Sexual Abuse in Secondary School Sports: Factors, Facilitators and the Implications for School Social Work

Sexual Abuse in Secondary School Sports: Factors, Facilitators and the Implications for School Social Work

Background & Purpose: Secondary school sports participation is a hallmark of the American childhood experience. Reports indicate that about 25 million children and adolescents play competitive sports within secondary schools (Engle, 2004).  For a variety of reasons, including passion for sports and the extra pay, teachers oftentimes serve dual roles as classroom leaders and coaches when it comes to organized secondary school sports. Almost twelve percent of student-athletes are the victims of some type of sexual abuse at the hands of a coach or school authority figure (Hall & Webster, 2004).  

This study explores the factors and facilitators to teacher-coach/student-athlete sexual (TCSA) abuse as well as recommendations on how secondary school systems can prevent and intervene in instances of TCSA sexual abuse.  

Methods: The conceptual framework for this study is Finkelhor’s (1986) four-factor model explanation of pedophilia, which illustrates distinctive, sequential factors that must align before the sexual abuse or harassment takes place.

This inquiry is qualitative in nature and included ten focus groups (N= 76 participants) with students (23), teachers (15), parents (10), school administrators (15), and coaches (13) from a mid-sized public school district in Western North Carolina. The school systems director of public relations recruited participants, via email and flyer.  The participants responded to a structured schedule of questions, related to:

1)   Processes and factors leading to TCSA sexual abuse,

2)   Perpetrators and victims characteristics,

3)   Perpetrator grooming strategies

4)   Sport and cultural specific facilitators, and

5)   School system responses (prevention/intervention) to TCSA sexual abuse.

The analysis was guided by grounded theory and inductive qualitative research principles. The focus groups were transcribed verbatim and coded thematically using ATLAS Ti. Secondly, the author conducted pattern matching (Yin, 2009) and content analysis (Krippendorf, 2012) by utilizing the data analysis and TCSA sexual abuse scholarship to critically analyze the content.  A panel of six graduate students and two faculty members engaged in member checking and peer debriefing.

Results: The data analyses revealed that participants strongly believe that teachers and school administrators are ignorant of and/or ambivalent to, TCSA sexual abuse. Secondly, participants indicated that factors and facilitators of TCSA sexual abuse include blurred boundaries, antiquated school/sport policies, absence of student’s voice, and “passing the trash”. The data also indicates that mandatory reporting efficacy, monitoring sport practices, early detection techniques, raising awareness of ethics, and an infrastructure for investigating abuse are critical to how schools respond to TCSA sexual abuse.

Conclusions & Implications: The findings support the notion that adoration for sport impedes the willingness and ability of sport stakeholders to identify, intervene in, and prevent TCSA sexual abuse – even in secondary schools. As such the findings suggest that specific strategies, efforts, and policies should be created to respond to TCSA sexual abuse.  Given the frequency of TCSA sexual abuse in school-sponsored sports the implications for school social work, and social service programs that use sports as a “hook”, will be discuss