Suchergebnisse

This article draws attention to safety concerns affecting young people in the setting of organized sport in Zambia. Our primary aim is to explore ways in which aspects of sport culture may constitute a threat to athlete safety. Secondly, we try to understand sport-specific safety concerns in light of more general concerns for young people's safety in Zambia. The study is based on interviews with athletes, coaches and sports leaders from Zambian sport. Although sport was mainly described as a positive recreational arena for youth, concerns were raised about unequal power relations and problematic ideals in the sport culture. Our findings suggest a need to discuss critically how glorification of toughness and resilience might contribute to normalize harmful practices in sport. Further, we indicate that divergent and elusive understandings of violence and abuse – in research and in practice – can influence athlete safety in significant ways. We conclude that safeguarding in sport continues to exist in the tension between protecting athletes from harm on the one hand and subscribing to a culture that promotes the ideals 'faster, higher, stronger' on the other.

Intoxicated sexual assault is the most common type of sexual assault but is rarely unpacked as a social phenomenon. Our analysis represents a novel approach to opening the broad category of intoxicated sexual assaults for further theorisation and identifies some of the social mechanisms that underlie victims' sensemaking in the aftermath of such assaults. Drawing on qualitative interviews with female victims, we present a typology of four experientially different assault situations: 'manipulative assault', 'opportunistic exploitation', 'sexually violent effervescence' and 'scripted compliance' – each with a different lead-up and interactional pattern. Across these often messy and disorienting situations, socio-sexual status dynamics affected the victims' understanding of what had happened: violations by low-status assailants were more clear-cut and easier to define as serious, while narrations involving high-status assailants were more ambiguous.

This article explores an important measure in current prevention policies in sport: guidelines against sexual harassment and abuse. Because little is known about how people involved in sport understand and relate to such guidelines, it fills a gap in current research on sexual harassment and abuse prevention in sport. We draw on 'video elicitation' focus group interviews with sport students in Norway. Our analysis is guided by Norbert Elias's sociology of knowledge and particularly his concept of 'degrees of involvement and detachment'. First, we found that the students had limited knowledge about the sexual harassment and abuse guidelines. Second, we saw how their discussions alternated between different positions when reflecting upon the guidelines' usefulness. From a relatively detached position, the students supported the general idea of guidelines. From the more involved position they voiced concern related to conduct regulations that conflicted with valued aspects of sport practice and mentioned problematic aspects of sport culture that the guidelines do not target. In a blend of involvement and detachment, the students drew on their sport experiences to reflect critically on both the potentials and limitations of the sexual harassment and abuse guidelines. Finally, we draw some implications of the analysis for the improvement of prevention work.