How and why do sports issues turn into politics? The aim of this paper is to explore how politicization of sports might happen, to show how social movement theory might contribute to such understandings and to contribute to a theoretical understanding of the political mobilization of sports issues. To achieve this aim, we outline a three-dimensional theoretical framework based on social movement theory. Thereafter we present six cases of more-or-less contested sports issues: gender, sexuality, doping, extreme wages, boxing/violence and failed talent development. Finally, we discuss the main features of our theoretical framework in light of these cases. How do political opportunity structures contribute to political mobilization of sports issues? How do cultural factors make a difference in political processes concerning sports? Which actors are involved when contested sports issues occur? The aim of this exploration is to discover how various societal factors addressed in our theoretical framework matter relative to how and why sports issues might turn into politics.

In this paper, we use data from focus group interviews with young athletes to explore their thinking about coach-athlete sexual relationships (CASRs). Our aim is to further the understanding of the ambivalence surrounding CASRs in the sports field, which are simultaneously viewed as ethically problematic and acceptable—at least when they involve high-profile adult athletes. Inspired by Swidler’s toolkit approach to culture, we analyze how athletes understand and justify CASRs. We found that three different ethics were activated in the interviews: the safeguarding, love, and athletic-performance ethics. We discuss how these ethics are linked to different underlying “imaginaries,” or cultural frames, about the meaning of sport in society and offer thoughts on how the results can inform sporting organizations’ future prevention efforts.

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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.

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Youth, parties and drinking is a well-known mix. Most often it is social and fun. A sense of freedom can be present: You can do things that are prohibited in other circumstances. But sometimes things go wrong, boundaries are crossed, and someone ends up violated. This chapter explores such situations: sexual assaults that happen at parties or related to social drinking situations among youth. The aim is to understand the types of experience they represent for the victim: In what sense was the incident a violation? The empirical basis for our analysis is women’s narratives about party-related sexual assaults in their youth. The analysis points towards four main types of experience: manipulative assaults, opportunistically exploited vulnerability, situational appeal (effervescence) and scripted entrapment. These experiences are differentiated by the victim’s degree of agency in the sexual interaction and her interest in the assailant(s) or the social situation per se. We suggest that victims’ understandings of what happened to them hinge on how their experience relates to these dimensions. However, this is not the whole story. Victims’ interpretations of sexual assault situations are also impacted by their perception of the assailant’s position in the gender market: Situations involving assailants with low socio-sexual status are more often recognized as assaults.

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