below. Thanks for those who have already emailed sharing their thoughts and feedback so far. I love that this is creating a dialogue already. Research included by lead authors: Sylvie Parent Margo Mountjoy Aurélie Pankowiak (PhD) Victoria Roberts, Sheppard-Perkins Resources by: National Centre for Action on Child Sexual Abuse Blue Knot Foundation and our team Aurélie Pankowiak (PhD) Alex Parker #Stepsforsafesport #safesport

"The scientific evidence suggests that [harassment and abuse] HA is prevalent. However, we believe that there is under-reporting, which could be due to [sports medicine physicians] SMPs’ lack of recognition of HA, or a reluctance of clinicians to report." This research sought to better understand physicians current beliefs and practices related to harassment and abuse in sport. Over 400 sports medicine physicians from over 100 countries completed the survey for this research project. Here's what they found: 👉🏻 Sport medicine physicals were aware of the importance of recognising abuse and harassment and were confident in their ability to detect it, but many felt uncomfortable with being on the lookout for it. 👉🏻 Women physicals reported a greater sensitivity to the impacts of harassment and abuse and had different barriers to men for reporting including "more difficulties controlling their emotions’, ‘feel more alone’ and ‘fear threats of reprisals’" 👉🏻 Just over 25% of physicians were unaware of where or to whom to report suspected abuse and over half did not know the safeguarding officer in their sport. Despite safeguarding being recommended as a core competency in sports medicine curriculum as far back as 2011, it was not included until 2020. These results suggest that sports medicine physicians still feel discomfort in recognising and responding to harassment and abuse in sport. "Importantly, the way forward must include the voices of athlete survivors of HA to inform SMPs of the required skills beyond the mechanics of the clinical approach: trust, empathy, and authenticity.In the voice of an athlete survivor of sexual abuse in sport: ‘I struggle seeing clinicians—not because I believe their intentions are not good or that they will harm me, but because I fear not being heard when I truly need help. I fear my pain or ailment may not be worthy of their care …. Optimal healing requires a commitment from all clinicians to be willing to connect with patients in new and vulnerable ways’." Authors: Margo Mountjoy , Helena V., Finnoff, Murray, Paynter, Pigozzi, Tooth, Evert Verhagen, Tine Vertommen https://lnkd.in/g92zMFc9

"It was Hippocrates who stated ‘First, do no harm’, and we believe the sentiment of this medical principle is one that every researcher should embody when conducting research on interpersonal violence (IV) in sport." If anyone was wondering what our International Research Network on Violence and Integrity in Sport (IRNOVIS) research team was up to in Belgium earlier this year, this is it! In this editorial our team provides an overview of how to practically apply principles of trauma and violence informed care (TVIC) into research on interpersonal violence in sport. While trauma and violence informed care principles have generally been applied with a focus on supporting those with lived experience to engage in research practices, we propose a more holistic application of the principles is needed because "regardless of whether participants have direct experiences of violence, the very nature of this research can create potentially traumatic situations for both researchers and participants." TVIC approach supports all involved in the research. The TVIC principles include building trauma awareness and understanding; safety and trustworthiness (eg, emotionally and culturally); fostering opportunities for individual choice or collaboration; and strengths based and capacity building. We have developed a reflective guide to assist researchers in applying these principles in their research. Some key points from the guide: 👉🏻 When assembling the research team, it is important to acknowledge and address the emotional labour involved (for participants and researchers) and have appropriate supports in place (trained personnel, debriefing practices, distress response protocols, etc) 👉🏻Self-care is essential and often overlooked. Practices like peer support, mentoring and journaling can be considered. 👉🏻When working with those with lived experience (as researchers or participants) researchers should reflect on and address their position of power. 👉🏻Wherever possible, provide choices for how individuals engage in and with the work. "The goal of this editorial is to encourage and support researchers in applying TVIC principles in their research on IV in sport... This approach both enhances the ethical conduct of research and also promotes and safeguards the well-being of all involved, fostering more meaningful and effective engagement throughout the research process." https://lnkd.in/gZdtb85R Authors: Tine Vertommen Mary Woessner (PhD) Emma Kavanagh Sylvie Parent Aurélie Pankowiak (PhD) Leen Haerens Cleo Schyvinck Bram Constandt Ramon Spaaij Vidar Stevens Annick Willem Margo Mountjoy

"The present study is one of the first to explore how abuse survivors can be placed at the forefront of education initiatives that are underpinned by international trauma-informed principles." This research explores the process of supporting two survivors/individuals with lived experience of abuse in sport in leading education initiatives on non-sexualised forms of abuse in sport. They leveraged the six trauma informed principles in the design and delivery of the education. Below are examples of how they applied these principles to their work: 👉🏻 Safety (physical, social, emotional): Online delivery to give participants easy exits if unforseen triggers emerge. It gave participants 'implied control' over when they choose to engage in the content. Rapport development between the facilitator and the participant was a central focus. 👉🏻Trustworthiness/transparency: Clearly stating the purpose and plan for the session in both verbal and written format. The approach also privileged all voices and did not take a traditional approach of the facilitator being the giver of knowledge. 👉🏻Peer support: The facilitators themselves were survivors of abuse in sport and could relate to athlete experiences. 👉🏻Collaboration and mutuality: The educational approach included explicit moments where power relationships were shifted between facilitator and learner (who spoke, who listened, who taught). 👉🏻Empowerment, voice and choice: Both facilitators and participants were given choices as to what content to lean into, when to take breaks and how to engage in the different content. 👉🏻Cultural historical and gender issues: For this, the education spoke to elements of normalised abusive practices and behaviours within the specific sports the workshops were delivered to. This recognised that abusive practices and attitudes vary sport to sport and this contextualised the content. These are some examples of ways to apply the trauma informed principles to education initiatives on abuse in sport, but the list is not exhaustive and the authors also note that while this focuses on applying principles to avoid re-traumatisation, there is still a need to seek to change "the practices and procedures which are associated with particular culturally driven ideological discourses relating to winning, gold medals and sporting excellence which have been found to contribute to athlete maltreatment (e.g. win at all costs; meritocracy; technocentrism). Indeed, approaches and practices (e.g. slim to win, hell week camps, punishment for lack of performance, punishment for putting on weight) relating to these ideologies have been challenged for their inappropriateness, dehumanizing nature and compromising of athletes’ health and well-being." Authors: McMahon, McGannon, Zehntner, Werbicki, Stephenson, Martin https://lnkd.in/gQUhRmtE

Child Protection in Sport: Reflections on Thirty Years of Science and Activism "The institution of sport was, at one time, a cultural and political island, defined as separate and free from the rest of society, with a kind of Cinderella status [34]. The historic institutional blindness of sport to child abuses led to an almost complete absence of prevention measures. By the 1980s, there were many reported cases of sexual, physical and emotional abuse in sport, but very few were publicised and virtually no studies had been conducted." The late Celia Brackenridge penned this publication almost 10 years ago and if you haven't yet read it, here's your sign to do so. For anyone working in #safesport, especially with a child abuse focus, this article provides an excellent summary of where we've been, where we are and where we need to go. While you can read the piece to find out the where we have been, and where we are, I want to focus on the where we need to go. There are two key points from the article to this end: 👉🏻 We need researchers and activists to work together to disseminate the knowledge and evidence underpinning safeguarding in sport- while the evidence base is thin relative to other areas of sport science, doping, physiology, it exists and needs to be known. 👉🏻While it's tempting to suggest that we are at a tipping point where athletes welfare is prioritised over performance, the dominant discourse remains performance success and if we are to shift this, there will likely need to be a performance rationale embedded within the cause. Some thoughts to kick off your week! Authors: Brackenridge and Rhind https://lnkd.in/g4j8cb7V

On Tuesday we returned to the #MCG with Vicsport to present the second part of our trauma informed care (TIC) in sport workshops: organisational TIC. This was our first delivery of this series of workshops so we were keen to see what worked or didn't and what was most useful. We designed the workshop to provide both a theoretical understanding of trauma informed care and practical applications to sport. This was not an easy task as the published evidence base for this work in sport is only starting to emerge. While we of course did some formal evaluation activities, what hit home the most was numerous people coming up during the second workshop breaks to share how they had already applied some of the learnings from session one (interpersonal responses to disclosures) and were needing the information from that day (organisational response). I'll be doing a deep dive into all things trauma informed care in sport for the first issue of my ✨STEPs for Safe Sport Newsletter ✨. I am blown away that there are already people from over 20 countries signed up 🤯 If you missed the original, you can sign up to receive the first edition here: https://lnkd.in/gTnYjvGn Grateful for my team: Alex Parker and Aurélie Pankowiak (PhD)

"athletes can feel psychologically safe in an inherently competitive group environment when coaches set the tone by giving athletes’ voice." There's a question that's both asked in the literature and in the workshops and talks I give around whether psychological safety is even possible in elite sport environments. An inherently competitive environment coupled with poor communication, bad leadership, no transparency, power discrepancies can lead to poor mental health, anxiety, burnout, injuries and poor performances. But...is there another way? Previous research has highlighted communication as the fundamental element as a culture of silence is perhaps the most dangerous culture. This study surveyed over 300 athletes to understand whether giving athletes a voice is an important element to creating psychological safety. Here's what they found: 👉🏻Athletes openness and conflict management skills both influenced team psychological safety. This includes athletes capacity to be open with their coaches, navigating conflicts, providing and receiving feedback, etc. 👉🏻The study also proposes that "the coach as a leader is the driving force and catalyst in creating a “climate of voice.'" 👉🏻A climate of voice enables athletes to bring their whole selves to the sport environment, feeling safe to take risks and push their performances. 👉🏻Athletes' relationships with their coaches were positively influenced by higher psychological safety. That is, when the athletes are in a safe environment, they are more like to maintain quality relationships. "while the coach-athlete relationship and communication are important dimensions to effective coaching, psychological safety may be an aspect in creating cooperative environments in competitive sports and a springboard to athletes’ flourishing and thriving in sport and life that must not be neglected." The coach plays an important role, but it's not all simply about how they communicate or treat individual athletes. It's about the climate they help to create and the collective buy-in to principles of psychological safety. So not only is this possible, there's more and more evidence emerging that this type of approach could have better outcomes for health, wellbeing and performance. If you want the research and practice findings sent straight to your inbox, along with practical tools for implementing safe sport in your context, you can sign up to receive the first STEPs for Safe Sport Newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/gTnYjvGn #safesport Authors: Sophia Jowett, Jose Roberto Andrade Do Nascimento-Júnior, Chen Zhao, Jyoti Gosai https://lnkd.in/g8sMtEAk

"I think there’s still a little bit of “you deal with the scary stuff and the horrible side of things” rather than being seen as a positive enhancement..I think the difficulty in safeguarding is quite often what you’re trying to do is presented as being an issue. You’re doing things so that things don’t go wrong... People don’t understand the value in planning and preparation that a lot of safeguarding is." In many countries around the world, roles focused on child protection (or at least broadly on safeguarding) are emerging in sport. The Child Protection in Sport Unit in the UK was the first government-backed agency with responsibility for safeguarding children in sport. While many strides have been made in safeguarding since the initiation of the unit, little has been done to understand the experience and roles of some of the key roles in safeguarding, namely the safeguarding lead officers within the national governing bodies of sport. A total of nine safeguarding lead officers participated in interviews for this project Key findings were: 👉🏻the resources available to an NGB are a significant factor in determining the extent of the safeguarding lead officr structure that can be established within a sport and the degree of safeguarding and child protection support that can be provided for that sports community 👉🏻One participant shared that safeguarding was only one small piece of their role, stating it was a "bolt on" part that made up about 20% of their time 👉🏻There was concern about how one person can fulfil all the requirements of the role on top of competing responsibilities. Some also indicated that given the choice again, they would not choose this role. 👉🏻 The officers encountered significant resistance from within their organisation. One was told "this is all just political correctness gone mad!”, and another shared that they would hear "this doesn’t happen in our sport." 👉🏻 There was isolation within the role, with other departments leaving safeguarding responsibilities to the singular role. One noted that even "higher up the organization, they still kind of leave it up to the safeguarding department. There’s still that whole, not understanding that everyone plays a part." These roles both in the UK and internationally are the cornerstone of much of the safeguarding policy implementation and yet we know very little about how this works in practice. What has been shared in these interviews speaks to a system which relies on individuals, individuals who often feel isolated, unsupported and even overwhelmed. "based on the analysis presented here, we suggest that for the implementation of “child protection in sport” to be meaningful (rather than superficial), organizations must demonstrate much greater investment, belief, in the philosophy of children’s rights than was encountered by the safeguarding lead officers interviewed here." https://lnkd.in/geqyP2xb #safesport Authors: Harthill and Lang

"All athletes have a right to engage in ‘safe sport’, defined as an athletic environment that is respectful, equitable and free from all forms of non-accidental violence to athletes. Yet, these issues represent a blind spot for many sport organisations through fear of reputational damage, ignorance, silence or collusion." While a new IOC consensus statement is soon to come, it's worth looking back at this one from 2016 that was the first to discuss ALL forms of abuse against athletes (not just sexual abuse). While the field has largely moved away from the term "non-accidental" violence, the included figure remains one of my favorites as it broadly details diverse types of abuse, the power differentials that can enable/contribute and the multi-level impacts of the abuse. Since this publication, there has been a rapid emergence of publications on the diverse forms of abuse of athletes and studies outside of sport have provided further insight into the impacts and severity of these other forms, including a recent study that showed that childhood experiences of psychological abuse had similar longterm impacts to mental wellbeing as experiences of sexual abuse. This was one of the first publications I read when venturing into this field of research. The next one I read was by one of the authors, Trisha Leahy who conducted one of the first (and still few) studies on sexual violence in Australian elite sport. Seeing that lone study in the early 2000s was a key motivator for driving forward research on this topic in Australia. Authors: Margo Mountjoy, Celia Brackenridge, Malia Arrington, Cheri Blauwet, Andrea Carska-Sheppard, Kari Fasting, Sandra Kirby, Trisha Leahy, Saul Marks, Kathy Martin, Katherine Starr, Anne Tiivas, Richard Budgett https://lnkd.in/gSSMAU8w

"...athletes with a strong athletic identity...may overlook the harmful aspects of emotional abuse by a coach if they perceive the abuse as means to achieve their performance goals in sport and as a necessary part of the athlete experience." This study aimed to understand if there was a relationship between emotional abuse, athletic identity and disclosure of abuse. Over 3000 Finnish athletes were recruited for the survey based study. Here's what they found: 👉 Female and gender diverse individuals experienced higher rates of emotional abuse than males. 👉 A salient athletic identity was associated with experiencing emotional abuse from a coach. A salient athletic identity is when athletes tend to identify themselves solely through the lens of their sport participation and previous research has suggested that the more "salient an athlete's athletic identity becomes, the more likely they are to normalize and adhere to the norms of sport." 👉 A salient athletic identity decreased the likelihood of disclosing emotional abuse. This further reinforces the notion that the more the athletes identify with being an athlete, the more likely they are to normalise abusive experiences and remain silent. To me, this study highlights the need for psychological safety within the sport environment. Athletes need to feel safe to challenge the status quo and not fear repercussions. Moreover, athletes should be supported as holistic humans, not centering the athlete identity to the exclusion of all other identities. "Sports organizations must cultivate a culture of trust and accountability surrounding reporting channels. As demonstrated by the results, coming forward with experiences or concerns of abuse is not a straightforward process for athletes. To encourage athletes to report their experiences and observations of abuse it is vital that sport organizations foster a safe environment. Athletes should feel empowered to come forward with their concerns, knowing that their reports will be taken seriously and addressed promptly." #safesport https://lnkd.in/gkHpASki Authors: Jatta Muhonen, Ashley Stirling, and Marja Kokkonen