The level of child abuse in sports is horrifying, but is rarely reported

 

 

• Utter bias: The different way that different clubs are seen by the media
• What happens if ManC and the rest of the League can’t agree on anything?

By Tony Attwood

If you are a regular reader of Untold you will know that from time to time we have touched on the very difficult subject of child abuse within football clubs. “Child abuse” in this context can mean anything from playing a youngster when he or she has an injury rather than giving him time off for medical treatment needed, through to sexual abuse of a child by an adult.

If you are a regular reader of the football media this may surprise you since you won’t see anything like this being mentioned at all although if you search you can, of course, find occasional write-ups of cases where it has been found that child abuse has become ingrained in the culture of the club.   

But the child abuse is there, and in football can include physical, sexual, and/or psychological maltreatment or neglect of a child or children as part of the way a club treats children. 

And from that point, the questions arise why does it happen, why is it allowed to continue, and why don’t the media report it?  It is clearly obvious that for young players to develop into adults who can have a career in professional football, they need to be nurtured and helped both in their skills as footballers and in their ability to cope with a life that is different from the norm.   Factors such as working constantly with people a lot older than oneself, being coached and trained in a way that does not happen beyond sport, and (if successful in becoming a professional) being open to the extremes of praise and abuse from supporters and the media.

And this takes us into the psychological side to football which can cause young players difficulties – such as how one coped mentally with not being able to play for a prolonged period of time due to injury, loss of form, or simply a falling out of favour with a trainer or manager.

Indeed that latter point can be a real problem where the trainer or manager has absolute control over the youth teams and no one else is keeping a very close eye on that individual’s behaviour.

Research conducted by Edge Hill University and the University of Wuppertal (in North Rhine-Westphalia) across six European countries including the UK, and involving over 10,000 individuals found that, utterly shockingly, three-quarters of children engaged in sport beyond the school level had encountered abuse in sport.

And to be clear this was research, funded by the European Union, and not funded by an organisation that was seeking to prove a point.   

The findings were basically terrifying, as was the lack of publicity the research received in the wider media.   Just under half of those interviewed had experienced physical violence, figures which show that the current measures aimed at preventing abuse of youngsters in football are utterly insufficient and that this wholesale level of abuse is continuing without anyone in either the media or the game seeming to be bothered about it.

At the heart of the problem appears to be the notion, prevalent among many trainers, that emotional punishment of young people is the only way in which one can get them to work hard, and therefore such punishment is justified.   It would also appear that many football clubs in their training programmes with children see psychological and physical abuse of children as the “only way” to make them work hard.

Obviously research in this area is hindered by the fact that researchers cannot go around asking under 16 year olds if they have been abused, so instead research focuses on those aged over 18 who participated in sport before they were 18.   The highest level of reported abuse was among those who had taken part in international competitions.

Not only is this level of abuse extraordinary and horrifying but equally awful is the fact that it is not widely debated and is not investigated by independent bodies, probably because within their staff are many who were abused or were abusers.  Perhaps just as alarming is that this level of abuse seems to be happening across Europe – it is not just an English or British problem. Indeed the highest level of abuse of children in sport was found in Belgium, and in virtually all countries the level of violent abuse of boys was significantly higher than the abuse of girls.

However, this is not to say that girls are safe.   In Greece, for example, it appears that around one-third of female athletes reported sexual harassment, with one in six female athletes reporting harassment from their coaches.

Thus two issues arise.  One is that it appears that the abuse of young people in sports is commonplace and extensive.  The other is that yet again we have come across an issue that the media simply won’t touch let alone investigate.