Surviving child sexual abuse in women's artistic gymnastics: ‘It's beautiful, because had I stayed in the past, I wouldn’t have evolved as a person’

Abstract

The USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal raised global awareness about child sexual abuse (CSA) in women's artistic gymnastics. The ensuing media coverage also centre-staged victims’ survivorship stories, a process that for many moved from dissociating, recognising and disclosing CSA to feeling comfort when connecting with survivors and accepting CSA as part of their life history. However, scholarship on what survivorship from CSA in sport entails, and importantly, what it means to athletes, is limited. In this article, we frame the survival of CSA using Arthur Frank’s socio-narratological conceptualisation of people being able to process the devastating consequences of a life-threatening and/or a life-altering event, and present the survivorship stories of two former gymnasts, Maria and Lucia (pseudonyms). For these two women, survivorship was facilitated by hearing others’ stories of sexual abuse, purposefully facing their CSA experiences and connecting with one another later in life to raise awareness about sexual abuse in sport. Thus, in addition to presenting Maria and Lucia's stories for the purpose of providing CSA victims with a survivorship narrative, we outline and reflect on the role hearing and telling stories have in CSA survivorship.

Children’s Rights to and in Sport: A Comparative Analysis of Organizational Policies in the Scandinavian Countries

“…Since David's book, research has acknowledged different forms of exploitation of child athletes, such as sexual abuse and the "trafficking" of young football players (Strandbu et al 2023;Yilmaz et al 2020). Research also points to the culture of silence that often seems to prevail in sporting contexts (Rulofs et al 2019;Barker-Ruchti and Varea 2023) that serves as a barrier to reporting and revealing abuse and harassment. Followingly, there has been an increased awareness of the need for the protection of children in sport-as underlined in the growing research on safeguarding in sport (Brackenridge and Rhind 2014;Lang and Hartill 2014;Rhind and Owusu-Sekyere 2017).…”