Athlete welfare should be of central importance in all sport. This comprehensive volume features cutting-edge research from around the world on issues that can compromise the welfare of athletes at all levels of sport and on the approaches taken by sports organisations to prevent and manage these.
In recent years, sports organisations have increased their efforts to ensure athlete health, safety, and well-being, often prompted by high-profile disclosures of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse; bullying; discrimination; disordered eating; addiction; and mental health issues. In this book, contributors lift the lid on these and other issues that jeopardise the physical, emotional, psychological, social, and spiritual welfare of athletes of all ages to raise awareness of the broad range of challenges athletes face. Chapters also highlight approaches to athlete welfare and initiatives taken by national and international sport organisations to provide a safer, more ethical sports environment.
As the first book to focus exclusively on athlete welfare, this is an essential read for students and researchers in sports studies, coaching, psychology, performance, development and management, and physical education. It is also a useful reference point for anyone working in welfare, safeguarding, child protection, and equity and inclusion in and beyond sport.
Introduction
Melanie Lang
Part I: Conceptualisations of Athlete Welfare
1 Developments in International Policy on Athlete Welfare
Melanie Lang
2 Scientism and the Welfare of Athletes: Minds, Brains, Genes and Agency
Leon Culbertson
3 Organisational Obligations Toward Athlete Transitions: Confronting the bureaucratisation of Athlete Welfare with an Ethics of Care
G. Z. Kohe and L. G. Purdy
4 Athlete Shaming and the Ethics of Care: Opposing Forces in Sport Coaching
Emily McCullogh and Parissa Safai
Part II: Current Concerns in the Welfare of Athletes
5 Gendered Violence in Women’s Artistic Gymnastics: A Sociological Analysis
Natalie Barker-Ruchti, Astrid Schubring and Carly Stewart
6 Psychological Abuse in Competitive and High-Performance Women’s Volleyball
Alixandra Krahn
7 Presenteeism in Elite Sport Organisations: A Framework for Understanding Athletes’ Decisions to Practice Sport Despite Health Concerns
Jochen Mayer, Felix Kühnle and Ansgar Thiel
8 The Issue of Athlete Welfare and Why Tackling Should be Removed from Physical Education and School Sport: #BanTackling
Adam J. White
9 Welfare and the Protection of Young Athletes: An Analysis of the Nature and Prevalence of Bullying Behaviours in Sport Settings
Miguel Nery, Carlos Neto, António Rosado and Peter K. Smith
10 Degrading and Harming New Teammates During Hazing: ‘Athletes will be Athletes’
Jennifer J. Waldron
11 Exploring the Links Between Self-directed Violence and Child Maltreatment and Bullying in Sport
Sylvie Parent, Judith Kotiuga, Tine Vertommen and Kristine Fortier
Part III: Athlete Mental Health
12 Mental Health in Sport
Brad Donohue and Davy Phrathep
13 Suicide Among Athletes
Ashwin L. Rao
14 The Athlete and Addiction
Carwyn Jones
15 Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating in Sport: The Hidden Role of Sporting Organisations and How the Cycle Can be Broken
Jenny McMahon
Part IV: Equity and Inclusion as an Athlete Welfare Concern
16 The Welfare of Disabled People in Sport
Hayley Fitzgerald
17 Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Racist Ruptures in US Youth Soccer
Alex Manning
18 Locked Out: Examining Binary-gendered Locker Rooms as a Key Site for Trans Athlete Welfare
Ali Greey
Part V: New Agendas and Missing Voices
19 Virtual Technologies as Tools of Maltreatment: Safeguarding in Digital Spaces
Emma Kavanagh, Chelsea Litchfield and Jaquelyn Osborne
20 The Welfare of Adolescent High-performance Action Sport Athletes: The Case of Young Commercially Sponsored Dutch Kite Surfers
Froukje Smits
21 Examinations of Sports Workers’ Welfare in Spaces of Geopolitical Conflict: ‘The Country is Under Threat, but the Game Goes On’
L. G. Purdy, G. Z. Kohe and R. Paulauskas
22 Pasifika Rugby Migration and Athlete Welfare: Stairway to Heaven
David Lakisa, Jack Sugden and Brent McDonald
23 Countering the Trajectories Towards New Forms of Violence in Youth: Enhancing Protective Factors Through Sports
Dean M. Ravizza
24 Sexual Abuse ‘Survivor’ Research in Sport
Colin Harris and Mike Hartill
25 Factors Influencing the Mental Health of Sports Match Officials: The Potential Impact of Abuse and a Destabilised Support System from a Global Context
Tom Webb and Paul Gorczynski
Part VI: Stakeholders in Athlete Welfare
26 The Role of Parents in Promoting the Welfare of Children Involved in Sport
Camilla J. Knight, Olivier Y. Rouquette and Maita G. Furusa
27 Consent and Complicity: The Athletes’ Role in the Normalisation of Damaging Coaching Practices
Chris Zehntner
28 Athlete Welfare in Coach-athlete Romantic Relationships
Susanne Johansson
29 Moving Beyond Unproblematic Policy Implementation: Some Micro-level Reflections on Social Interaction, Emotion and the Enactment of Safeguarding Policy in Sport
Andrea Scott-Bell, Karl Wharton and Paul Potrac
Part VII: Approaches to Prevention
30 Protection of the Athlete: Activities of the International Olympic Committee
Margo Mountjoy, Kirsty Burrows, and Susan Greinig
31 Criminal Record Checks as a Tool to Prevent Child Abuse in Sport
Melanie Lang and Maria Papaefstathiou
32 Protecting Athletes Against Sexual Violence: A Club-based Approach from Germany
Bettina Rulofs
33 Measuring the Prevalence of Interpersonal Violence Against Children in Sport
Tine Vertommen and Sylvie Parent
34 Advancing Autonomy-supportive Coaching Through the Application of the Transtheoretical Model
Joseph Gurgis, Gretchen Kerr and Ashley Stirling
Biography
Melanie Lang is Assistant Director of the Centre for Child Protection and Safeguarding in Sport and a senior lecturer in child protection in sport at Edge Hill University, UK. She is co- editor of the book Safeguarding, Child Protection and Abuse in Sport: International Perspectives in Research, Policy and Practice (Routledge, 2015).