Addressing the Complexity of Violence Against Women in Sport: Using the World Café Method to Inform Organizational Response

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the process and outcomes arising from a unique collaboration involving researchers and professionals to explore key gaps and challenges in sport organizations’ responses to violence against women. Using the World Café method in a 1-day research forum in Victoria, Australia, we brought together state sport organizations, violence against women organizations, and multidisciplinary researchers to reflect upon the multiple contexts that shape violence against women in community sport. Drawing together insights from feminist research and a socioecological perspective, this article contributes to sport management scholarship by using an innovative methodology for collaborative knowledge sharing and creation to explore the challenges and opportunities for organizational action to address violence against women. We advance a gendered lens for understanding how power relations shape sport management practice contexts as well as future research into organizational thinking, research, and responses to violence against women.

The “Boys’ Club”, sexual harassment, and discriminatory resourcing: An exploration of the barriers faced by women sport officials in Australian basketball

“…This is illustrated by statement 28 in Cluster 3 Discriminatory Resourcing : “Lack of value placed on developing female referees for long-term elite careers as it is assumed we will leave the sport to become pregnant.” These traditional gender norms associated with women as caregivers constrain women and keep them in inferior positions as outsiders (Jeanes et al, 2021; LaVoi and Dutove, 2012). Sexist attitudes such as this continue to reinforce gendered stereotypes and create barriers to women basketball officials, as well as women and girls in sport more broadly (Fink, 2016; Forsdike and Fullager, 2021). Furthermore, because these high-level barriers appear across different clusters it is evident that the barriers are insidious and work in several different ways to subordinate women.…”