Dear Colleagues,

The attention on sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment in sport has never been higher within the global sport community. The numbers of individuals victimised in sport who are willing to report and speak out continues to grow and the field, in its widest sense, has expanded significantly in the last ten years. ‘Child protection’, ‘safeguarding’, ‘athlete welfare’, and associated nomenclature is now irrevocably part of the sport lexicon as policy developments in this area proliferate. Nevertheless, questions about the extent to which the international sport sector is genuinely willing to acknowledge and address the underlying socio-cultural factors that give rise to abuse and exploitation remain.

It is also now 20 years since the publication of Celia Brackenridge’s seminal book ‘Spoilsports: Understanding and Preventing Sexual Exploitation in Sport’ and 35 years since she first began speaking about this problem in public and professional forums. Sadly, it is also 3 years since her death. Spoilsports and Celia Brackenridge’s wider research led the way in both the recognition of sexual violence and exploitation as a policy issue for the sport sector, as well as in the development of our understanding of sexual violence (and other forms of ‘non-accidental’ violence) in sport. One of Brackenridge’s most important contributions is that sexual violence cannot be divorced from its socio-cultural context. Following this, approaches to sexual violence based in the social sciences have much to add to the body of knowledge and policies they inform.

Over the past twenty years, research in this field has grown exponentially. Whilst sexual crimes are always the most likely to find their way to the news headlines, researchers have rightly called for a holistic approach to child/athlete welfare, where all violations are equally accounted for, and attended to, in both research and policy. Nevertheless, the specific act, practice, and experience of sexual violence remains under-researched and under-theorised within the social scientific investigation of sport. Further, there is a dearth of research that engages critically with policies, systems, and programmes developed to prevent sexual abuse in sport.

In this Special Issue, we call for contributions that come from social sciences and engage with the groundbreaking empirical and theoretical work of the founders of this field, as well as the later body of research and perspectives from beyond sport scholarship. We especially ask for research with new theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches, theorising sexual violence in sport from a sociological, historical, or socio-cultural perspective as well as for empirical studies with a focus on under-researched areas in this field (e.g., long-term consequences of sexual violence for those affected, specific populations/subgroups affected by sexual violence in sport, traumatised organisations in sport, evaluation and effectiveness of prevention programmes in sport). To this end, we hope this Special Issue will offer a state-of-the-art collection that establishes the current contours of the field and the current limits to our knowledge from the perspective of social sciences, with the aim of moving international debate and understanding forward in a critical and reflective way.

Prof. Dr. Mike Hartill
Prof. Dr. Bettina Rulofs
Guest Editors

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• sport
• sexual abuse
• violence
• exploitation
• harassment
• safeguarding
• child protection
• athlete welfare
• abuse prevention