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Blurred boundaries a qualitative investigation into the organisational culture of bullying and harassment in elite track and field athletes in Jalisco, Mexico

Lozano Esparza, Victoria

Awarding institution: King's College London

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Download date: 27. Sep. 2021 Blurred Boundaries: A Qualitative Investigation into the Organisational Culture of Bullying and Harassment in Elite Track and Field Athletes in Jalisco, Mexico

Victoria Lozano-Esparza

Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy

Department of Global Health and Social Medicine

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy King’s College London

REVISED

JANUARY 2021

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Abstract

The aim of this doctoral dissertation was to contribute to the understanding of the manifestations of bullying and harassment in Mexican sport by investigating the organisational culture of a public sport organisation in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. My objective was to analyse the stories and narratives through qualitative interviews of elite semi-professional and professional track and field athletes who trained and participated in this public sport organisation. Based on the body of scholarship suggesting that the quality of a work environment reflects the values, norms, and beliefs of an organisation and that symbolic features and assumptions of a work environment turn into behavioural practices, I chose my conceptual framework. This framework is called organisational culture as developed by organisational psychologist Edgar Schein. I drew substantially from the discipline of organisational psychology, a sub-field of psychology that studies human behaviour at work, emphasising issues such as bullying and harassment in the workplace and sought to apply it to the context of sport. I transcribed and interpreted 14 interviews, seven female track and field athletes and seven coaches (six male and one female) according to the principles of thematic analysis. I created four themes based on the patterns, accounts, and perceptions shared by participants, these were: Boundaries; Grooming and Transgression; Dome of Silence; and Safety Culture. This investigation is unique compared to other work done in the topic because of two reasons: firstly, this investigation centres on a geographical area outside the Anglosphere from which most of studies of bullying and harassment in sport come from. Despite the widespread presence of bullying and harassment in various parts of the world and in different contexts, in sport, the research has been limited in Mexico and rest of Latin America. Therefore, I am addressing and giving voice to a new group of individuals. Secondly, this investigation seeks to encourage the application of methodological and theoretical principles of organisational psychology to the field of sport. I do so by drawing from the literature on organisational cultures and its influence on individuals in organisations,

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considering the national context of Mexico, and how adherence to norms and behaviours of such culture can be associated with bullying and harassment in sport. Thus, theoretically, this investigation contributes to the body of scholarship that deals with organisational culture and issues of systematic abuse in organised contexts, bridging foundations from organisational and social psychology with sport research. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no studies approaching bullying and harassment from a cultural and organisational perspective in semi-professional and professional sport in Mexico. This project aims to bridge this gap in knowledge through a qualitative empirical investigation.

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Acknowledgements

To Martha, Raul, Ale, Brownie and Bonita (my sweet, noble, smart Golden Retrievers): infinite thank you for the love, support, guidance, and motivation in distance and in person. You are my nucleus, my family, my team, and what gives me enormous strength.

To Silvia and Anne: I am immensely grateful for your kindness, encouragement, friendship, and professionalism, all at once, towards me always. Your dedication and work ethic have been an example I must continue to follow, and a friendship I would like to continue on with. Thank you for being with me.

To those who showed intrigue, excitement, and appreciation for this investigation and were brave enough to speak and share their truth with me: the new normal is ours. You are not alone. There is always, always, a helping hand.

To my friends who formed part of some of my PhD adventures but have parted, and to those who are still with me and, perhaps, who are destined to be in my life for long, thank you for your magic, and for teaching me humility and patience; for showing me freedom, choice, and love; for being fun and being there with hugs and kisses for me too.

Finally, for those who taught me lessons the hard way. Thank you for making me much, much, stronger. Here I go.

'May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.'

― Nelson Mandela

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Short Table of Contents

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALE FOR RESEARCH 1

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 8

Chapter 3: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 35

Chapter 4: METHODS 53

Chapter 5 Findings 1: BOUNDARIES 80

Chapter 6 Findings 2: GROOMING AND TRANSGRESSION 102

Chapter 7 Findings 3: DOME OF SILENCE 119

Chapter 8 Findings 4: SAFETY CULTURE 130

Chapter 9: CONCLUSIONS 144

REFERENCES 154

APPENDIX I: Information Sheet Spanish Template 180 APPENDIX II: Consent Form Spanish Template 184 APPENDIX III: Interview Guide Spanish Template 186 APPENDIX IV: Information Sheet English Template 189 APPENDIX V: Consent Form English Template 190 APPENDIX VI: Interview Guide English Template 191

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Abstract i

Acknowledgements ii

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION AND RATIONALE FOR RESEARCH 1 Research Momentum 2 Research Aims and Research Questions 3 Structure of Thesis 4

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 8 Introduction 8 Theorising Bullying and Harassment 9 Terminology: A Definitional Debate 9 Sport Terminology 11 Intentionality 13 Definition for this Research 13 Causes of Bullying and Harassment 14 Functional Behaviour 15 Reward Systems and Athletic Identity 16 Organisational Cultures and Structures 18 Prevalence and Risk Factors in Sport 20 Popular Culture, Stereotypes, and Commodification 22 Power, Regimes, and Relationship with the Perpetrator 24 Reporting Harassment 26 Consequences and Coping with Bullying and Harassment 29 Research Gaps: Mexico 31

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Statistical Data Gaps in Mexico 31 Theoretical Gaps: Organisational Psychology Applied to Sport 33

Chapter 3: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 35 Introduction 35 Understanding Organisational Culture: What is it? 36 Methods for Studying Organisational Culture 38 Schein’s Three-Level Model of Organisational Culture 39 Three Levels of Culture: Artifacts, Espoused Beliefs and Values, 42 and Underlying Assumptions Organisational Culture: Its Application in Sport 44 Organisational Culture and Work Environment 45 Organisational Culture, Gender, and Hypermasculine 47 Environments Organisational Culture: A Lens to Study Bullying and Harassment 49

Chapter 4: METHODS 53 Introduction 53 Rationale for the Research Design 54 Research Setting 57 Recruitment 57 Participants and Sample Size 59 Data Collection: Semi-structured Interviews 62 Interview Process 63 Advantages of Non-Face-to-Face and Online Interviews 64 Interview Guide 65 Analysis and Interpretation of Interviews: Thematic Analysis 66 Philosophical Approaches 67 Theme Generating 68 Reflexivity 70 Other Approaches Considered 72 Ethics and Informed Consent in High-Risk Research 73

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Confidentiality and Anonymity 74 Identified Risks and Benefits to Participants 76 Data Management 77 Presentation of Data and Order of Chapters 78

Chapter 5 Findings 1: BOUNDARIES 80 Introduction 80 Banter and Safe Environment? 81 Coaching styles and athlete behaviours: Do coach-athletes relationships 90 lend themselves to bullying and harassment? Coach-Athletes Romantic and Sexual Relationships: Perspectives 97

Chapter 6 Findings 2: GROOMING AND TRANSGRESSION 102 Introduction 102 Grooming 103 Initiating Harassment and Transgression 109 Dealing with and Reflections on Grooming and Transgression 115

Chapter 7 Findings 3: DOME OF SILENCE 119 Introduction 119 Aftermath of Harassment: Coping and First Motivations to Speak out 119 Formally Reporting Harassment, Silence and Outcomes 123 Consequences of Reporting Bullying and Harassment 127

Chapter 8 Findings 4: SAFETY CULTURE 130 Introduction 130 Safety point 1: Psychosocial Hazards and Safety Perceptions 130 Safety point 2: Risky Venues 136 Safety point 3: Background Checks and Cultural Differences 139

Chapter 9: CONCLUSIONS 144

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Main Remarks 144 Theoretical Implications 144 Challenges on Terminology 146 Methodological Implications 147 Further Research Recommendations 149 On Representative Statistical Data 151 On Barriers to Reporting, Evidence, and Support Networks 152 Final Remarks 153

REFERENCES 154

APPENDIX I: Information Sheet Spanish Template 180 APPENDIX II: Consent Form Spanish Template 184 APPENDIX III: Interview Guide Spanish Version 186 APPENDIX IV: Information Sheet English Template 189 APPENDIX V: Consent Form English Template 190 APPENDIX VI: Interview Guide English Template 191

List of Figures and Tables

Figure 1. International Olympic Committee Conceptualisation of Harassment and Abuse in Sport (Non-Accidental Violence). Causes, mechanisms and impacts, p. 18.

Figure 2. Schein’s Three levels of Culture, p. 42.

Table 1. Participant table. Characteristics include: Assigned ID number; sports role; age at interview; and specialisation in track and field, p. 60.

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Chapter 1

Introduction and Rationale for Research

Larry Nassar, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Roger Ailes, are but a handful of perpetrators, perhaps the most high-profile, of bullying and harassment and other criminal acts. They and many other abusers were a ticking bomb before a whole movement against oppression, sexism, and violence arose in working places, long due. There is strength in numbers, and the #MeToo movement revealed the scale of impunity, patriarchy, and webs of power dynamics across the globe. Focusing our attention on sport, I argue that it is an intriguing space and working place that deserves more serious attention. Sport is not a trivial matter. To start, the impact of sport in society is vast. At its most basic and positive levels, sport incentivises socialisation, physical activity, play, fun, and teamwork. It also builds character and discipline and provides a sense of achievement and confidence to youth and adult populations (Eime et al, 2013; Oja et al, 2015). On a political level, part of government investment goes to the development of elite athletes for national representation and political identity (Coakley, 2011), in addition to the achievement of non-sport outcomes such as public health goals through mass sport participation (Houlihan, 2005; Hoye et al, 2010; Oja et al, 2010, 2015; Santo and Mildner, 2010; Hargreaves and Anderson, 2014). In an economic and cultural level, important competitions such as the Olympic Games, World Cups and Grand Slams, to name a few, are watched widely in different places of the world and are the means of revenue for many businesses, as well as the means of subsistence for those who partake in it in professional and semi-professional levels. Yet sport has also had, historically, a very dark side. Historical power struggles related to social class, ethnicity and gender are well known to happen in the field of sport and associated with political values. Forms of violence and abuse, as are sexual and emotional abuse, have been less researched, perhaps because these issues in sport are well-hidden. The most recent high-profile example was Larry Nassar’s case of sexual harassment and abuse of

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USA gymnasts (Fisher and Anders, 2020). There are many other examples although out of the public sight (Antúnez, n.d; Antón and Rodríguez, 2014) Nassar was guilty of ten accounts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2017, yet allegations of harassment and abuse against him existed since the 1990s (Fisher and Anders, 2020; Kavanagh et al, 2020). Surprisingly, neither Michigan State University (the university Nassar worked for) nor the National Collegiate Athletic Association (the American organisation administering intercollegiate sport and student-athletes ‘success’) gave serious attention to (Fisher and Anders, 2020). Notwithstanding the potential uses of sport for the benefit of society, there is now undeniable evidence that highly competitive environments, as is elite professional sport and university sport, are prone to abuse, and more commonly than previously thought (Coakley, 1995; Coakley and Dunning, 2000; Brackenridge, 2001; Leahy, 2008, 2011; Kirby et al, 2008; Fasting et al, 2011; Kavanagh, 2014; Oliver and Lloyd, 2015; Schinke et al, 2016; Owton, 2016; Mountjoy et al, 2016; Parent and Fortier, 2018; Vertommen et al, 2018; Yabe et al, 2018; Jeckell et al, 2018). Timpka et al, 2019; Mountjoy and Shute, 2019). The global pattern of abuse in sport is undeniable, as I will show in the next chapters.

Research Momentum

The research momentum on the topic of bullying and harassment is forcing us to rethink the impact these issues have not only at the individual level, but for organisations too and, perhaps, consider them as a public health problem given its consequences. In sport, the topic of maltreatment has acquired a new dimension, becoming less of a taboo, providing new research opportunities. I take advantage of these new opportunities here, in my doctoral investigation, to delve into the experiences and perceptions of athletes and coaches with bullying and harassment in the context of Mexican semi-professional and professional sport. More specifically, the narratives of both athletes and coaches come from the sport of track and field, from varied specialisations within the sport, to be discussed later on, and who train and participate in a public sport organisation in the state of Jalisco (Mexico). Research on bullying and harassment has been extensively studied in different contexts, workplaces in the public and private sectors, such as corporations and businesses,

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healthcare and educational settings (Leymann, 1996; Millward, 2005; McCarthy and Mayhew; 2004; Einarsen et al, 2011). Less so has been the focus of research in workplaces that include sport, such as the bullying and harassment of athletes, and other sport members, taking into account organisational and cultural perspectives. I argue that there is a need to understand bullying and harassment in sports in a more holistic manner, looking at how athletes perceive their organisational environments, their own organisation, and how cultural and social processes may provide a background to certain bullying and harassment behaviours, which are known to have repercussions on the performance, health and well-being of athletes.

Research aims and research questions

The overarching aim of this research was to contribute to the understanding of the manifestations of bullying and harassment in Mexican sport by applying an organisational culture lens to the stories and narratives of female athletes and coaches from the sport of track and field. I focused on the perspectives and own experiences with bullying and harassment of seven female athletes and seven coaches (six males and one female) in a well- established public sport organisation in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. The main research questions for this study were the following:

• What do participants’ experiences with bullying and harassment reveal about the organisational processes of their sport environment? o How is the direct experience of bullying and harassment like for my participants?

• What do participants’ narratives about bullying and harassment illustrate about the normalisation of bullying and harassment in the sporting environment of the research site? o How do participants’ narratives around bullying and harassment characterise the quality and safety of their sport environment?

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• In what ways does the Mexican culture and organisational environment of the research site illuminate the rise of bullying and harassment of high-performance track and field athletes?

Structure of Thesis

This investigation has nine chapters of which four (chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, and chapter 8) contain empirical data obtained from semi-structured interviews. In chapter 2, I provide a synthesis of the current state of knowledge regarding bullying and harassment in sport. I focus on bridging literature from organisational psychology with the literature from sport research. The former has a substantive theoretical and empirical base on bullying and harassment that I argue enriches that of sport, which is growing considerably, but is not yet fully developed (Mountjoy and Shute, 2019). I begin this literature review chapter engaging with a discussion on the definitions that scholars have put forward for bullying and harassment and emphasise how this is an important scholarly debate until this day. Next, I go on to explain that bullying and harassment is a form of aggression that has been linked to substantial negative consequences on health and well-being (Nielsen et al, 2016). I point out that in sport, bullying and harassment have profound consequences on those who experience it, and we, researchers, have just begun to document it more thoroughly. Further in this chapter, I also discuss risk factors for bullying and harassment including age, organisational culture, normalisation of violence in society, and others. Much of the way in which bullying, and harassment have been studied and understood both within and outside academia has been through individualistic or clinical perspectives. This perspective has focused on the victim-perpetrator relationship, and while the victim-perpetrator relationship is important, it is not the most important aspect of the bullying and harassment phenomenon, even though, at first, it may make sense to view the problem in this way (Duffy and Sperry, 2012; 2014). Assuming that the problem lies either in the perpetrator or in the target of bullying and harassment, researchers can risk missing features of the experience that lead an individual to become victimised or to perpetuate the aggression (Duffy and Sperry, 2012; 2014)

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In the context of sport, I argue, supported by my findings and by a growing body of research that, rather than bullying and harassment being merely an interpersonal (victim- perpetrator) problem, it is a multicausal phenomenon (Brackenridge et al, 2010; Leahy, 2011; Mountjoy et al, 2015, 2016; Donnelly et al, 2016; Mountjoy and Shute, 2019). Therefore, more dimensions have to be explored, such as culture and organisational features, as are safety rules, norms and beliefs that guide behaviour, where semi-professional and professional sports take place, and which might facilitate opportunities for forms of violence to emerge. This brings me to explain the conceptual lens that guided my investigation, called organisational culture (Schein, 1988; 2010). In chapter 3, I discuss in more detail why organisational processes are important to study when addressing bullying and harassment. This framework stems from the discipline of organisational/occupational psychology (in the USA and UK, respectively), a sub-field of psychology, which studies social and work processes in organisations and how these processes influence human behaviour and work dynamics (Fox and Spector, 2005; Jex and Britt, 2008). The quality of the sport environment can be an important factor for the occurrence of bullying and harassment in sport organisations (Leymann, 1996; Salin and Hoel, 2011). Thus, it is imperative to go beyond individualistic notions regarding the causes of bullying and harassment and study the context in which bullying, and harassment develops and is sustained. This can be done through careful analysis of stories and experiences of informants, targets of bullying and harassment, and even perpetrators themselves, which give us culture and meaning making information (Schein, 2010). In carrying out this research, I encountered several challenges. For example, recruitment and commitment from participants. It was not an easy task to find participants who openly discussed personal or witnessing experiences with bullying and harassment in Mexico, in the state of Jalisco and the sport organisation where I focused my recruitment. Likewise, some participants that had initially accepted to have an interview with me, later declined or their interview had to be postponed several times. However, these research challenges are not uncommon when studying sensitive topics. As other researchers have pointed out already, one of the main reasons that make studying bullying and harassment in sport challenging is that it is a phenomenon that tends to be concealed. Concealed by the prestige associated with sport competitions; normalised

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under hypermasculine environments; obscured due to the stigma and the ‘taboo’ nature of the topic; silenced due to the fear of reputational and economic damage, among other factors (Coakley and Dunning, 2000; Brackenridge and Fasting, 2002; Leahy, 2011; Mountjoy and Shute, 2019; Kavanagh et al, 2020). It is because of this concealment that to address this research issue, the choice of research methods is important. I discuss my research approach in chapter 4, explaining that in order to obtain the data that I wanted for my research, I relied on a qualitative research design, analysing a variety of stories, and perceptions on bullying and harassing behaviours. Also, in chapter 4, I elaborate on my motivations to embark on this research and how they influenced my approach to it, in a more philosophical and epistemological manner. Further, I share that apart from wanting to seek applicability of the field of organisational and social psychology in sport, my own experiences as an elite athlete, a tennis player, propelled me to study and discuss the topic in a more serious and formal manner. I conducted a total of 19 interviews. During the research process, I considered that 14 interviews provided richer descriptions, were more relevant to the research issue and thus were transcribed, analysed and interpreted according to the principles of thematic analysis. This process and justification for this analysis is explained in more detail in the pertinent sections of the methods chapter. As of my results, I created four themes based on the patterns, accounts, and perceptions shared by participants. I called these results chapters: Boundaries; Grooming and Transgression; Dome of Silence; and Safety. Each of these will be discussed in detail in chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8, respectively. Briefly mentioned here, chapter 5, Boundaries, focuses on how participants think about their team dynamics and certain coach-athlete relationships. This includes forms of communication, intimate romantic relationships, and perceptions of bullying and harassment derived from these dynamics. In this chapter, I highlight unique aspects of the culture in Mexico that permeate sport and exemplify grey areas in terms of interpersonal boundaries and vulnerability for bullying and harassment. In chapter 6, Grooming and Transgression, I work closely on three cases of direct bullying and harassment. I discuss the concept of grooming as it has been used in sport abuse research and how my participants experienced it before a more acute form of transgression. Chapter 7, Dome of Silence, is about the process of speaking out and reporting instances of bullying and harassment, as well as ways of coping with it. I show features of the culture in

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Mexico and sport that make a victim of bullying and harassment less likely to have justice. In chapter 8, Safety Culture, the final empirical chapter, I focus on perceptions of safety by my participants and how these can be indicative of management efforts given to the well-being of athletes, coaches, and others who train and participate in sport at the site of my research. Chapter 9 contains a recapitulation of the main findings of this investigation, reflections on the topic and contributions to the literature, as well recommendations for future research and implications for practice. Finally, my interest in studying this problem is motivated not only by personal experiences or building theoretical academic knowledge, but also, most importantly, by a desire to contribute to the change in the working conditions of people, in this case, sport professionals. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no studies approaching bullying and harassment from a cultural and organisational perspective in semi-professional and professional sport in Jalisco, Mexico. This project thus aims to bridge this gap in knowledge.

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Chapter 2

Literature Review

Introduction

In this chapter, I bring together knowledge about bullying and harassment. I draw from the organisational psychology literature where substantive theoretical and empirical knowledge on bullying and harassment has been produced. I also draw from research that has focused specifically on sport, such as sport psychology, sport management, and related fields within sport studies and exercise science. My purpose in this chapter is to provide an up-to-date review of the ways bullying and harassment have been conceptualised, its causes, risk factors, and consequences. Another aim is to discuss and compare the research from the context of sport to non-sport contexts, highlighting knowledge gaps with the intent of enriching the conclusions that may be drawn from the data that I present in this investigation. In the beginning of this chapter, I focus on how bullying and harassment has been theorised. Subsequently, I discuss a central debate on the topic, which is what bullying and harassment are and how the phenomena should be defined. Further in the chapter, I move on to discuss the causes of bullying and harassment that have been identified in the field of organisational psychology, contrasting and comparing with sport research. In the final sections of this chapter, I explain the consequences of bullying and harassment for the individual, the organisation, and sport performance. I then provide and justify my use of the term bullying and harassment for this investigation, based on the conceptualisations done by several organisational psychologists. I conclude the chapter situating the problem in Mexico, highlighting the gap in knowledge and the need to study Mexican sport. Lastly, for this literature review, I used a variety of sources and databases including PubMed, Elsevier's database Scopus, SAGE's Journals and Wiley Online Library. I also used ResearchGate as a medium to contact researchers working on the topic and request publications not accessible through institutional credentials. Key search terms included

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combinations of the following terms: violence and sport; gender-based violence and Mexico; sport and Mexico; organisational culture; organisational culture and bullying; sport bullying; workplace aggression; harassment and sport; gender and sport. I revised publications in both English and Spanish.

Theorising Bullying and Harassment

There are different and related terms that are used in research to refer to harm-doing behaviours, such as bullying and harassment. Many of these terms have been derived from taking into account biological, organisational, and social approaches to human behaviour, as well as the different ways that researchers have sought to define harm-doing behaviours (Baillen et al, 2008; 2016; Branch, 2008; Einarsen et al, 2011; Caponecchia et al, 2020). Generally speaking, bullying and harassment are understood to be forms of aggression (Nielsen et al, 2016). Aggression is ‘any form of behaviour directed toward the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment’ (Neuman and Baron, 2005, p. 16). The typology of workplace aggression by Buss (1961, cited in Neuman and Baron, 2005, p. 20), is useful in that it separates into smaller parts aggressive behaviours. This typology has served as a basis for several studies on workplace aggression and captures forms of aggression in three dichotomies: active-passive; b) direct-indirect; and c) physical- verbal. For instance, as summarised by Nielsen et al (2016), active forms of aggression entail that the behaviour itself produces harm, while a passive form of aggression entails that the withholding of a behaviour is the cause of harm. Similarly, direct forms of aggression involve a direct harm from the aggressor or perpetrator to the target or victim, while an indirect form of aggression involves harm to the target or victim through objects they value or through assaults to other agents. Lastly, verbal forms of aggression involve words and physical forms involve overt action towards another.

Terminology: A Definitional Debate Having put forward that there is an aggression element in harm-doing behaviours, and broken down these behaviours in three dichotomies, I can compare and discuss other

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terms that are more commonly used in this kind of research topic. Harm-doing behaviours are also called ‘mobbing’; ‘emotional abuse; ‘interpersonal violence'; ‘trouble at work; ‘abusive supervision; ‘ostracism’; ‘interpersonal deviance’; ‘incivility’; ‘psychoterror’, among many other terms (Branch, 2008; Einarsen et al, 2020). However, is it generally agreed that it is the persistency of negative and harm-doing behaviours that can warrant the label of bullying or harassment (Branch, 2008; Caponecchia et al, 2020) To provide some context on the evolution of the definitional debate, in the late 1970’s, psychiatrist and anthropologist Carroll Brodsky had already described the cases of systematic mistreatment of employees in different organisational levels in a qualitative study (Einarsen et al, 2020). To this phenomenon Brodsky referred to as ‘the harassed worker’ and suggested five main types of harassment: sexual harassment; scapegoating, name-calling, physical abuse and work pressure (Einarsen et al, 2020). It was due to the sociomedical approach and socio-political climate of the 1970s, in terms of awareness to stressful and abusive work situations, that Brodsky's work had no major impact in the scientific study of bullying and harassment, as Trujillo Flores et al. (2007) note. In the 1990’s, Leymann (1996) systematically documented abuses in the workplace. He was the one who coined the term ‘mobbing’, defining it as: ‘hostile and unethical communication, which is directed in a systematic way by one or a few individuals mainly towards one individual who, due to mobbing, is pushed into a helpless and defenceless position, being held there by means of continuing mobbing activities. These actions occur on a very frequent basis (statistical definition: at least once a week) and over a long period of time (statistical definition: at least six months of duration)’ (Leymann, 1996, p. 168). Leymann (1996) explained that his use of the term ‘mobbing’ was borrowed from ethologist Konrad Lorenz’s description of animal behaviour where a single larger animal was threatened by a group of smaller animals. Supported by previous research done by Norwegian psychologist Dan Olweus, who pioneered the research of bullying in children, Leymann sought to document similar behaviours in the workplace (Trujillo Flores et al, 2007). However, he deliberately opted to discard the term bullying and use mobbing instead, arguing that ‘the connotation of bullying is physical aggression and threat’, while ‘physical violence is seldom found in mobbing behaviour at work’ (Leymann, 1996, p. 167). For Leymann, the term bullying was to be applied in schools and children behaviour and mobbing for adult and workplace behaviour (Trujillo Flores et al, 2007).

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Since this early and pioneering work on bullying and harassment, researchers have borrowed definitions, and expanded on them, aided by increased attention given to the topic. However, there is still not one clear-cut term to represent the myriads forms of aggression and abuse that individuals in organisations can experience (Branch, 2008). Einarsen et al (2011, p. 5), leading scholars on the topic, treat bullying, harassment and mobbing as interchangeable constructs to refer to the ‘systematic exhibition of aggressive behaviour at work’ and it includes ‘the perception of being systematically exposed to such mistreatment while at work’. Similar to Einarsen et al. (2011), Neuman and Baron (2005, p. 22) interpret ‘mobbing, bullying, psychological terror and emotional abuse as related constructs in that ‘they all involve attempts by one or more individuals to harm others with whom they work and are motivated to avoid such treatment’. In contrast, and following Leymann, Duffy and Sperry (2014) emphasise that there is a distinction between the term bullying and mobbing. Bullying, according to Duffy and Sperry (2014), involves an individual or group exercising power over another but without organisational co-participation. Mobbing, instead, involves members of an organisation acting together in overt or covert actions against a targeted victim (Duffy and Sperry, 2014). In one the process seems to be more interpersonal and interactional. In the other, the process seems to involve the organisation as a whole with different people from different levels of the organisation. Still, the recurrent and periodic nature of the harm-doing behaviours seem to be the general agreement among researchers, although in different countries, and research fields researchers may have inclinations towards certain terms and definitions (Branch et al, 2013). For instance, ‘bullying’ being used by Nordic and English-speaking countries; the term ‘harassment' (harcelement morale) used in French-speaking countries; the term ‘mobbing' used in the USA; and a combination of terms ‘acoso' (harassment) and ‘maltrato psicológico' (psychological maltreatment) used in Spanish-speaking countries, Einarsen et al (2011) explain. Interestingly, Leymann (1996) himself also noted cultural differences in term use, citing bullying as a term employed by English and Australian researchers and mobbing used in the USA.

Sport Terminology A similar pattern on the definitional debate occurs in sport research regarding harm-

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doing behaviours. Definitions vary depending on the legal frameworks, scope of research, the researchers position on the subject, and whether the context involves interpersonal situations or physical situations that are inherent to the practice of sport (Kirby and Demers, 2013). The problem of definitions in sport has already been discussed by leading scholar in the field of abuse in sport, Brackenridge (2001), who proposed a continuum of ‘sexual exploitation’. In this continuum, sexual discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual abuse were differentiated by whether it is the institution or organisation or an individual who commits the violence or assault. Following-up on Brackenridge (2001), Kirby and Demers (2013) discuss that the term ‘sexual exploitation’ is complex to define, yet stress that the terms we use matter as they shape how a problem is understood and eventually addressed. Interestingly, Kirby and Demers (2013, p. 142) also noted that, ‘sport is organized in different ways in different countries, making broad based solutions difficult’, which is why we still see discrepancies on definitional criteria. To cite some examples, Mountjoy and Shute (2019, p. 545) use the term ‘harassment and abuse’ to refer to ‘a range of various forms of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse’. What is more, they further explain that the terms ‘violence’ and ‘non-accidental violence’ are also used in sport in order to maintain consistency with the terms that advocacy groups such as UNICEF and Safe Sport International use. In comparison, Kavanagh (2014, p. 15), used the term ‘maltreatment’ to refer to ‘volitional acts that result in or have the potential to result in physical injuries and/or psychological harm’. This definition was based on children’s literature on violence and abuse (see Claussen and Crittenden, 1991; Crooks et al, 2007), the World Health Organisation, and the UK legislation to protect children’s rights and their basic needs, as well as those of vulnerable adults. Kerr and Stirling (2019) also used the term ‘maltreatment’, however, stated that this definition was drawn from the child development and child abuse psychology literature. Kirby and Demers (2013, p. 144), like Einarsen et al. (2011, 2020) and Neuman and Baron (2005), cite different terms and definitions that are found in sport harassment and abuse research, such as sex discrimination/prejudice; sexual assault; sexual exploitation; sexual harassment; child sexual assault; grooming; sexual ‘shakedown’ of a team; and lack of sexual consent. They do note that there is substantial overlap between these definitions and

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the experience of any of these can occur over a short or long period, by the same or different perpetrators. It is important to note that my participants were all of legal age and hence I draw from the organisational psychology literature that deals with harm-doing behaviours such as bullying and harassment, as explained in the previous section of this chapter.

Intentionality In the same scholarly discussion regarding the labels given to forms of aggression or harm-doing behaviours is the concept of intentionality. Whether this should matter or not in defining a specific construct is debated among researchers. Those such as Olweus (1993) and Neuman and Baron (2005), tend to consider intent of harm as an essential feature of the definition of bullying and harassment. In contrast, Buss (1961, cited in Einarsen et al, 2020, p. 15), objected against the notion of intent in defining aggressive behaviours stating that, ‘intent is a private event that may or may not be capable of verbalisation, may or may not be accurately reflected in a verbal statement’ and thus creating theoretical, methodological issues. Theoretically, aggression theory has sought to distinguish between accidental and intentional harm (Einarsen et al, 2020). Thus, it would make sense for some researchers to separate intentional harm-doing behaviours, such as bullying and harassment, from ‘thoughtlessness’ or single rude events. Intent could also potentially help distinguish those individuals who are legitimately innocent from wrongdoing behaviours but are misperceived to have done otherwise. However, one of the main arguments against including intentionality in the definition of bullying and harassment is that it is difficult to prove unless it is explicit (Nielsen et al, 2016). Furthermore, Einarsen et al (2020) argued that there are several challenges with the definition of intent itself, which I summarised as: 1) Defining intent of each single act (negative act); 2) Defining intent for the bullying and harassment process (plan to act over time); 3) Finding intent in will to victimise and conscious plan to harm. Additionally, socio- psychological definitions of bullying and harassment tend to be broader than legal ones, including subjective experiences and where the perception of intentionality can vary between the target and the perpetrator (Cortina and Berdahl, 2008).

Definition for this Research

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Considering that definitions are important for understanding the problem and for identifying the scale of poor conduct, for this study, I use the terms ‘bullying and harassment’ as understood by Einarsen et al (2003; 2011, 2020) to refer to manifestations of consistent hostile or aggressive behaviour that could undermine the dignity, personality, physical integrity and mental health of the athlete, as well as degrade the quality of the sport working environment of my research context. Having discussed definitional debates in the previous sections, I reiterate that, in practice, these two terms encompass several aspects of aggression and violence that could be experienced in sport environments, ranging from the psychological, the physical, the verbal, and the sexual. Einarsen et al’s (2020) definition are in line with that of other researchers in terms on the applicability of the terms bullying and harassment and is also based on a solid theoretical base from the field or organisational psychology on workplace aggression, a field that I suggest could enrich the research on abuse in sport, and which I will elaborate on later in chapter 3. Based on this applied field of psychology, I also argue that the definitions I use here suit the cohort of my investigation, who are all of legal age and whose training regimes and relationship dynamics resemble more to that of any other worker outside sport than that of child-athletes. In essence, while the phenomenon of bullying and harassment can be complex to define, since it may come in varied forms and contexts, as Einarsen et al (2011, p.4) point out, ‘at its basic level it is about the systematic mistreatment’ of individuals.

Causes of Bullying and Harassment

Bullying and harassment are understood to be multicausal and can seldom be explained by one element only (Salin, 2001; Salin and Hoel, 2011). Its causes are rooted in human biology, our need for social acceptance, education, the law, organisational norms, cultural practices and beliefs (Salin and Hoel, 2011). In this section, I summarise evidence on organisational causes that lead to bullying and harassment considering also the clear hypothesis set forth by Leymann (1996) on the link between poor work environment and experiences of bullying and harassment.

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Functional Behaviour One view of the causes of bullying and harassment is as a functional behaviour driven by the work organisation and job design (Salin and Hoel, 2011). Researchers (Tedeschi and Felson 1994; Salin, 2001; and Neuman and Baron, 2011) have pointed out that expressions of violence and aggression could be used strategically to enhance the perpetrator's own position. Knowingly to cause distress, violence and aggression may be carried out intentionally to discourage unfavoured individuals, either because they are perceived as unproductive or considered a threat to certain other individuals in a particular context (Tedeschi and Felson 1994; Salin, 2001; Griffin and O’Leary-Kelly, 2004; Neuman and Baron, 2011; Ramsay et al, 2011). The way in which a particular job is structured, or the way work is understood in an organisation may lead individuals to using bullying and harassment as a micropolitical strategy to achieve personal outcomes (Griffin, 1991; Tedeschi and Felson, 1994). For instance, individuals competing for high stakes but limited prizes, such as status and monetary gains, or career advancement may create opportunities. In this sense, researchers (Neuman, 2004; Neuman and Baron, 2011; Einarsen et al, 2011) suggest that, rather than being a form of pathological behaviour, violence and aggression have a function in social interactions. In sport, bullying and harassment can be used to make sure individuals comply with norms and goals. For example, to make sure athletes obey team rules, understand authority positions of coaches or other athletes within a team, or as a way to motivate athletes based on the belief that it pushes them to perform better and incentivise internal competition (Murphy and Waddington, 2007). A study by Kelly and Waddington (2006), highlighted how managers of professional soccer clubs used intimidation tactics as a form of managerial control. During the interviews with both professional soccer players and soccer managers, it was revealed how even there were rules of conduct, these tended to change depending on the ‘idiosyncrasies of the manager’ or the different soccer clubs (p. 150). Control mechanisms ranged from verbal and physical elements such as yelling and hitting to financial elements such as fines. Furthermore, Owusu-Skeyere and Gervis (2014), studied youth football coaching practices associated with mental toughness and reported that some coaches in the study admitted and justified using shouting and bullying as a means of developing mentally tough

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athletes. Similarly, another study by Jacobs et al (2017), provided qualitative evidence on the normalisation of emotionally abusive practices as a way to increase mental toughness in youth elite gymnastics. The interviews with both gymnastics coaches and board directors in the Netherlands, revealed that winning was strongly emphasised in the development programme of the athletes, which seemed to justify the hiring of certain coaches and the use of bullying as part of the coaching process (Jacobs et al., 2017). Along the same lines, the study by Stirling and Kerr (2013), described the effects of emotional abuse by elite athletes, and how the experience of emotional abuse had a functional element in the athlete’s sport performance. Performance decrement and decreased motivation were reported, perhaps, as expected. Yet some of the athletes in the study also reported that they needed ‘yelling’ to be pushed to the ‘next level’ among other behaviours considered to be emotional abusive (p. 95). From an organisational perspective, these insights (Kelly and Waddington, 2006; Stirling and Kerr, 2008; 2013; Owusu-Skeyere and Gervis, 2014; Jacobs et al, 2017), illuminate how abuse can be tolerated in a sport environment if it is perceived by the athlete, coaches or managers to enhance athlete performance.

Rewards Systems and Athletic Identity Reward systems in sport, for instance, often involve a winner takes all format where large amount of prize money and higher status are highly valuable and serve as important incentives (Roberts et al, 2019). There is research that highlights that the path to ‘success’ in sports is associated with certain activities and beliefs (Hoberman, 1992; Coakley, 1995; Finley and Finley, 2006; Jeckell et al, 2018). With aspirations for recognition, winning, and the potential for financial rewards, young and adult athletes feel pressured to adopt certain norms and values if they are to be serious competitors (Hoberman, 1992; Coakley, 1995; Finley and Finley, 2006; Jeckell et al, 2018). The ‘sport ethic’, a term created by Coakley (1995), refers to the behaviours and attitudes that athletes adopt to distinguish themselves from peers to achieve athletic success (Coakley, 1995; Hughes and Coakley, 1991). These behaviours and beliefs may include bullying and harassment, but also unsupervised intense physical exercise, exercise as punishment and strict dietary plans as they are perceived to grant a competitive advantage (Coakley, 1995; Waldron and Krane, 2005; Murphy and Waddington, 2007; Atkinson and

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Young, 2008; Fields et al, 2010; Lee Sinden, 2012; Tristán Rodríguez et al, 2015; Mountjoy et al, 2016). Other sport researchers (Coakley, 1995; Finley and Finley, 2006) have added that adherence to the sports ethic or ‘the culture of risk’ has to do with the importance given to athletic roles. If the individual places his or her identity in athletic roles while neglecting other social roles, then perceptions of competence within that role are more likely to affect self- esteem and motivation. The positive aspect of a strong athletic identity is that it can increase sports motivation and facilitate training and athletic competitiveness (Waldron and Krane, 2005). The less positive side is that to preserve self-esteem and success, as it is strongly connected with athletic performance, individuals may willingly engage in behaviours and practices disregarding their long-term health and that of others so as to achieve competitive advantage in the short-term (Waldron and Krane, 2005; Finley and Finley, 2006). For instance, researchers Coakley (2015) and Krumer et al. (2011), have studied the relationship between strong athletic identities and certain outcomes such as using performance-enhancing substances and have suggested that this athletic identity may lead to hazardous sports practices. Additional to a strong athletic identity, dominant notions of masculinity, social approval can reinforce risky sports practices (Waldron and Krane, 2005). In short, bullying and harassment in sport happens through a variety of mechanisms and is sustained by organisational, interpersonal, physical and cultural factors as seen in Figure 1.

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Figure 1. International Olympic Committee Conceptualisation of Harassment and Abuse in Sport (Non-Accidental Violence). Causes, mechanisms and impacts. Source: Mountjoy, M. et al. (2016) International Olympic Committee consensus statement: harassment and abuse (non-accidental violence) in sport. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 50 (17), 1019–1029.

Organisational Culture and Structures In light of the recent systemic and high-profile cases of bullying, harassment and sexual abuse in sport and other workplaces, it has been increasingly argued that the culture of organisations can facilitate bullying and harassment through shared norms and beliefs that are sustained over time (Schein, 2010; Roberts et al, 2019; Kavanagh, et al, 2020; Nite and Nauright, 2020). Organisational culture scholars and practitioners have been interested in how cultural components, such as values, norms, and beliefs develop and come into place in working contexts. It has been suggested that certain values, norms and other symbolic features, turn into unique behavioural practices based on the example and habits brought by the leaders or heads of an organisation (Schein, 2010; Phekp, 2017). Additionally, culture, has been also understood as an instrumental element for organisations to achieve goals that they intend to achieve (Allaire and Firsirotu, 1984). Thus, the way some behaviours become the norm, such as bullying and harassment to gain competitive advantage, or how certain aspects of organisations are more valued than others

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can be partly explained by the concept of culture. Cultural investigations of organisations are also helpful in revealing that people’s personalities and behaviours reflect the group’s environments that socialised them (Marshak, 2006; Schein, 2010). Therefore, a cultural perspective on organisational phenomena can provide rich information on the dynamics of behaviour of a particular context, such as performance or counterproductive behaviours. Exemplified in a sport context, certain dominant values, beliefs and norms in sport can serve as unwritten rules, such as the ‘sport ethic’, previously discussed, that maintain uncivil or hostile behaviours in sport organisations. Part of the culture of an organisation can also include more visible aspects of it such as whether codes of conduct and background checks exist or if rules are appropriately enforced (Schein, 2010; Parent and Fortier, 2018). Along the same lines, researchers (Hartill and Lang, 2015; Mountjoy, et al, 2016; Wagstaff, 2017; Parent and Fortier, 2018) note that the training and monitoring of sport staff, such as coaches or medical doctors may not be adequate in some sport organisations and should be improved. In fact, Kirby and Demers (2013) argue that poor monitoring, as well as lack of professional and pedagogical sport preparation of coaches or other training personnel may contribute to bullying and harassment of athletes because it could be difficult for sports organisations to effectively screen well-prepared personnel. It might be the norm rather than the exception that sports staff lack the proper background to operate closely with athletes. This speaks of a safety culture and possible psychosocial hazards present in sport organisations, revealing management and organisational attention and care towards individuals in sport organisations. I will discuss the lens of organisational culture in more depth in chapter 3, and the concept of safety culture in my empirical findings in chapter 8. Similar to organisational cultures, there are also structural components in sports organisations that may contribute to bullying and harassment in sport, such as the type of dynamics playing out between athletes and sport staff, derived from whether sports organisations have strong hierarchies were certain members are in more possession of decision-making power or other resources than others (Roberts et al, 2019). The nature of these hierarchies may lead to power imbalances where athletes can be the most vulnerable, as they are often the ones who compete for resources but are less involved in decision- making practices. Related to structures and hierarchical relationships, deference and uncritical

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acceptance of the knowledge and competence of coaches or other sport staff who often work closely with athletes can give them informal power to abuse without consequences (Roberts et al, 2019; Kavanagh et al, 2020). An example of this is seeing former athletes becoming coaches, under the assumption that just because they have participated in high- performance sports, they have the skills, experience and knowledge to manage teams and coach athletes. Coaches may feel entitled to dictate what they want to happen without much proof of coaching capacity, which without a proper pedagogical training on how to manage workloads, organise periods of rest, adequately motivate or follow psychosocial development of athletes, can pose vulnerabilities for abuse (Kirby and Demers, 2013). In this sense, ensuring safe sports environments is a challenge, and organisational frameworks can provide guidelines and evidence on how to monitor, evaluate and offer training (Mountjoy, et al, 2016; Wagstaff, 2017). Finally, one more viewpoint of what may cause bullying and harassment is that of retaliation and reactions to injustice. Researchers (Anderson and Bushman, 2002; Greenberg and Colquitt, 2005; Bowling and Beehr, 2006; Dupré and Barling, 2006; Barling et al., 2009) argue that violence and aggression do not develop only as a means to an end. Instead, it has been suggested that violence and aggressiveness such as bullying and harassing behaviours can be a reaction to ‘organisational justice’, perceived unethical practices and unjust treatment in organisations, or previous provocations such as an assault to individual dignity (Greenberg, 1987; Greenberg and Colquitt, 2005). In this sense, bullying and harassment can be understood as a reaction to or retaliation to an event, agent or subject. In sports, this view of bullying and harassment has been given less consideration. The data that I collected from my research interviews did not provide evidence of this kind of behaviour, and it could be a new and interesting area of potential research as to why some members of sport organisations engage in bullying and harassing behaviours.

Prevalence and Risk Factors in Sport

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In terms of prevalence studies, results vary substantially. Various qualitative and quantitative studies exist but with variation on research focus including sport types, sport performance levels, coaching behaviour, and experience of sexual harassment in sport compared to non-sport settings. Fasting (2016) explains that studies on the prevalence of sexual harassment worldwide vary between 0.4% and 92%. This is a large variation, and it does not give a clear measure of the problem. Similarly, and making a term distinction, regarding sexual abuse, Fasting (2016), cites a variation of 2% to 49% worldwide. Variation exists due to the different methodological approaches to study very similar issues. In terms of the situation of Mexican sport, the closest to a study addressing the topic of bullying and harassment in high-performance levels was conducted out by the Sports Association for Women and Health (DEMAS in Spanish) (Pereyra, 2006; El Pais, 2007). The study involved a questionnaire eliciting opinions about sexual abuse and harassment in a sample of 150 marathon runners in the country, in which it was reported that 71% percent of respondents had experienced sexual harassment and knew the perpetrator. Furthermore, in the study, 67% of respondents had identified that the coach had been the aggressor and that 92% of the incidents occurred in sporting facilities. However, the accuracy and validity of these results have not been peer reviewed. As for risk factors, Mountjoy et al. (2016) and Vertommen et al. (2016) have argued that athletes who are part of minority groups such as LGBT, athletes with disabilities or a particular non-dominant ethnic group may be at a higher risk for bullying and harassment, as well as other forms of violence in sport. Furthermore, it appears that high level of involvement and competition in sport may also be a risk factor for bullying and harassment (Parent and Fortier, 2018). Additionally, Brackenridge and Kirby (1997) suggested ‘the stage of imminent achievement’ hypothesis (SIA) as a risk factor for violence in sport, specifically, sexual abuse. The stage of imminent achievement hypothesis 'refers to the peak age with respect to performance within a particular sport' (Stirling and Kerr, 2009, p. 229). This suggests that the athlete is more vulnerable to sexual abuse when the athlete is in the process of athletic improvement, moving from national to international level, also called elite level. Brackenridge and Kirby (1997) explained that during the process of athletic improvement, the stakes are higher, just as physical and emotional pressures, which can coincide with unsafe behaviour, especially if the developmental process of puberty coincides with peak athletic

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maturation. Subsequent studies in different nations exploring the stage of imminent achievement have provided some supporting evidence (Fasting et al, 2002 in Norway; Leahy et al, 2008 in Australia; Fasting et al, 2011 in the Czech Republic, Greece, and Norway). However, there is not yet sufficient evidence about the validity of the construct, and it may well be that the risk for sexual abuse is significantly different across sports since they can show variation in age of peak performance. That is, the ‘brink of top level of success’, as Brackenridge (2001) put it, can be very different among athletes from different sports. For example, gymnasts will reach elite or peak performance levels earlier than tennis players or football players given the rules and demands of each sport. Nonetheless, the stage of imminent hypothesis is an interesting proposition worth of deeper investigation regarding the risk of sexual abuse in sport.

Popular Culture, Stereotypes, and Commodification Sport has been historically a terrain in which to express power, physical differences among men and women, sexuality and control for the body. As Hargreaves and Anderson (2014, p. 4) state, ‘sport is a distinctly gendered activity and closely aligned to the moving physical body, it’s musculature, strength, speed and artistry’. Issues surrounding the participation of women, members of certain socio-economic levels, and indigenous people in sporting activities have been well present in sport. Until this day, there are still controversies about the ideal type of athletic body, particularly in regard to female bodies as I discussed in a previous section (Kessel, 2016). In a field where bodies are trained, awarded and glorified for their ‘natural prowess’ and for pushing the apparent human limits, it is paradoxical that there are still notions about the proper masculine and feminine bodies that seem hard to vanish. Additionally, sports media are also an important social catalyst in the proliferation of gender and body stereotypes in sport (Knight and Giuliano, 2003). Because many sports events are created not only for showcasing athletes’ physical abilities but also for public entertainment, media outlets mark gender differences and their position in society by recognising, in different ways, men’s achievements compared to women (Kosofsky, 1993; Knight and Giuliano, 2003; Fuller, 2006). The greater value placed on physical strength in sport results in the favouring of men despite knowing that both men and women put similar efforts in their training and competitions (Knight and Giuliano, 2003; Hardin and Greer,

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2009). Thus, not only gender norms presented in media outlets serve as a rationalisation for the belief about the increased sporting skill of men and the seemingly less commercially popularity of women's sport (manifested in fewer sponsorships, and fewer media coverage of women's sport), but also coverage of women's sport typically alludes to their sexual and aesthetic attraction rather than their skill, compared to male athletes (Knight and Giuliano, 2003; Fuller, 2006; Hardin and Greer, 2009). In this sense, the media can be a form of authority and propagators of violence through repetition of gender norms. Furthermore, some scholars have argued that the field of high-performance sport becomes a ground for testing athletes with medical, technological and commercial innovations (Hoberman, 1992; Camporesi and McNamee, 2014). High-performance sport has changed rapidly with the developments of new technologies, which have resulted in a discourse increasingly focused on performance, predictability, productivity and efficiency (Shogan, 1999; Johns and Johns, 2000; Magdalinksi, 2009). This can be exemplified in the relatively recent and more specialised professions such as performance analysts, sport managers, sport psychologists and experts in biomechanics, etc., all with the purpose to optimise and evaluate athlete’s accomplishments (Johns and Johns, 2000; Magdalinksi, 2009). Winning-centred philosophies and their relationship with increased performance have generated concerns about the purposes of sport, under the argument that the professionalisation of sport has converted athletes to a commodity, turning its practices into exploitation and profit practices where bodies are disrupted and conceived as machines in the pursuit of success (Walsh and Giulianotti, 2006). The concept of elite sports as a commodity is important in the context of the experience of abuse because it means that somehow athletes need to govern themselves according to the current commercial and political demands of the sport which can result in the assimilation of certain practices and behaviours including bullying and harassment. In relation to the above, Shogan (1999) sharply notes that the discourses of sport performance, although they highlight the athletes as being at the centre of the sport, they are not the ones who determine the discourses of the sport. Rather it is the coaches, managers, sports scientists, sponsors and such who seem to have greater authority in determining the sporting environment and how athletes should be best conducted and train.

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This exemplifies a process of subjectification of the high-performance athlete. The continuous observation, sexualisation, commercialisation and scientific interventions on the athlete, all in the name of the ‘spirit of sport’ and ‘improved performance’ could inadvertently, be making the athletes become subjects of science and the market. Thus, making athletes also susceptible to certain practices in this environment, which may put their health and safety not entirely in their benefit and empowerment.

Power, Regimes, and Relationship with the Perpetrator Although many studies on abuse in sport have focused on the coach-athlete relationship, it is important to understand that perpetrators of bullying and harassment in sport can include athletes themselves, other sport staff, such as sports doctors, sponsors, managers, and even family members (Mountjoy and Shute, 2019). An example is former American professional tennis player Andre Agassi’s being coerced to play and win in tennis by his father (Agassi, 2010). This pressure had consequences on Agassi's well-being, tennis career, and personal life, as he stated in his autobiography (Agassi, 2010). Similarly, present Australian professional tennis player Bernard Tomic’s strained relationship with his father is another example of abusive relationships outside the coach-athlete dynamic. However, it is perhaps because of coaches’ close proximity to the athlete, on a daily basis, that the coach-athlete relationship has received greater attention when investigating abuse. The literature does provide evidence that coaches can have positive effects on athletes, in their sport, and personal development, and that the coaches’ level of preparation and involvement in young athlete’s life can help them build long-term health habits (Jowett and Cockerill, 2003; Johansson et al, 2016). Yet, in spite of the myriad of positive outcomes that effective coach-athlete interactions can provide, many studies point to coaches as the ones tending to be the most common perpetrators of violence (Gervis, and Dunn, 2004; Stirling and Kerr, 2009; Stirling and Kerr, 2013; Kavanagh, 2014; Owton, 2016; Owton and Sparkes, 2017). My own data collection contains references to abuse in the coach-athlete relationship, which I will discuss this in the empirical chapters 6 and 7. Therefore, the athlete’s relationship with the coach can be understood as a form of intimate relationship (Johansson et al, 2016). This relationship is unique due to the varied roles that a coach can have in the relationship with the athlete. A coach can be someone who solely imparts sport knowledge and training. However, at the same time, a coach can also be

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a parent figure, a hero or a romantic partner. For example, Canadian Olympic cyclist Emily Batty married her coach, just as tennis player Li Na. In other instances, as Johansson et al. (2016) and Fasting et al. (2018) explain, the coach can be the sponsor or the medium for sponsorship for the athlete. Such intimacy and interdependency between coaches and athletes entails that both agents have great influence on each other’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Thus, it is important to understand the interdependent and power dynamics between these relationships because this will determine how certain decisions within the relationships are made. I discuss further issues about coach-athlete romantic relationships and boundaries in chapter 6 of my empirical findings. An important aspect regarding power dynamics that can add to the discussion of the athletes’ relationship with their perpetrator is that of the athlete as a docile body. Drawing on ideas of philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, Pringle (2014) explains that Foucault’s influence in the domain of sport has had to do primarily with the cultural politics of gender and sex. To provide some context, Foucault (1977) questioned and reframed, from a historical and philosophical perspective, the concept of power. What made his way of thinking unique was that he made cultural struggles visible via a focus on the body, which often had to do with control, dependence, and sexuality. Foucault did not explicitly address sport in his writings. Yet, his interest on self- identity, power and focus on the body as a site for dominance and dependence provide a useful angle to explore the culture of high-performance sports and analyse which mechanisms may give rise and sustain bullying and harassment. For instance, notions of the female body of an athlete are often played out in practices such as dieting, importance in weight loss or preoccupations with being overly muscular (Pringle, 2014). Yet the domain of sport also provides opportunities to challenge these so called performed and gendered identities. Even those who fit the dominant culture such as heterosexual athletes with ‘acceptable’ bodies, can experiment with different bodies through the change of training and eating regimes, clothing, displays of aggression that sport allows but others spheres of life not so much (Shogan, 1999; Godoy-Pressland, 2016). An important Foucauldian concept is that of the panopticon (Foucault, 1977, 1982; Cole et al, 2004) a prison model in which the architectural space of the prison was designed to make the inmates believe that they were in constant surveillance. This constant

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observation by prison guards, produced a form of self-regulation from inmates. As Foucault (1977, p. 201) illustrated, the panopticon was ‘to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’. Paired with the concept of the panopticon, Foucault also coined the term ‘docile bodies’, which referred to those ‘created bodies’, those self-regulated and disciplined individuals which illustrated the ideal functions of modern power. In relation to sport, the athletic body, that of the high-performance athlete, could be a body made docile not only by the regime it follows but also by the spaces it is confined in. The athlete is normally confined to specific spaces that allow him/her to be monitored, examined and corrected, thus highly disciplined. There is always an observation of the athlete and specific movements are demanded from them according to their sports, mainly from their coaches. For example, Rinehart (1998) illustrates how the spatial structure of a swimming pool enables coaches’ constant gaze from the outside of the pool and creates a situation similar to the workings of the panopticon. Furthermore, Rinehart (1998) explains that this spatial structure, in which the swimmer is on a specific lane, timed, performing and watched, makes swimmers exercise power on themselves and easier to follow instructions. Following Rinehart’s swimming example, in a published auto-ethnography, McMahon and Thompson (2011) exemplified the ‘self-regulatory practices’ and ‘regulatory processes by others’ on their body within an Australian elite swimming culture (p. 38). More specifically, the authors show the reader the power of self-regulation in their weight management to achieve a ‘right shape’. Thus, a space or facility to perform, to be monitored or observed and then be modified or corrected is what Foucault would term a ‘regime’. In sports, being highly disciplined and docile can occur at the same time, as we can see in McMahon and Thompson (2011) auto- ethnography. It is so argued because the athletic body follows such a controlled routine that, paradoxically, becomes a malleable body, a docile body, that starts to lose individuality. The malleability or rather, the adaptability of the athletic body to different training loads and competitions can create a submissive type of state that in certain ways may be helpful in terms of sport outcomes but in others it can create vulnerabilities for abuse, violence and aggression.

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Reporting Harassment

Research consistently shows that fear of blame, disbelief, career damage, ostracism and revictimization are common reasons for targets choosing not to report bullying and harassment (Holland and Cortina, 2016). Other reasons for not reporting instances of bullying and harassment include pluralistic ignorance, the perception that the target is the only one who has experienced victimisation (Halbesleben, 2009); and legal consciousness, that is, individuals’ awareness and perceptions of their legal rights, trust in the law, and how the law applies to their case (Blackstone et al, 2009). Garret’s and Hassan’s (2019) social media study is illustrative of non-reporting reasons that many targets have. Their analysis of 12,899 out of 40,000 Tweets from the #WhyIDidntReport movement yielded eight main reasons for not reporting harassment. Garret and Hassan (2019) categorised these eight reasons as:

1. Shame; 5. Drug/Disassociation 2. Denial; 6. Lack of Information 3. Fear; 7. Protecting the Assailant 4. Hope/Helplessness 8. Young Age

In sport, part of the culture that characterises high-performance sports, such as athletes subjecting themselves to the authority of the coach; hazing (humiliating, degrading, and endangering activities in order to join a team or group); training while injured or not fully recovered; pressure to rapidly change body metrics, such as weight or muscle, contributes to define an environment that deprives athletes from having influence and agency, which create organisations blind to key problems affecting athletes (Kirby and Wintrup, 2002; Jamieson and Orr, 2009). Not much different from other contexts, incidents with bullying and harassment in sport are likely to go underreported due to several reasons. Firstly, underreporting can occur because athletes lack the knowledge of the process to report cases of bullying and harassment (Kirby et al, 2000). Secondly, besides not knowing what to do in the face of bullying and harassment, research also suggests that if athletes do report the incident, they are unlikely to be satisfied with the outcomes and sanctions posed to the perpetrator (Kirby

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et al, 2000). In line with the literature, studies from Mexico regarding reasons for not reporting harassment show similar results. For instance, Echeverría et al (2017) conducted a study to obtain descriptive data regarding experiences with bullying and harassment (acoso y hostigamiento in Spanish) of students at the Autonomous University of Yucatán, Mexico., where 2,070 undergraduate and postgraduate students from different faculties participated in a survey. Echeverría et al (2017) reported that professors and peers were the main perpetrators of harassment and that female students (undergraduate and postgraduate) suffered more instances of harassment. However, they noted that female students were more exposed to harassment considered ‘low level’ (innuendos, catcalls, unwanted touching or propositions), relative to male students who reported experiences with more ‘severe’ forms of harassment (coercion towards sexual relationships or physical violence). With regards to reporting instances of harassment, the authors noted that prejudices about those who report the harassment (victim blaming); anxiety for not being able to prove the harassment (similar to disbelief and pluralistic ignorance as noted before); distrust about lack of confidentiality when reporting; not fully understanding the harassing event (epistemic injustice); and the relationship with the perpetrator were among the reasons for not formally reporting the harassment. In chapter 7, I will discuss further these and other reasons in the context of sport in Mexico, where I present empirical findings of three cases of athletes with direct experience with bullying and harassment, their decision to speak out, and their reporting process. Similar to the previous study, Cortázar (2018) studied gender perceptions and their role in discriminatory, harassing and violent behaviours at Guadalajara University, Mexico. A survey sample of 4,288 undergraduate and postgraduate students, academic personnel (professors-researchers), and administrative staff, showed that persisting gender stereotypes affected women’s professional and academic development at the university and that female students (48%) were the group who suffered the most sexual harassment by a member of the university. Interestingly, Cortázar (2018) reported a phenomenon that I also captured with my data, albeit in a smaller scale, and which I discuss in more detail in chapter 5 and chapter 8. Cortázar (2018) found that responses to the survey question about having experienced harassment first-hand were considerably lower to the responses to the question of having

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known someone who had experienced it, concluding that harassment might be widespread at the university but respondents find it difficult to acknowledge that they have been exposed to it. Furthermore, in Mexico, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (2016) conducted the National Survey on the Dynamics of Relationships in Households (ENDIREH in Spanish). The purpose of the survey was to obtain probabilistic data from a national representative sample on violence against women in different aspects of life, such as the domestic, the workplace, among others. According to the ENDIREH survey, 66.1% of women of 15 years of age and older have experienced at least one form of violence (emotional, economic, physical, sexual, school/workplace discrimination). Sexual violence (harassment, intimidation, abuse and rape) was among the most frequently reported form of violence in the survey, with 41.3% of Mexican women declaring having experienced this form of violence. In terms of reporting violence and harassment, 11.1% of women legally reported instances of violence, and only 2% of these reports obtained a positive outcome for the target. Accordingly, this means that 9 out 10 women who suffer violence in Mexico do not formally report it and 2 out of 100 Mexican women who legally report violence have justice. The survey showed that the primary reasons why Mexican women who had experienced violence did not report it legally were because they felt no permanent impact in their lives (a possible link with disbelief and pluralistic ignorance mentioned above) and were convinced not to report. These might be partly explained by the social and political context of women in Mexico, in which they seem that they need to prove twice such instances of bullying and harassment have occurred, and thus, discouraging women to report.

Consequences and Coping with Bullying and Harassment

It is well documented that the experience of bullying and harassment can have devastating effects on the health, well-being and the performance of those who experience it (Leymann, 1990; Avina, and O’Donohue, 2002; Niedhammer, 2009; Duffy and Sperry, 2012; Kavanagh et al, 2017). Consequences for the individual that eventually impact the organisation include lessened job satisfaction and organisational commitment, which has

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been liked to greater levels of absenteeism and intention to leave the organisation (Salin, 2005; Nielsen et al, 2016). Exposure to bullying and harassment has also been found to be associated with health outcomes such as anxiety and depression; chronic fatigue; sleep disturbances; burn- out; and other psychosomatic symptoms (Nielsen et al, 2016). Related to this is De Lara’s (2016) ‘adult post-bullying syndrome’, referring to the symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder in adults from the effects of having suffered childhood bullying. Other consequences at the individual and social level include issues with trusting others, problems with socialisation and intimacy (De Lara, 2016). In parallel with the literature on workplace bullying and harassment, Mountjoy and Shute (2019) highlight that there are social, psychological, physical and organisational consequences of bullying and harassment in sport. For instance, at the organisational level, a sport organisation which inefficiently deals with cases of bullying and harassment may suffer from reputational damage and diminished public trust. Subsequently, there can be a loss of sponsorship and loss of revenue through asset depreciation (Mountjoy and Shute, 2019; see also Figure 1). Negative economic impact would, in turn, affect organisational performance in terms of reduced medal tally through lessened financial athlete support and reduced athlete commitment to the organisation. At the individual level, the consequences of bullying and harassment on the athlete include loss of self-esteem; anxiety, depression and social withdrawal; eating disorders; self- harm and suicide; burn-out, somatic illnesses and PTSD symptomatology (Mountjoy et al, 2016; Kavanagh et al, 2017; Mountjoy and Shute, 2019). This is not different from what other scholars have observed outside sports contexts, which I noted above. However, there is still more research to do on how bullying and harassment affect both in the short and in the long-term to those in sport who experience it, as there might be unique manifestations depending on the context. For instance, it would be interesting to investigate further the implications of bullying and harassment sport performance of the athlete, which may or may not suffer, as well as in their daily lives that do not involve sport (Fasting et al, 2007). This also points towards the way athletes use strategies to cope with bullying and harassment. For example, a qualitative study by Kavanagh et al (2017) showed different ways in which a sample of 12 athletes coped with what they defined as emotional abuse within a

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coach-athlete relationship. Kavanagh et al (2017) categorised the coping strategies of 12 elite athletes in the United Kingdom in three main parts: 1) Coping in the moment (e.g., attention redirection, effort increase, distraction techniques; 2) Coping over time (e.g., support seeking, dropping sport/team); and 3) Post experience (e.g., meaning making). Given that there is not a single consequence of bullying and harassment, athletes may cope with it in different ways. Knowledge about these coping mechanisms can shed light into whether some athletes me have been experiencing bullying and harassment by identifying certain displays of coping mechanisms, which may or may not have to do with their sport performance. I go back to these coping mechanisms in my empirical chapter 7, when discussing ways in which three of my females track and field participant athletes dealt with the stress and pain of the experience and reporting bullying and harassment.

Research Gaps: Mexico

Globally, it is estimated that one in three women experience sexual harassment (O’Neil et al., 2018), and in sport, global patterns of abuse are clear now. To cite a few studies to illustrate this global pattern: Fasting et al. (2002) in Norway; Fasting et al. (2011) in Czech Republic and Greece; Kirby et al. (2008) in Canada; Leahy et al. (2008) in Australia; Kavanagh (2014) in the UK; Kavanagh et al. (2017) in the UK; Parent et al. (2016) in Canada; Vertommen et al. (2015, 2018) in Belgium and Netherlands; Jeckell et al. (2018) in the USA; Yabe et al. (2018) in Japan; Timpka et al. (2019) in Sweden; Cetin and Hacısoftaoğlu (2020) in Turkey; Ohlert et al. (2020) covering Germany, Netherlands and Belgium; and Fisher and Anders (2020) in the USA. As it can be appreciated, the trend shows that the majority of these studies come from Anglo-speaking or European countries. This trend reveals that bullying and harassment and other forms of violence for athletes in Mexican sport is still an invisible component of their everyday lives. Very little has been talked about the subject, academically and publicly, in the country, and the patterns of systemic violence around the world lead us to think Mexico is also likely to present similar forms of abuse in sport. My work here is to study an unknown region and to add data to the global and systemic patterns of abuse in sport.

Statistical Data Gaps in Mexico

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As highlighted in an earlier section, in Mexico, the ENDIREH (2016) survey showed that 66.1% of women over the age of 15 reported having suffered at least one incident of violence (emotional, physical, economic, sexual, etc.). Emotional violence had the greatest reported percentage (49%), followed by sexual violence (41.3%) and physical violence (34%). In the context of the workplace, the survey showed that 16.1% of women have experienced some form of gender-based violence. Breaking down these forms of violence, 10.7% of women reported being sexually harassed; 9.5% of women reported experiencing violence because of their gender; and 4.9% of women reported being victims of sexual coercion. Moreover, between 52% and 80% of women reported that the perpetrator of abuse was in a hierarchical relationship with them. In terms of sport abuse in Mexico, I could not find a similar survey addressing sport. The ENDIREH (2016) survey did contemplate gender-based violence on ‘community’ activities that may or may not involve sport but reported nothing specific regarding sporting practices. That is, the survey did not report findings from a sport category at all. Without being more specific about it, it is difficult to assess whether violence in Mexican sport exists or not, or if it even has been measured in some other ways. Moreover, another survey with the same purposes conducted specifically in the state of Jalisco (ENDIREH, 2011), had two main sections, the domestic and the public. Of particular interest was the public sphere which covered violence suffered in institutional spaces, such as student life and academic environments, and violence experienced in workplaces (non- sport) spaces. Interestingly, and similar to the national survey of 2016, there was no mention of sport in any of its forms (e.g., leisure, organised or elite). That there is no mention at all of organised sport, or sport in any form, in these two surveys which are specifically intended to measure gender-based violence, reveals the limited work and priority given to sport in the country and thus hidden cases of violence. Therefore, without specific categories that include sport in different levels, it is very difficult to know to what extent this national survey, although useful for some contexts, is for high-performance sport and for Mexican sport organisations. It is imperative then to maintain a constant critical stance towards the myriad ways, subtle or direct, through which bullying, and harassment occur. This would entail, when attempting to quantify gender-based

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violence, paying attention to the constructs or variables researchers include or do not include. The variations in prevalence studies compilated by Fasting (2016) demonstrate that researching the prevalence of bullying and harassment of athletes is complex. This is in part due to the different methods, samples, and theoretical approaches employed in these studies. One example of the limitations when conducting research on bullying and harassment is the nature of the topic. Certain individuals may not always be willing to share their stories or to allow researchers to obtain data from a sport organisation. Additionally, the sport schedules of athletes and other sport members, which involve constant periods of traveling nationally and internationally may hinder their availability to participate in studies about bullying and harassment. Thus, sport being a microcosm of the larger society, there is a need to examine, critically, this environment to understand different faces of violence and devise measures to protect athletes (Kavanagh et al, 2020). Sport organisations, along with sports consultants, should have clear procedures to address bullying and harassment, spaces to discuss it safely, financial plans to support victims/perpetrator, the organisation and accountability (Kerr and Stirling, 2019; Kavanagh et al, 2020). In chapter 7, I discuss this further by presenting the difficulties that three of my participants experienced when speaking out about their bullying and harassment.

Theoretical Gaps: Organisational Psychology Applied to Sport Sport, particularly professional and semi-professional, are areas important to analyse through the lens of organisational psychology due to two primary reasons. Firstly, professional and semi-professional sports are dependent on organisational processes. Sports and its associated organisations, in various respects, have similar types of structures and problems as many other non-sport organisations (Hanin, 1993; Taylor et al, 2008, Söderman, and Dolles, 2013; Wagstaff, 2017). Furthermore, awareness to the social and economic environment in which these types of high-performance sports take place has gradually increased over the last three decades (Lussier and Kimball, 2014; Wagstaff and Larner, 2015). This awareness means that modern sports are indeed complex organisations which interact and relate to other organisational bodies both nationally and internationally.

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Secondly, contemporary professional and semi-professional sport involves other actors in addition to high-performance athletes or coaches. This means that those individuals working directly or indirectly with athletes such as coaches, dieticians or sports psychologists are increasingly influenced by managers, federations, economic and political forces and form part of the creation of specific organisational dynamics (Hanin, 1993; Wagstaff and Fletcher, 2009; Wagstaff, 2012). In relation to the study of bullying and harassment in sport, there is still a need for a clearer common framework that helps researchers investigate the problem with more theoretical coherence. I argue that the field of sport would benefit substantially from incorporating the work of scholars in the field of organisational or occupational psychology that studies specifically workplace bullying and harassment. This scholarly body of work already has a substantive empirical and theoretical base from which to draw from that is applicable to sport contexts where professionalism exists. At present, the literature on abuse and harassment in sport is predominantly based on child abuse research, yet many elite athletes compete under an implied professional or semi-professional status, creating sport organisations a working place for athletes both adults and children. Therefore, by applying an organisational lens to issues that affect the safety, productivity and work environment of those who participate in organised sport, and in this case, legally adult athletes, I see my work contributing mostly to the body of scholarship that deals with issues of systematic abuse in organised contexts, bridging foundations from organisational and social psychology with sport research.

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Chapter 3

Conceptual Framework

Introduction

In this chapter, I introduce the lens of my research which is called organisational culture. I chose an organisational culture framework to guide this investigation based on the numerous studies and accounts on organisational tolerance for abuse through the conformity to dominant values (e.g., see for non-sport environments, Leymann 1996; Baillien et al, 2008, 2009; Schein, 2010; Einarsen et al, 2011; Salin and Hoel, 2011; Duffy and Sperry, 2012; 2014, Pheko, 2017, among others. In sport environments, see Kelly and Waddington, 2006; Stirling and Kerr 2008; Alexander et al, 2011; Stirling and Kerr, 2013; Owusu-Skeyere and Gervis, 2014; Coker-Cranney et al 2018; Jacobs et al, 2017; Parent and Fortier, 2018, among others). Adopting a research approach using this organisational lens allows the learning and unpacking of patterns of behaviour, and meanings around work environments (e.g., elite sport) which influence desired or undesired organisational behaviour. Therefore, my approach in this chapter is to treat the concept of organisational culture as a lens to understand my study participants and their behaviour in the sport organisation of my research, and what occurs in it in relation to abuse. I begin this chapter reviewing the concept of culture, its academic roots and how the concept made its way to organisational research and potential applications to the sport field. I focus next on explaining that views on culture are multifocal in the field of organisational psychology and other social disciplines (Allaire and Firsirotu, 1984; Schein, 2010; Schneider et al, 2013). This is to be able to fit the different expressions that culture can take. Nonetheless, culture lenses can be broadly distinguished into two categories, functionalist and interpretivist. In particular, I discuss how the contribution of psychologist Edgar Schein (2010) toward organisational culture is especially useful as a theoretical framework. Finally, I explain

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how the latter view on culture, the interpretivist approach, is applied in the context of my research, discussing how culture can be studied and analysed in relation to bullying and harassment in sport.

Understanding Organisational Culture: What is it?

The concept of organisational culture has its roots in anthropology, a field that has traditionally used cultural constructs and analysis of culture to understand human societies, drawing also from social and cognitive psychology, as well as sociology (Allaire and Firsirotu, 1984; Schein, 2010; Schneider et al, 2013). Culture, broadly explained, is composed of norms, values, behaviours in the form of rituals or routines, language, and physical spaces. Culture is also a medium of knowledge creation that aids us in understanding human reality. Additionally, culture is re-created in social situations and is a powerful force in producing social and organisational phenomena (Allaire and Firsirotu, 1984; Schein, 2010). Already in the 1940’s, scholars were interested in cultural aspects of organisations, arguing that it influenced social relations, and that these affected productivity and effectiveness (Ehrhart et al, 2014). The set of values, beliefs, traditions, language and norms that make up organisational cultures guide member’s behaviours in many ways and in conscious and unconscious ways. For instance, people from different occupations not only need to have the skills to do their jobs, but they also tend to adopt the values and follow norms that define those occupations, as well as their individual identities, such as ‘being’ an athlete, an academic, a medical doctor and so on (Jex and Britt, 2005; Keyton, 2005; Schein, 2010). Using athletes as an example, those forming part of an Olympic team in the USA will interrelate with each other, and speak in particular ways that represent their context, compared to Olympic athletes from the UK, Mexico or other places in Latin America. The organisations athletes represent may have formal rules, policies and structures that may share similarities because they are involved in sport matters and goals. Yet, the informal and expressive side of their interactions will tend to reveal and create values, identities, beliefs, norms and group interactions unique to each of those Olympic teams and their environment. Likewise, the ways in which the quality of decisions tend to take place within an organisational context (e.g., sport organisations), or the ways in which leaders or senior members approach their work positions are influenced by culture.

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What is more, culture also influences members of an organisation, and particularly important to this investigation, in the way meanings, practices and interpretations are given to work and safety, which translate into people’s actions toward prevention and risks (Guldenmund, 2016). This is something that I will be discussing more in my empirical chapter 8 on safety. Having introduced the concept of culture, now I highlight different perspectives in the way it is understood when applying it to the study of organisational phenomena. Researchers and practitioners have applied different constructs of culture in their academic work and applied in organisations. The organisational behaviour literature suggests two main approaches to culture in organisations. One is a managerialist view and the other is a critical view of culture. The managerialist view is usually interested in understanding how culture is linked to certain outcomes such as effectiveness and productivity (Ehrhart et al, 2014). In this sense, the set of beliefs, values, rules and behaviours are thought to serve a function, being easily categorised, viewed as variables and manipulated by management (Guldenmund, 2016). As Ehrhart et al (2014) explain, this approach to understanding organisational cultures is more of a technical interest that have as a goal identifying causal relationships which could be controlled according to desired organisational interests. In contrast, a critical view of organisational culture is interested in ‘shared schemas’, that is, the set of beliefs, values, rules and norms that grow out of an interplay between individuals in the organisation (Alvesson, 2002). As such, the interest of researchers is of understanding and describing what organisations mean to people including ways in which organisations limit or engage individual autonomy, for instance. Ehrhart et al (2014) discuss that from this cultural perspective symbolism, experience and meaning making take a central role as researchers attempt to understand stories, forms of communication, rituals and other symbolic features that can be found in organisations. This more subjective, critical view of culture then means that cultural attributes are not as easily identified and categorised, neither is their change. A change in organisational culture would require questioning deep rooted assumptions about the role of work, about the purpose of organisations/institutions, as well as human interactions, realisation which often takes time, resocialisation and other resources. The subjective and critical view of organisational culture is the one I follow for this research to explore bullying and harassment in a sport organisation in Jalisco. The information that I collected through my qualitative interviews, I see it as a representation of the real world of my participants in their sport organisation in Jalisco, Mexico, rather than attributes that are in need of fixing. In the sections ahead, I will explain further the model of organisational culture that I apply here, which is

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Schein’s (2010) three-level model of culture.

Methods for Studying Organisational Culture Traditionally, in the field of organisational psychology, the choice of methods to study organisations relied heavily on quantitative approaches. The convention was to emphasise organisational performance with metrics, and similar approaches applied to the study of culture as a functional variable as discussed above (Coyler, 2000; Hoeber and Frisby, 2001; Wagstaff, 2017). This is still the case, however, researchers that propose qualitative approaches to study culture do so under the presumption that organisations are cultures and have distinctive features worth of investigation. This contrasts those researchers who view organisations as having cultures and that tend to rely on more quantitative approaches. Notwithstanding the positivist paradigm being dominant in the study of organisations, qualitative approaches study of culture in organisations was particularly important in the early stages of this field of study because it introduced organisational researchers to methods and concepts essential for the study of human behaviour that had not previously been considered (Schneider and Barbera, 2014). This epistemological approach led organisations to gradually adopt a more ‘humane’ way to look at behaviour, performance and the people in organisations (Schneider and Barbera, 2014). As a result, well-being and health have also been emphasised, under the argument that humans are not for production purposes or commodities only. This understanding of organisations as places that affect individuals and vice versa can also be applied to sport contexts. Sports organisations are places where individuals work and develop their careers, where they contribute to a common goal. Placing our focus on athletes in particular, one can also argue that athletes are not for sponsorship, entertainment or political purposes only. The concept of culture thus directs attention to organisations as settings that matter to people because of the experiences they have in these settings, and how organisations attend to these issues (Schneider and Barbera, 2014). Furthermore, as Fisher and Anders (2020, p.130) explain, athletes are embedded in different power relations in sport environments and relationships that ‘advantage some selves while disadvantaging others’. Using research approaches that demand ‘culturally reflexive work to explore locally pressing issues’, which seek to critique dominant ideologies and taken-for-granted sport identities are necessary to address issues such as systemic gendered-violence or sexual exploitation in sport. Qualitative work focused on emancipation and justice is what Fisher and Anders (2020)

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suggest when studying issues of abuse in sport, for instance. This view of qualitative research is also in line with what Ehrhart et al (2014) discusses about researchers focusing on unique elements of organisations and individual experiences in them, as opposed to universal elements. The study of organisational culture can be argued to have become a field of its own and can be linked to different and broader cultural issues. While is difficult to be precise when organisational culture became a field of study, it can be said that it has been a gradual and steady process with the contributions of different authors interested in organisational phenomena. There are scholars who specifically focus their research on organisational cultures, within overlapping fields such as business studies or industrial relations or organisational psychology or business anthropology, and more recently, organisational sport psychology, for example (Wagstaff and Fletcher, 2009; Wagstaff, 2017; 2019a; 2019b). As pointed out earlier, since the 1940’s there were researchers referring in some way or another to cultures or ‘traditions’ in organisations, and with the passing of time this interest was consolidated into a more delineated field of study. There is now a wealth of literature applying the concept of culture in relation to organisational successes, effectiveness and productivity, as discussed previously (Keith and Frese, 2011, Ehrhart, 2014) and to how organisations, through their shared norms and values solve organisational problems, including violence and aggression (Schein, 2010; 2018; Einarsen et al, 2011). Similarly, an organisational culture lens in the context of sport can be applied to investigate not only organisational success, leadership or problem-solving, but also conflicts and issues such as bullying and harassment. I have discussed in chapter 2 that the problem of bullying and harassment has to do with interpersonal dynamics, yet those dynamics develop and evolve within a particular environment. Applying this further to the Mexican culture and the state of Jalisco, how this particular sport environment is created will depend on an aggregate of factors at the individual, managerial and cultural levels. Conceptualising the different layers that play a role in these human interactions can illuminate further how bullying and harassment can exist in Mexico, in the sport organisation of my research, and serve us to recommend changes that can shape Mexican sport environments, as well as athletes’ identities, well-being and performance.

Schein’s Three-Level Model of Organisational Culture

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To understand culture, Schein (2010, p. 18) defines it as: ‘a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solves its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems’. In short, Schein (2010) seems to define culture as an adaptation mechanism. That is, culture, is passed on because it is useful for a group unit irrespective of its size. Furthermore, there must be a range of observable events of group dynamics, habits of thinking or linguistic paradigms, as well as broad ideological principles guiding people’s actions (Alvesson, 2000). In order to call something a culture, it has to show ‘structural stability’. By structural stability it is meant that culture shows the quality of remaining unchanged over time, and that it must be shared. Culture then is something that ‘survives’, and this applies when defining a group, community or organisation. In other words, being part of a culture implies stable deep assumptions regarding truth, reality, human nature, and human relationships (Ehrhart, and Raver, 2014). Thus, being part of a culture would mean that members of that culture would see or experience things in a similar way as the others because there is a shared understanding of what things mean in that culture. The unique contribution of Schein to the use of the culture construct is its application to organisations in order to better understand how organisations function (Schein, 1996). For Schein, the abstraction of culture applies beyond ethnic or religious groups and culture is as important in organisations as other forms of measures of organisational performance (Schein, 1985). Essentially, Schein (1988) argued that the study of culture does not have to apply to societies, religious groups or ethnicities, commonly studied by anthropologists. Cultures, that is, what people do, how they think and what drives these cognitions and behaviours (e.g., norms, values, symbolic meanings) are also transferable to organisations. Organisations then can have and display specific values and assumptions that work as a mechanism to cope with challenges, and as a force to accomplish goals. Translating this to sport means that cultural values, symbolic displays and assumptions exist in sport organisations and they influence sport members too. These values, symbolic meanings and socialisation processes will be clear in on chapter 8 about safety culture in the site of research. Furthermore, culture in organisations can also vary in strength and this has potential

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implications on performance and social relationships. Ashkanasy and Jackson (2001) explain that an organisation can have a strong culture if there is a high degree of consistency in the shared values, norms and behaviours. The strength of an organisational culture can depend on several factors, such as the length of time the organisation has existed for, the beliefs of group leaders or founders, the learning and socialisation mechanisms, and the intensity of learning experiences. In sport, the longer a team has a shared history with its members, the more likely it is to have a strong team culture. This will be appreciated in chapter 5 with the forms of interactions and forms of communication among members of the track and field team. In contrast, if in a sport team there are members who are frequently changing or leaving, the group’s cohesion and history will be less strong. For example, if a running team shares the same intensity of experiences, such as having an ice bath at 5am, running long- distances with or without timed water breaks or having accomplished something important in what seemed a tough year, then the culture of that group is likely to be strong due to the intensity of the shared experiences among members. Schein (2010) has also discussed that cultures can exist in hierarchies depending on their size. He classifies culture on the basis of size in four groups: There is the macro-culture, the organisational culture, the subculture and the microculture. All of these have a role in the functioning of an organisation. The macro-culture refers to cultures at a global level such as nations, ethnic and religious groups, and even occupations that are broad enough and formally recognised worldwide such as law, medicine, engineering, or academia (Schein, 2010). Organisational culture refers to the culture of governmental, public, non-profit, and private organisations. Subculture refers to group units within organisations, they could include certain occupational groups or groups such as teams in sports. And microcultures refer to groups within or outside organisations that can be integrated in one way or another to occupational groups or teams, such as a surgical team or a triathlon team. Schein has conceptualised the analysis of culture in three levels, and which I will exemplify further in the sections ahead. The three levels of culture are: artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and underlying assumptions. The first level, artifacts, has to do with what is easily observed, perceived, and felt in a social unit as seen in Figure 2. The second level is espoused beliefs and values, which has to do with ideologies, goals and how values become unconscious assumptions. In this level, observed aspects of a culture are not as readily available as in the first level.

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Finally, the third level of culture is basic underlying assumptions, which involves the unconscious and taken-for-granted assumptions. This level involves those beliefs and values that eventually determine the way social units will think, perceive and behave. In what follows, I elaborate more on these three levels of culture and how to study them in the context of sport of my research.

Figure 2. Schein’s Three levels of Culture. Source: Hatch and Cunlife’s (2013, p.168) adaptation of Schein’s culture model (1985, p.14).

Finally, rather than giving us something prescriptive, Schein’s (1985; 2010) conceptualisation of the levels of an organisational culture helps us examine how certain organisational issues may be occurring or which aspects of an organisation, as they pertain to people, may need greater attention based on deep rooted assumptions of how things are or must be done. Thus, this lens of organisational culture can be applied to sports organisations and guide what I wanted to explore regarding bullying and harassment of female track and field athletes in Jalisco, Mexico. In the following sections, I provide an expanded explanation of how this works.

Three Levels of Culture: Artifacts, Espoused Beliefs and Values, and Underlying Assumptions In Schein’s (1985; 2010) organisational culture model, the artifacts are the visible organisational structures and processes. The artifacts of an organisation are visible to outsiders. Examples of artifacts include working spaces such as offices and the way they are arranged, the building’s architecture, or facilities as in sport organisations. Normative behaviour such as policy documents found on an organisation’s website, codes of conduct, videos or ‘mission statements’ also constitute the artifacts of an organisation. Interpersonal relations such as the way people greet each other, what they wear for work, what they celebrate, what they fear and the stories that are

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normally shared are also part of the artifacts of an organisation (Ehrhart, and Raver, 2014). All of these examples are observable, felt and perceived as is seen in chapter 8 on safety culture. However, because they are easily noticeable does not mean that culture is revealed. Schein (2010) refers to these observables as hard to decipher because even though they are readily available to newcomers or outsiders, they can, at the same time, be ambiguous markers of a culture since very different underlying values and assumptions might create them. An analogy is that of the iceberg. At the top of the mass are the visible indicators of a culture. But underneath is a bigger, invisible mass that holds all the ingrained cultural assumptions that are difficult to get to and change. Therefore, we need to study the mass underneath that iceberg to get a good sense of what is happening in a specific place. Schein also argues that culture is not always easy to see, and that we cannot always rely on overt behaviours, the artifacts. Therefore, studying intangible aspects such as ‘unwritten rules’, stories, the way language is used and so on, gives insight into the formality or informality of group dynamics, as well as group beliefs and assumptions. What is more, going past the artifacts is important to consider in the context of this research, because due to the potential sensitive nature of the topic for both athletes, coaches and the sport organisation, specific bullying and harassing behaviours may not be easily observable. Espoused beliefs and values consist of conscious beliefs of what is important or what ought to be of value. This level of culture includes the reasons why people in social units do things and why they are driven to certain ways of behaving (Schein, 2010). For example, in sport, there is something called the sport ethos, which refers to a ‘just do it’ and ‘whatever it takes to win’ approach to training and competitions (Coakley, 1995). These are espoused values and beliefs that drive how athletes act around competitions and training with others and also the way they treat their own bodies. Perceptions towards winning as those described have been shown to place athletes and others at risk of doping, playing with injuries and using aggression to take advantage (Waldron and Krane, 2005). Because those espouses beliefs and values result in a behavioural outcome (e.g., winning), they are socially validated within the sport environment. As Schein (2010) observes, the espoused beliefs and values are confirmed by the social unit —athletes, coaches, organisation—continuing to recreate social experiences. These espoused beliefs and values are difficult to test as they are not as easy to observe as artifacts, except through the examination of consensus. This is when one does not rely so much on observation but on interviewing key informants, searching for narratives, opinions and stories.

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The last and third level of culture under Schein’s conceptualisation is basic underlying assumptions. By basic underlying assumptions it is meant that within a social unit or group there is an unquestionable consensus about certain beliefs, norms and values. These, Schein (2010) argues, have little variation within groups but are powerful forces. Godwyn and Hoffer Gittell (2012) echo Schein’s third level of culture by explaining that consensus, or those aspects that are strongly held in a social unit or group result from repetition, even in the face of pressures to change. Culture can also affect power relationships by influencing who has legitimate power because culture enables a process of beliefs of what is conceivable and what is not within social units. Schein (2010) explains that what is strongly believed within a group will also represent what is inconceivable for others to do in that group. This process of legitimation, power and beliefs can be seen in non- verbal signs as in rituals or deference gestures, and in verbal signs as in forms of language use and physical demonstrations or demeanour. Applying this reasoning to sport, for instance, it would mean that if in a sports team, the consensus is that the coach has maximum authority instead of the athletes and is the one who dictates all matters related to the athletes and the team, then according to Schein (2010), team dynamics would revolve around the coaches’ leadership, which implies the use of power. Athletes would find it inconceivable to attempt to gain more authority than the coach, for doing so would disturb the consensus and team dynamics. These are the implicit assumptions that guide behaviour and are usually non-confrontable and non-debatable, and thus difficult to change.

Organisational Culture: Its Application in Sport

In the field of sport, scholars have increasingly emphasised the need to study the organisational contexts in which athletes operate to better address their needs, and those of sport (Fletcher and Wagstaff, 2009; Maitland et al, 2015). This focus has been steadily growing over the last ten years with the intent of increasing protection and support to sport members such as athletes and other sport employees, including the ethical obligation and responsibility of providing performance environments that facilitate safe and thriving relationships (Wagstaff, 2019). Regarding the study of culture in sport organisations, there is a growing body of research, albeit smaller than in non-sport research contexts, focused on the impact of organisational culture on managerial and leadership practices (Fletcher and Arnold, 2011), as well as on the unique values,

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attributes and symbols that sport teams display in relation to the endurance of high-performance (Cruickshank and Collins, 2013; Skille and Chroni, 2018). However, while an increased body of knowledge, merging sport psychology and organisational psychology, has been produced to better understand the day-to-day workings and demands of sport members such as athletes, coaches, managers and staff, the extent of the impact of these studies in organisational functioning and change remains unclear. One criticism comes from Wagstaff (2019), who argues that organisations may be failing to make organisational changes due to the chaotic and complex nature of sport systems which still employ performance outcomes as the main measures of success, prioritising less the welfare, duty of care and ethical behaviours of organisational members (Gray-Thomson, 2017). The research practices of researchers and practitioners have also been a point of criticism. McDougall et al. (2019) pointed out that researchers have relied on organisational cultural constructs to study team cultures without delineating properly the level of cultural analysis or the extent that those analyses apply to the broader sport organisational culture. Furthermore, the concept of culture can also be used lightly by some researchers when attempting to prescribe a singular cultural definition that explains all organisational phenomena, with the risk of oversimplifying the concept, especially when applied to managerial or performance discourses (McDougall et al, 2019). This criticism is in some respects in line with Schein’s (1988) argumentation towards exploring culture in a qualitative manner, rather than measuring it quantitatively. Schein (1988) made the case for studying organisational functioning in an intersubjective manner with concrete observations of real behaviours to make sense of key components and values of working environments, which quantitative measures can miss. While it is true that the concept of culture can become an ambiguous or too abstract of a definition, treating the concept as a variable, operationalised, measured, and easily changeable does not make it easier to discuss it scientifically. Culture as intersubjective, in which individuals give meanings to their experiences around their work activity and behave according to perceived norms, values, or rituals (Keyton, 2005; Álvarez, 2006; Steyaert et al, 2016) can also be scientifically discussed, and perhaps provide more precise information of organisational reality and work identity of the members that comprise an organisation.

Organisational Culture and Work Environment

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Interestingly, Leymann (1990, 1996), mentioned in the literature review (chapter 2), an early researcher of bullying and harassment, proposed that instead of a character flaw, bullying and harassment in the workforce, which he called ‘mobbing’, resulted from environments that were prone to abuses of individuals and worker’s rights. Abusive environments meant that factors, such as deficiencies in leadership practices (authoritarian, or lax), deficiencies in work-design (inadequate workloads), the target’s position (exposed, vulnerable or peculiar), and deficiencies in conflict management (low departmental morale) led to bullying and harassment in the workforce. An example of a work environment that may tend to facilitate abuse will be illustrated in chapter 8 on Safety Culture. More recently, other organisational psychologists and researchers (Baillien et al, 2008, 2009; Einarsen et al, 2011; Salin and Hoel, 2011; Duffy and Sperry, 2012) have provided more evidence for the relationship between perceptions of work environments, role conflicts and the experience of bullying and harassment (Raver and Gelfand, 2005; Agervold, 2009; Skogstad et al, 2011; Baillien et al, 2016; Pheko, 2017). This is an important research contrast between non-sport and sports contexts where researchers have more widely discussed the culture of organisations as a reflection of work environments which can influence productive or counterproductive behaviours (Schein, 1984, 2010; Einarsen et al, 2011; Ashkanasy and Hartel, 2014; Nielsen et al, 2016). This means that bullying and harassment will likely be prevalent in an organisation if organisational members such as athletes, coaches, managers, sport doctors, etc., perceive to have the support of others (whether direct or indirect) or if they feel that the behaviour is a normal aspect of the organisational life (Nielsen et al, 2016). Equally important are the socialisation processes that take place in organisations (Schein, 2010). This is where new organisational members can learn and adopt behaviours and norms that can be destructive or harmful. In the socialisation process, traditions are passed on that reinforce dominance positions of certain groups or individuals (Schein, 2010). In sport, for instance, Jamieson and Orr (2009) explain that hostility and aggression in contact sports is not necessarily directly linked to the athletes, but to the identification of team norms. They suggest that team identity and athletes’ relationship with the team may play a more significant role in the display of hostility and aggression. An example of socialisation and learning processes in sport is the sport ethos, which can be a double-edged sword in terms of achieving success and risk of harm. Practicing bodily and mental control for the mastery of a specific skill is part of the process for athletic success and is usually appreciated by many high-performance athletes. However, activities also implicit in this process can

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pose serious health risks, such as unsupervised intense physical exercise or exercise as punishment, strict dietary plans or hazing rituals that can be overlooked and thought of as required process within the sport culture (Atkinson and Young, 2008; Coakley, 1995; Lee Sinden, 2012; Waldron, 2009; Jeckell et al, 2018; Kavanagh et al, 2020). Coker-Cranney et al (2017) pointed out in a study of collegiate wrestlers in the USA the way that conformity to the sport ethos can lead to health compromising behaviours. It was reported to be a characteristic of wrestlers to engage in unhealthy weight loss practices to achieve a competitive advantage, even when there are safer methods for weight management and increase performance. More alarmingly is that adopting these behaviours (losing weight in a short period of time, ‘putting in the extra hours’, increasing muscle mass quickly or playing with injuries) is usually praised by some coaches and parents, sponsors, stakeholders, the media and even fans. In another study, Lee Sinden (2013), explored the relationship between emotional rules in the context of elite rowing and the decision of rowers to ignore their health. It was argued that in high- performance sports there is a homogenisation of emotions which results in athletes dissociating their thoughts and feelings, ‘suppressing concerns about pain, health and training intensity’ (p. 615). Similarly, Barker-Ruchti and Tinning (2010) illustrated the suppression of pain by describing how female athletes in artistic gymnastics become used to endure pain from injury and continue with their training in spite of it.

Organisational Culture, Gender, and Hypermasculine Environments Another socialisation and cultural process that affect athlete experience of sport are expected gendered behaviours. Authors have highlighted that gender is a risk factor for bullying and harassment in sports (Alexander et al, 2011; Vertommen et al, 2016), suggesting that bullying and harassment based on gender may arise in sports set in a hypermasculine environment. In such an environment, the use of sexist or vulgar language towards a gender and evaluation of the sports performance based on ‘masculine' notions of athletic success can be commonplace (Kosofsky, 1993; Brackenridge, 2002; Appleby and Foster, 2013; Howe, 2015). For instance, on chapter 5, I elaborate on the distinctive ways of using ‘albures’, a Mexican term and behaviour, and how this figure of speech play out in the blurring of boundaries. For short, albures play a part in the blurring of boundaries because this form of

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communication at its core includes sexual tones that can reinforce stereotypes related to gender, class or ethnicity, and thus reproduce symbolic violence. Along the same lines, the mere inclination of a girl or woman towards the practice of a sport considered ‘masculine’ such as football or rugby, or simply any sport in some contexts, may give rise to doubts about her femininity and sexuality; a similar case occurring to men choosing sporting activities considered more ‘feminine’, such as ballet or skating (Brackenridge et al, 2007; Vidiella Pagés, 2007; Salvatore and Marecek, 2010; Howe, 2015). Athletes, then, are expected to represent a heterosexual aura on and off the field and transgressions to this heterosexual and gendered narratives may result in indifference, opposition and violence (Woodward, 2009; Mountjoy et al, 2016). This supports what Mountjoy et al. (2016) and Parent and Fortier (2018) highlight, which is that athletes competing at the elite or professional level (including young athletes) who are disabled, and LGBT are at higher risk of bullying and harassment by non-athletes and other athletes as well. Interestingly, feminist writing on gender and sport highlight that sport is a social institution characterised by sex differentiation (Brackenridge, 2002; Appleby and Foster; 2013), and aggression or violence towards athletes could be a form to maintain a social order (hierarchical standing of men over women, and white over non-white ethnicities, for example). It is clear then that gender and sex are fundamental components of sports. Distinctions based on gender and sex in sports are based on statistical physiological differences where different levels of performance in sport might be achieved by the sexes (Scraton and Flintoff, 2002). However, the repetition of gendered acts, propelled by organisational structures and cultural expectations (whether unconscious or deliberate), have various consequences on athletes. It can discourage them to partake in sports, and even discourage them to decrease effort on behalf of the participant out of fear of discrimination or due to the impact of discrimination or violence (Scraton and Flintoff, 2002; Brackenridge et al, 2007; Vidiella Pagés, 2007; Appleby and Foster; 2013; Ántunez, n.d). Through this mechanism, socially imposed norms restrict athletes’ abilities. If left unquestioned, these norms maintain a vicious cycle of exclusion, eventually giving the impression that some groups, such as women, are indeed less physically capable than other groups such as men as vulnerable to violations (Bolin, 2012; Howe; 2015). Not surprisingly, gender is one among various factors (e.g., religion, ethnicity and socioeconomic status) that

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influences whether individuals take up a sport (Scratton and Flintoff, 2002; Moreno, 2011; Appleby and Foster, 2013). Finally, as Woodward (2009) explains, because sports is a corporeal activity, it invites the transformation of the body. Due to these body transformations through ‘dedicated training and eating regimes’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 161), boundaries of the human body and identities can be interrogated, as discussed previously, a more masculine woman or a more feminine man. There is a tension in sport between the ‘bodies it regulates and those it targets' (Woodward, 2009, p. 160). Sporting bodies are recreated through gendered narratives. Therefore, the belief by organisational members and athletes themselves, that female athletes are less competent or ‘inferior’ or likewise, that men are ‘superior’ in sports and that they challenge the femininity norms can be found behind various forms of violence against athletes, supporting gender as a risk factor for violence (Messner and Sabo, 2012; Kirby and Demers, 2013; Parent and Fortier, 2018).

Organisational Culture: A Lens to Study Bullying and Harassment

Socio-cultural frameworks such as organisational culture can provide a broader perspective on the mechanisms and causes of abuse in sport. This is because norms and certain social practices are ingrained in the environment where they are repeated without critically questioning them (Hanin, 1993; Jex and Britt, 2005; Schein, 2010; Steyaert et al, 2016). High-performance sport is not isolated from the rest of societal workings, and in fact, sports is often a reflection of wider cultural values and societal issues (Hanin, 1993; Wolfe et al, 2005; Maitland et al, 2013; Lussier and Kimball, 2014). Socio-cultural models to understand bullying and harassment in sports are also useful because they not only depart from individualistic and pathological notions of violence but aim to consolidate biological and wider cultural forces behind the problem. In light of this, scholars (Wagstaff and Fletcher, 2009; Brackenridge et al, 2010; Wagstaff, 2017; Donnelly et al, 2016; Parent and Fortier, 2018; Kavanagh et al, 2020; Nite and Nauright, 2020) have been increasingly arguing for the study and evaluation of sports organisations, and their roles in protecting athletes and addressing instances of violence. Not all personnel working directly with athletes holds decision making power in sports organisations. Sports psychologists, for instance, tend to focus on micro-level components of

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sports performance, that is, motor skills, concentration techniques, team cohesion and goal attainment (Leahy, 2011; Tristán Rodríguez et al, 2015; Kerr and Stirling, 2019). Hanin (1993) more specifically highlighted that the field of sport psychology focused on offering top performance at the level of the individual performer. However, this work has dealt less methodically with issues of violence at the level of the organisation, in sports settings. Brackenridge (1997, 2002), one of the pioneers in the research of abuse in sport, argued that the individualisation of sport performance has resulted in whole sport institutions being able to deny or to turn a blind eye to issues of abuse, calling for a systems approach to address these issues. Bullying and harassment involve more than targets and perpetrators, where social status within a group matters on whether to intervene or not in the face of violence (Salmivalli et al, 1996). This suggests that perpetrators often have some type of support, whether other individuals or whole institutions. The complexity of bullying and harassment in sports as an outcome of forces beyond an individual’s disposition is less well understood. Thus, organisational perspectives are useful in sports settings to investigate bullying and harassment and other forms of violence because they aim to integrate individual and group behaviours along with structural and cultural processes within organisations (Keyton, 2005; Mata, 2013; Wagstaff, 2017; Roberts et al, 2019; Kavanagh et al, 2020). Furthermore, in psychological research and clinical practice, the dominant approach to understanding bullying and harassment has been through the lens of personality characteristics (Duffy and Sperry, 2014). This personality viewpoint to bullying and harassment is also seen in the general public and media, whereby people tend to see bullying and harassment as a consequence of either a negative personality characteristic of the perpetrator or a character flaw in the victim (Duffy and Sperry, 2014). The personality- dominant approach to bullying and harassment is also portrayed as ‘the bad apple’ argument, which prompt us to believe that if we get rid of the bad ones, the problem will be solved. However, closer to reality is that bullying, and harassment have many causes, involving historical and cultural contexts which influence how individuals, groups of people and organisations interact in particular situations. Finding the ‘bad apple’, as Duffy and Sperry (2014) put it, or a psychological-dominant approach, has limited explanatory power and can result in making erroneous behavioural explanations. This view also has the effect of preventing paying close attention to situational

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or contextual factors, not letting us have a more complete view of the problem of bullying and harassment. Yet this view is consistent with the individualistic values prominent in western societies and also in specialised and professional sports (Kavanagh et al, 2020). Organisations can be the incubators of bullying and harassment by directly or indirectly supporting these behaviours through individualising or turning a blind eye to the problem. Thus, to increase awareness and generate change particularly in the domain of sport, organisations as well as individuals need to be addressed (Brackenridge, 1997; Kerr and Stirling, 2019; Kavanagh et al, 2020; Nite and Nauright, 2020). Turning the focus back to Schein (1988; 2010), although he has not studied specifically the phenomenon of bullying and harassment with his concept of the three levels of culture, he has referred to leadership practices as a force behind the abuses of power and as a source of conflict or resolution (Schein, 2018). However, Schein (2010) has indeed suggested that deviation from cultural norms can lead to ostracism. In fact, Leymann (1996) who started his work on ‘mobbing’ in Scandinavia and whom I mentioned in chapter 2, observed and suggested that the problem he was studying had less to do with particular characteristics of the individual. Instead, abuses in the workplace had to do more with the work environment that involved deeply rooted factors, such as work belief and norms, leadership and managerial practices. Duffy and Sperry (2014) express something similar regarding cultural norms (Schein, 1988) and the work environment hypothesis (Leymann, 1996), but in terms of insiders and outsiders. Outsiders, according to Duffy and Sperry (2014), are the ones who depart in important ways from cultural, structural, and leadership practices in organisations and being more likely to experience abusive behaviours. Likewise, sport researchers (Brackenridge, 2003; Kirby et al, 2008; Mountjoy et al, 2016; Vertommen et al, 2016) have identified that markers of difference such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, body shape and disability can put athletes at a particular risk of experiencing bullying and harassment or other forms of abusiveness. Related to this, being an outsider often takes the form of the gender, race or ethnicity and sexual identity, contrasting from what is dominant in an organisation. ‘Being different’, as De Lara (2016) refers to, influences the inclusion or exclusion of individuals in groups. She explains that conformity is preferred due to its usefulness in a system, namely, an organisation since there is predictability in behaviour (De Lara, 2016). Non-conformity or being an outsider can also take the form of individuals challenging organisational dynamics or speaking out about abuses or corruption,

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increasing the likelihood of certain individuals being bullied and harassed, irrespective of certain personality profiles. Finally, Schein’s contribution to the study of cultural phenomena in organisations and human behaviour is of theoretical importance for this study, as it provides a clearly formulated framework with which to address the study of bullying and harassment in sport in holistically and nonprescriptive ways. Additionally, Schein (1998, 2010) and Martin (2002), stress that to have a deep understanding of culture one must enter that culture, engage in discussions with organisational members, and question the conscious and the unconscious aspects of it. Since the concept of culture is broad, containing varied layers with different levels of accessibility, Schein (1988; 2010) proposes qualitative approaches, such as ethnography or interviews with organisational members, rather than descriptive analytic approaches such as surveys. This is because in order to understand the deeper levels of culture, one must study feelings and perceptions of regular and old members (e.g., athletes, coaches or managers). Observing them and interviewing them, according to Schein (2010) around critical situations can provide a sense of the deeper-level shared assumptions. In chapter 4, I will provide a thorough explanation on my method to collect individual, cultural and organisational information from my participants. I also explain in more detail how the organisational culture lens guides the methods of this investigation to explore the unique attributes of the Mexican sports culture that emerge from the interaction with and narratives of my participants. I explain more about the qualities of the qualitative research to study organisational culture and mention that a qualitative design allows me to explore and uncover underlying values in the local sport context of my research by identifying subjective ‘lived experiences’ from the perspective of participants (Jones and Gratton, 2010; Creswell, 2014).

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Chapter 4 Methods

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I explained that organisational culture focuses on the broad social context of organisations and the meanings, experiences and perceptions organisational members derive from the context. Regarding bullying and harassment, I also discussed the need and my stance in enquiring this issue from a more holistic perspective. This perspective takes into account features such as norms, values, beliefs, national culture, rituals and practices, as opposed to a focus on individual dispositions to either commit or suffer bullying and harassment, yet both perspectives are important. The holistic research position echoes other researchers who have suggested a similar view in accounting for the wider social environment as influence on individual experiences with bullying and harassment. For instance, the work-environment hypothesis (Leymann, 1990); the ecosystem perspective (De Lara, 2016); the ecosystem system theory (Nery et al, 2020); the systems approach (Duffy and Sperry, 2012), among others. In this chapter, I discuss the rationale for using a qualitative research design, explaining the features of qualitative research, as well as its advantages and limitations and how they suit this research. Next, I discuss the research setting and why the location is a suitable site for the recruitment of participants for this research. I then explain the sample and sample size of this research, discussing further the features of this sample size and challenges that I faced over the course of this research. Later I discuss the data collection methods, particularly the use of semi-structured interviews and the strategy to conduct these interviews. Then I describe the procedures for analysis and interpretation of data for this research based on thematic analysis. Finally, I discuss ethical issues that had to be considered before and during the research, outlining how participants were informed about this research, and the steps I took to protect them and their rights and identities.

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Rationale for the Research Design

There is a combination of methods with which to study organisational culture, depending on the theoretical underpinnings adopted by the researcher, which guides the choice of data collection. Broadly understood, on the one hand, there are those who prefer approaching the concept of culture in a positivist, quantitative, manner. This is based on the notion that culture can be assessed as a single unit, a variable that can be statistically measured and manipulated. The way to study organisational culture with this approach would usually take the form of structured questionnaires, offering a diagnosis of an overall state of an organisation (Martin, 2002; Ostroff and Shulte, 2014). On the other hand, there are those who suggest that organisational culture cannot be simply isolated from social action and that data has to come from other sources such as in-depth interviews, observation or other forms of document analysis (Schein, 2010). My position towards the issue of bullying and harassment in sport and my own sport and academic background in psychology and medical anthropology lead me to subscribe to the more subjective conceptualisation of organisational culture. This makes sense in light of the fact that there are an increasing number of researchers in sport and non-sport settings suggesting that the issue of bullying and harassment goes beyond perpetrator-victim relationship. For example, Duffy and Sperry (2014) argue that the perpetrator or victim personality may play only a small part in cases of bullying and harassment. This implies that merely identifying, studying and banishing perpetrators of bullying and harassment would not be the solution to what is a systemic problem. Furthermore, Duffy and Sperry (2014) explain that the cognitive bias known as the fundamental attribution error could in part be leading us to accentuate individual explanations to bullying and harassing behaviours. This cognitive bias explains the tendency to form explanations about others; behaviours based on assumptions of who they are, rather than considering situational factors that influence the behaviour. In addition to seeking more encompassing explanations to bullying and harassing behaviours, the concept of culture has its roots in disciplines, such as anthropology,

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psychology and sociology, that have extensively made use of qualitative approaches to understand multiple interpretations of a wide range of cultural manifestations and social contexts. Thus, training with the method is another factor for using a qualitative approach. Qualitative research is about understanding context, environments, circumstances and processes (Bloomber and Volpe, 2019). Many of these can be overt and easily observable while others can be normalised, more subtle and even hidden from sight. Bullying and harassment in semi-professional and professional sport in the Mexican culture is a research problem that lends itself to a qualitative approach because it is a complex phenomenon of which there is no causal knowledge of yet, nor there is existing knowledge of the current conditions in which it develops at the professional and semi-professional level. The evident attention and increasing number of studies about bullying and harassment in sport from other countries, particularly the anglosphere, helps to highlight how limited this issue has been researched in Mexico. Therefore, there is an opportunity for discovering and exploring how bullying and harassment may be understood, talked about and experienced in the context of my research. The aim of the qualitative research design to explore an organisational culture is to gain insights into a part of the organisational functioning and the relationship between the individual and the environment. My focus then is on the local organisational context. That is why I am studying a group of people that is involved in the sport of track and field that belongs to a public sport organisation in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. And I do so in terms of exploring stories, norms, discourses and experiences around bullying and harassment of athletes, all with the intent to provide a better understanding of the problem in this particular cultural and sport context. Additionally, the use of a qualitative research design in this study is based on the principle of analytic induction. With analytic induction, the data collected is used for two main aims, the first is to generate new hypothesis around a specific theme or context; the second is to reveal social processes that produce or affect a particular phenomenon (Cassell and Symon, 2004). The principle of analytical induction is employed widely in a range of studies and across disciplines in the social sciences following a qualitative approach and applies also in my research. Increasingly, inductive approaches are being used in organisational research, guided by concepts such as organisational culture and grounded theory, helping develop

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explanations of interactional processes that people experience in social action (Cassell and Symon, 2004). As a researcher applying a qualitative approach to bullying and harassment in sport in Jalisco, Mexico, my aim is to seek range and variation in findings, forming a coherent whole about the phenomenon. Yet recognising the extent of generalisability of qualitative research, it is important to highlight that I do not intend to ‘diagnose the culture’ of the sport organisation of my study. That would require another methodological approach. What I focus on with a qualitative design here is to explore in depth the role of my participants, their direct experiences with bullying and harassment, cultural understandings about bullying and harassment in Mexico and my participants sense of being in the site of research. In doing so, I seek to understand and interpret how these lived experiences, understandings, perceptions and opinions can be enactments and transmission of an organisational culture of my research site. Additionally, I also consider that, without being prescriptive, the information shared to me by my participants can be revelatory of a potential general reality that might exist beyond what the sample size of my research suggests. For instance, in chapter 6, I take a closer look at three cases of direct experience with bullying and harassment. The purpose is to show what the experience of suffering and dealing with bullying and harassment feels like with all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the Mexican culture, and let the reader decide whether these are likely to be ‘isolated cases’ or part of a more serious pattern. Thus, given the purposes and reasons above, I considered a qualitative design to be the most appropriate approach to address my research problem, relative to, for example, a quantitative approach, which would be more appropriate for a study that aims to generalise patterns or focus on the narrow relationships between specific quantifiable variables (Rogelberg, 2004; Jones and Gratton, 2010). Furthermore, as of today, bullying and harassment of Mexican athletes seems to be an unsystematically researched issue in Mexican sport. Therefore, to start uncovering stories and building an appreciation of the severity and extent of the problem, a research methodology that was flexible enough to changes during the course of the research seemed sensible to adopt, than perhaps with a different research design would not have been possible.

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Research Setting

The place of research is a public sport organisation in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. Jalisco is one of 32 states in Mexico, it is recognised nationally as successful in the development of talent in different dimensions, making important contributions to the Mexican economy, particularly in the technology, commercial, and sports sectors (Palacios Lara et al, 2009). Sport in Jalisco has grown considerably in recent years. This has been evident with the success of high-performance athletes from Jalisco in the National Olympiad, the National Youth and National Paralympics (CODE, 2018) and international competitions such as the Pan-American Games (year) and the Olympic Games. Jalisco has proved to be leading in sporting excellence nationally and has reached historical figures for sport in Mexico. The relevance for studying a specific sport organisation in Jalisco is that this organisation is also a high-performance centre for athletes to train and reside in, besides being involved in mass sport participation. Because many high-performance athletes are in close contact with each other, as well with coaches, the sport organisation I focus on in this research in Jalisco is a platform to explore individual experiences, organisational working environments, and the way sport is experienced in relation to bullying and harassment.

Recruitment

Many of the phenomena of bullying and harassment in sport are presumably geographically widespread. The Mexican context and site of research matter for my own study because the site of research provided a feasible pool of athletes to recruit given the levels of professional and semi-professional sport participation. Even so, when I started this research, I had the expectation that I would find more participants with direct experiences with bullying and harassment that would be willing to share stories with me. From 19 individuals, three of them, shared explicit stories with bullying and harassment. I thought initially that the contact with participants with direct experiences, their stories, perceptions and insights would lead me to more athletes with these kinds of experiences. It did not turn out that way and the primary findings have to do rather than with

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the direct experience of bullying and harassment, more with the way bullying and harassing behaviours may be understood, present, and tolerated in the local context of my research. I recruited my participants based on a purposeful sampling. The rationale underlying purposeful sampling is that the type of research problem and questions that guide the researcher as to what the unit of analysis is and needs to be sampled (Bernard, 2006; Bryman, 2016). This means that the researcher recruits participants who are relevant to the research question. Equally important, the researcher recruits participants that have a variety of characteristics as to maximise the diversity of information relevant to the research question (Bernard, 2006). In this research, the unit of analysis were seven female athletes from different specialisations in track and field, and seven coaches, six males, and one female from the state of Jalisco, Mexico. Furthermore, the community of researchers working on violence and abuse in sport agree that bullying and harassment of athletes can occur at any age, sex or gender, nationality or ethnicity. (Mountjoy et al, 2016). Some research suggests that combat sports, such as boxing and martial arts and contact sports such as hockey, football, and rugby may have an increased risk for violence due to the physical aggression and brutal physical contact that these sports demand from athletes to determine a winner or have athletic success (Parent and Fortier, 2018). However, very few studies have attempted to compare one sport to another or do research in sports that do not involve such high levels of contact, less so in Mexico. Track and field is one of those sports and one where unique power relationships can be discovered among teammates or coaches. This was also a reason that drove me to explore the sport of track and field and recruit participants from this sport, and in this way add to the violence in sport literature by researching a sport where physical contact, leading to potential aggression, is not an essential part of the sport activity. To recruit my participants, I relied on key informants to obtain contact information of potential athletes, coaches and sport staff. Once I obtained phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I approached the participants explaining them about my research and whether they would be interested in participating in it. Some of the people that I approached decided not to participate, but for those who did I sent them the appropriate research documentation, such as the Information Sheet and Consent Forms (see Appendix I and Appendix II).

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I asked my participants to schedule one hour of their time for the interview. The range of the duration of interviews was from 30 minutes, being the shortest, to the hour, being the longest and were based on an interview topic guide (see Appendix III). Participation was voluntary and no incentives were offered. The criteria for participants were as follows: 1) participants needed to meet the condition of being of legal age (18 +); 2) participants athletes must have had experience in semi-professional (university) experience or professional levels in track and field; 3) participants must have been residing in Jalisco, Mexico and part of the sport organisation previously mentioned.

Participants and Sample Size

The data that I present here comes mainly from athletes and coaches. I gathered a total of 19 interviews. As the research progressed, I found that 14 participants were more directly involved to the sport organisation I focus on, compared to the rest 5 participants who were less directly engaged in the site of research. Therefore, I was drawn to those interviews which provided information that was more relevant and current to the research aims. It is common that in qualitative research the sampling and gathering of data evolves as the project progresses. Therefore, the analysis and interpretation of data was focused on those 14 participants; seven female athletes and seven coaches, one of them having an additional professional role as a sport psychologist (see Table 1 for participant information). Yet, I still considered the remaining interviews in the sense that they helped me refine the recruitment process, and also provided ‘shadow data’, a concept I will explain in the sections ahead. Additionally, I pseudonymised my participants, referring to them with other names rather than their own but according to their gender. I took this step to protect my participants’ identities in this investigation and future publications. I also refer to my participants with their participant number, which is a number that I assigned to them for identification of their transcript data, as well as their role as either athlete or coach and their specialisation in track and field. Thus, in the results section (chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8), when referring to participants and their quotes, it will appear as: participant number pseudonym, role; (P#, pseudonym, role).

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Age at ID Role Track and Field Specialisation Interview P1 - Carmen Athlete 30 Sprinter P2 - Luis Coach >40 Sprinters; middle-distance and youth P3 - Gaby Athlete 33 Middle-distance P4 - Sofia Athlete 26 Sprinter P5 - Mariana Athlete 30 Middle-distance P6 - Andrea Coach >40 Middle-distance, and youth P7 - Miguel Coach 36 Triathlon and long-distance; sport admin P8 - Tomás Coach >40 Middle and long-distance P9 - Fernando Coach >40 Middle-distance and amateur group P10 - Adriana Athlete 22 Sprinter P11 - Karina Athlete 31 Middle-distance; duathlon Coach/Sport P12 - Guillermo >40 Triathlon; university; private groups Psych. P13 - Marcela Athlete 25 Sprinter P14 - Hugo Coach >40 Long distance and middle distance

Table 1. Participant table. Characteristics include: Assigned ID number; sports role; age at interview; and specialisation in track and field.

The sample size of this research could be considered relatively small and was determined by a number of factors. However, this sample size is not much different from other sample sizes qualitatively investigating bullying and harassment or related forms of violence in sport. An important factor was the nature of the topic. Talking about bullying and harassment is still considered a taboo subject in sport. My experience discussing this issue with Mexican people was no different. Even when my participants had agreed to participate and I assured them that their identity was protected, they were cautious in the way they spoke to me and it was during the course of the interviews that more details were revealed. Still, many of them pronounced statements

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such as ‘I don’t want to give many details, but…’ or ‘it doesn’t concern me, but what I’ve heard is…’. Other individuals that I approached for invitation to this research declined or never answered back. The quality of data also justifies the sample size of my research. Morse (2002) suggests that besides the ability of participants to express themselves, if the data contains rich and experiential information, fewer participants may be needed to understand the case in question. The information from my interviews was grounded in experience and perceptions of environment related to sport and relationships within track and field. The majority of my participants talked about their day-to-day life and dynamics with their teams, what they knew about others and specific details about direct experiences with bullying and harassment. In particular, I had three cases of female athletes that dealt with direct experiences with bullying and harassment. These narratives gave substantial insight into how bullying and harassment happened, the personal, career and social consequences suffered, as well as highlighting patterns of behaviour in their sport environment that have to do with organisational and cultural processes. In qualitative research, the rich description of data and what it reveals about the phenomenon of study is what is most important, rather than frequencies of cases and this is what I focus on with the sample size of my research (Morse, 1995). Furthermore, besides the scope of the study and nature of the topic, the use of ‘shadow data’ is of great value (Morse, 2000). Shadow data is the information about experiences that participants share about others, in addition to their own experiences and perceptions. Shadow data enhance the analysis of research and although it may need verification, it provides the researcher with a range of experiences beyond the single story that one participant shared about him or herself, providing additional valuable information on the research issue (Morse, 2000). This concept is significant in this research because the coaches and athletes I interviewed not only shared information about what pertained to their lives, but also about what they had seen or heard in relation to bullying and harassment in track and field. Moreover, a recurring question that qualitative researchers ask themselves is that of knowing when enough data is enough. For this, the qualitative literature points to the concept of saturation (Creswell, 2014). Saturation is widely understood as an indicator that

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the data that have been collected and analysed does not yield any more relevant research information, making further data collection unnecessary (Saunders, 2017). Thus, saturation is considered a criterion for discontinuing data collection and its origins lie in grounded theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss (2006). However, the concept is debated for not being properly deconstructed as to understand what it means in determining sample size for qualitative data. Additionally, Dey (1999) and Mason (2010) note that the concept of saturation is difficult to put into practice and may be inappropriate because the more information is added in terms of sample size and the longer a researcher works with the qualitative data, the newer information that can be extracted and interpreted. This can be potentially problematic when developing a conclusion or knowing where the cut off is. Arguably, there are no concise empirical arguments as to why certain sample sizes are better or not than others. The consensus is that the sample size depends on several factors, including theoretical approaches to the research and feasibility, such as access to participants and site of research, the nature of the topic, willingness and availability of individuals to participate in the study, the quality of data, among others. Creswell (2014), for instance, cites that from his own analysis of qualitative research studies that, 'one to two' individuals have formed the sample size for narrative research; 'three to ten' for phenomenology; and 'twenty to thirty' for grounded theory. Therefore, strictly speaking, I did not aim to complete a theoretical saturation since, as discussed above, it is difficult to define given the variability of research projects. However, what I did focus on was on capturing as much and enough information that was relevant to my research purpose, looking to highlight the sport environment and culture on my research site, which due to the nature of the topic led to a relatively small sample size.

Data Collection: Semi-structured Interviews

A common method of data collection often paired with analytic induction is the interview, more specifically the open-ended or semi-structured interview. This type of interview is designed to look and feel like natural conversations for both the participant and researcher. The interview questions are based on key general topics, which are linked to the

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main research aims. I used the semi-structured interview because they are ideally suited for experiential type of research (Braun and Clarke, 2013). Semi-structured interviews are also useful to obtain information when asking questions that involve exploring perceptions, meanings and practices of others. In this case, the semi-structured interviews were best suited to interview my participants, athletes and coaches, that had some kind of personal stake in the subject of bullying and harassment, either their perceptions, witnessing and opinions on the subject or direct experiences with it. Additionally, the semi-structured interview was a valuable tool, perhaps more so than observations in the context of this research. This is because the semi-structured interview also helped to create a context where background information about issues that are not commonly voiced or are difficult to observe in the field could be shared (Lee, 1999; Markula and Silk, 2011; Tracy, 2013). The use of the semi-structured interview is also in line with proponents of qualitatively studying organisational cultures in that this method captures dimensions of experience and the environment that are often ‘unmanaged’ (Schein, 2010). Or Alvesson (2002) who notes that features such as meanings, symbols or inside knowledge, do not lend themselves to quantification and require a greater reflective task to understand how they fit in a given culture. Examples of these in my research was knowledge about where activities that took place in private homes, sexual activities, disciplinary practices, and safety measures, which were ‘out of sight’ to me. Thus, the semi-structured interview provided me with access to this information through conversing and asking participants about not only their daily practices, but also the details of these practices and venues, relationships with coaches and team members in practices and in competitions.

Interview Process The interviewing process had an informal and friendly tone, in the sense that I did not dictate nor gave my participants an order of questions, although I did tell my participants what to expect from the interview. Braun and Clarke (2013) highlight the importance of asking linguistically appropriate questions to the research cohort because specialised vocabulary and cultural assumptions is likely to have an influence on the way participants feel and respond to questions.

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Given this interview stance, the way I spoke with my participants was in such a way that they would have a sense of familiarity with me and their environment. This meant less formal language and adopting expressions that they used, or I knew are commonly used in sports environments based on my own sport experience. In essence, the interview was conversational as it often is the purpose with qualitative interviews (Creswell, 2007; Braun and Clarke, 2013), I let my participants decide the level of interaction based on their convenience and comfort. I conducted the majority of interviews online, fourteen interviews, through both Skype and WhatsApp calls, and five interviews face-to-face on site. Conventional face-to-face interviewing is an effective tool to obtain relevant data on social actors that researchers are interested in and is the most widely used data collection method in qualitative research (Creswell, 2014). Yet I considered that the online method for interviewing my participants was an effective strategy in the case of this research. This is not only in terms of practicality when contacting participants that are generally hard to reach, but also in providing a greater sense of control to them, as I discuss below.

Advantages of Non-Face-to-Face and Online Interviews Hooley et al (2012) point out that conventional face-to-face interviewing can present several challenges such as geographical dispersion, travel time, financial constraints, and physical availability and mobility of both, participants and researcher. However, with the ever-increasing use of technology and digital platforms, research approaches have evolved, allowing researchers for new research opportunities by reducing common research challenges, while potentially adding new ones (Creswell, 2007; Hooley et al, 2012). Besides geographical dispersion, travel time, financial constraints, and physical availability, among the advantages of using online phone interviews are that they can be empowering for participants (Braun and Clarke, 2013). People can feel empowered if they feel they can choose the exact location for the interview, guaranteeing that they feel most comfortable and safe as when they are in their homes, private offices, etc. (Hooley et al, 2012; Braun and Clarke, 2013). Additionally, not limited by geography, accessing participants that can be dispersed or difficult to meet in person becomes easier (Creswell, 2007). This is particularly true for athletes and coaches that are at the semi-professional and professional levels. Even if they

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compete and represent a national or local sport organisation, they travel often, and they also train at different venues such as universities. Moreover, and importantly is that with online interviews participants can feel that their identities are more protected, increasing anonymity, by not having to face the researcher (Tracy, 2013). In this research case, I gave my participants the option to have the video camera or just an audio call. In all interviews we proceeded without the video call as my participants were ambivalent about the choice or preferred not to have the video. I opted for this option to provide my participants with more control, comfort, and the space to tell their personal stories. For the online interviews, all of them where conducted in a private room of mine and I suggested participants to do the same. Furthermore, while potentially a possible barrier for rapport, the online method had the advantage of providing a less intimidating space for some participants. Tracy (2013) points out that in some instances, face-to-face interviews can make some participants feel shy or that they have to answer the researcher’s question, even if they are aware, they have the choice not to do so, simply because of physical presence. For the interviews that took place in person, once my participants agreed to participate in my study, we chose and agreed on a place for the interview. They all took place in the sport organisation of this study, at the track, as this is where they found themselves more comfortable and it was where they worked, but they were given the choice to choose the precise area where to sit and talk for the interview.

Interview Guide During the interviews I followed a topic guide. To develop my topic guide, I began by brainstorming questions related to the areas I wanted to know from my participants about bullying and harassment. I aided myself with previous research, paying attention to the wording and types of questions other researchers had asked their participants athletes with direct experiences with bullying and harassment, as well as coaches. I aimed for the questions in the interview guide to the broad enough as to let participants know what the area of interest was and allow them to recognise if they had something to say. The sequencing of questions mattered too, and I intuitively approached the sequence of the interviews from broad to more specific, approach also recommended by other researchers (Creswell, 2000; Howitt, 2010; Jones and Gratton, 2010; Braun and Clarke,

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2013; Creswell, 2014). Therefore, the interview guide was organised in such a way that early questions dealt with building rapport and putting the participant at ease. Early questions were less probing, less sensitive and less direct. They involved, for instance, exploring motivations for participating in track and field, what drove participants to that sport, plans for competitions and the ‘ups and downs’ of the sporting career. The introductory questions also served to share part of my experiences as a semi- professional athlete, albeit in a different sport than theirs, that put us at a similar level of understanding in terms of training practices, feelings about wins and losses, and commonalities that are unique to the sports environment. Gradually, the later questions sought to obtain insights about common practices and perceptions such as relationship dynamics, dealing with injuries, witnessing or experiencing bullying and harassment. For these questions I would be more probing such as asking for specific examples or asking participants to explain what they meant by saying certain things. For instance, when enquiring whether my participants had witnessed or experienced directly bullying and harassment, if they answered yes then I asked more directly how it had occurred, if others knew about the incident, as well as how they felt. Most of my participants were willing to talk about the subject but some of them found it more difficult to express themselves and articulate their thoughts. I noted that some participants where more ordered, chronological, in their stories, while others seemed less orderly. In the end, the interview guide was overall flexible in nature and meant to stimulate discussion.

Analysis and Interpretation of Interviews: Thematic Analysis

The way I approached the analysis and interpretation of my data was through thematic analysis. Thematic analysis of qualitative data is one of the main approaches in qualitative research to make sense of patterns from non-numerical data (Howitt, 2010; Flick, 2014). Thematic analysis allows to examine texts or other forms of data in different social contexts and this can provide a wealth of information about the social relationships in a community or any given context (Creswell, 2000; Flick, 2014). Using thematic analysis in this research consisted of finding specific patterns

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regarding what was said in the interviews related to bullying and harassment whether directly or indirectly, helping me to interpret the varied components of the research topic, but did not necessarily meant that this way of analysis provided organisation or a specific structure to my data. One of the advantages of the thematic analysis is that it is a theoretically flexible approach that can be paired with other broader analytical frameworks. Braun and Clarke (2006) discuss that thematic analysis is often framed within a realist or experiential paradigm, focusing on reporting experiences, meanings or events, but that the method is also often used with other paradigms such as constructionism; emphasising how experiences, meanings or events are affected by broader operating forces. Besides the theoretical flexibility of thematic analysis, an important aspect of the analytic process in thematic analysis is the role of the researcher. Braun and Clarke (2006) have argued against using the language of ‘themes emerging’ from the data because it gives the researcher a passive role in the analytic and interpretative process. In qualitative research, the researcher has an active role and different aspects of the researchers’ background shape how the data is read (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Howitt, 2010). I stand by this in that I always played an active role in the identification of patterns across my interview transcripts. Never was there a moment where themes just emerged, instead I purposely selected parts of interest, relevant to the research question and began with describing the context of that interview extract and then providing an interpretation. It was the constant thinking and reflection that created the links among and within the interview transcripts, eventually being able to form what is called a theme.

Philosophical Approaches The epistemological and ontological assumptions that I follow mean that there is an objective reality ‘out there’, yet people’s concepts and experiences of the environment they are in contribute to its reproduction or change. With these philosophical approaches, my stance in research is that reality is not purely subjectivist nor unstructured, there is an objective, more structured reality than mere thoughts and perceptions (Cassell and Symon, 2004). A reality where people interact and exchange materials. Yet participants still form part of the construction of that reality even if they are conscious of it or not (Cassel et al, 2018). I adopt this experiential view of reality in order to

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embrace, in a more socially inclusive manner, experiences within sport. For instance, bullying and harassment happens to people, yet because the phenomenon is in itself difficult to conceptualise and talk about, it might not exist in the eyes of some other individuals (Lee, 1999; Fricker, 2007; Alcoff, 2017). This means that the fact that clear data of bullying and harassment in sport in the site of my research is very limited does not mean that the issue does not occur.

Theme Generating Doing thematic analysis is not a straightforward process that takes the researcher to find all answers in linear fashion (Howitt, 2010). Instead, thematic analysis is a back-and-forth process where data features, transcripts and audio recordings are reviewed several times. Braun and Clarke (2006) suggest a way to doing thematic analysis involving six phases, but caution that this process is not something to be rigidly followed. This is so due to the nature of qualitative inquiry, which tends to be unstructured and ‘messy’ and with the possibility of finding a variety of interpretations. The six phases suggested for doing a thematic analysis are:

1. Familiarising with your data; 2. Generating initial codes; 3. Searching for themes; 4. Reviewing themes; 5. Defining and naming themes; 6. Producing the report

Having these phases in mind, I began familiarising myself with the data by reflecting and jotting down comments on the interviews I had conducted. This was a reflective process on my thoughts and reactions to the interviews that helped me make sense of my participants stories, feelings and understanding their position. Then I started processing the interview data by transcribing the interviews, depending on the number of interviews I was able to have in a given period. This was typically one or two interviews per week and transcription often took several days. The order of the transcription of interviews depended also on their content. For

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instance, if over the course of three weeks I had four interviews, I decided to work on the transcription of two interviews that I thought contained similar contents or were centred around a particular experience more than the other interviews. Transcription was an ongoing process, rather than being a phase that preceded another. During this process, I also browsed through the ongoing work to have an idea of the whole conversation and gain a greater sense of familiarity with the data and the participant. Once I had some transcriptions completed in a given period, I focused more deeply on them, taking notes of my first impressions and writing down questions I had developed through listening to the recorded interviews. I also began to become more aware of my role in the interview and reflected on the ways my position as a young researcher, as I was, in most of the cases, the youngest one. Being a semi-professional athlete with an extensive national and international sport background, made possible rapport and elicitation of responses from participants. My sports background gave me further credibility that perhaps my age did not, as compared to the rest of my participants. The next phase of the data analysis involved labelling parts of the transcription, this is called ‘coding’. It involved marking certain words and highlighting sentences and whole paragraphs that described activities, thoughts or processes about personal experiences or observations about the sport organisation of my research and that I found relevant to the research topic. Moreover, the way people talked and what they shared is influenced by the social context in which they are talking. I also paid attention to the choice of words, because they not only formed a narrative, but they also tell how a person feels about something and reveals about his/her relationship with others (Tracy, 2013; Flick, 2014). There were distinguishable ways in which my participants expressed the kind of social experiences they had in the context of the Mexican culture and which gave clues to the kind of sport environment they and other athletes may be in. I noticed, for instance, that coaches and athletes engaged in a form of communication called ‘albures’ in Mexico, which is typical of the Mexican culture, and which I explain further in the results section in chapter 5. Participants also had a tendency to avoid naming incidents or feelings directly. They rarely said that they were harassed, bullied or abused or had witnessed something directly. Instead, they used other terms and forms of communicating their experiences. What is more, the researcher’s role is important to highlight here. The production of codes is also an active

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process since in choosing relevant interview features, I was purposefully rereading and searching for meaning among large amounts of textual and audio data. In the search of themes from my interview data, what I did was look at the different codes that I had and assigned labels to these that reflected a broader description of the codes, smaller features from data, that I had identified in the coding process. A theme is a ‘patterned response or meaning within the data set’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Identifying and creating themes was an ongoing process, inserting comments in the transcripts, referring to the codes I had that signified a potential overarching theme. I found that some codes were discarded as other codes served to form sub-sections within a main theme. The more I engaged with the data, the more relationships I found between candidate themes. For instance, in discussing interpersonal dynamics between athletes and coaches, and the process of grooming and experience of bullying and harassment, there were interview features that I felt overlapped within these themes. Yet I needed to separate these codes and structure them adequately in each theme to make them coherent and meaningful. In a way, the more overlaps and relationships among themes served me to review and refine each theme. This meant extracting parts of the interviews that did not seem to fit in theme even if I had at some point incorporated them before. Therefore, identifying themes in my data had to do more with whether codes had some important feature or relation with the research topic than following a prescribed rule for theme generating.

Reflexivity As discussed in a previous section, since answers to the research question do not simply emerge from the data, reflexivity is important in the analytic and interpretive process. Haynes (2012) points out that reflexivity is an awareness that the researcher and the object of study are mutually and continually influenced. It involves a constant reflection on why, what and how the decisions during the research and analytic process are being made. It is also a realisation of the assumptions that underpin the approach to research, to participants and interpretation of data (Howitt, 2010). Reflexivity is an essential component of the qualitative research process due to its interpretative nature. As qualitative research is not primarily concerned with the analysis of facts and generalisations, but with social contexts and their influence on meanings and experiences, awareness of theoretical and personal assumptions is necessary. Haynes (2012,

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p. 73) suggests that the theoretical level of reflexivity entails all the ‘pre-understandings’ brought to the research. For instance, I bring to this research the philosophical assumptions that view the nature of reality as an experiential one. With this view, I recognise that reality and knowledge production are not uniquely subjective, however, neither they are testable nor empirically isolated only. There is interpretation and subjectivity within a shared reality that can be analysed. Moreover, theoretically, as I have explained in chapter 3, I view the problem of bullying and harassment as a consequence of organisational and situational factors, rather than biologically or individual ones. Thus, another pre-understanding that I bring to this research is the holistic approach to bullying and harassment. At the personal level, reflexivity involves an awareness of the cultural, intellectual and experiential aspects that the researcher brings to the study. Cassell et al (2018) point out that at the personal level, reflexivity presupposes a disclosure of something about us, sincere enough to show how we may shape the research process but delimited enough as to not divert attention from the main research goals. In this case, the desire to treat the topic of bullying and harassment as a research subject for my PhD dissertation reflects greatly my past experience as an elite athlete. In fact, my life and identity could not have developed the way they have if it were not because of the combination of elite sport, from being a child-athlete to playing at university teams and professional competitions, paired with high academic achievement. Those past experiences led me to see and experience bullying and harassment in my own sport, from coaches to athletes and vice versa, just as in others sports as well. All these personal experience in some way influence, consciously or unconsciously, how I viewed my participants and how I interpreted their accounts. Additionally, the relationship I had with participants was important during the interviews. Sharing my background as a tennis player at the elite level in the international and Mexican sport environment and experience with some forms of bullying and harassment helped to build rapport, trust and credibility. My openness with them helped in particular with those athletes with direct experiences with bullying and harassment to be more sincere and give more detailed account of their experiences. With the rest of my participants who did not have direct experience with bullying and harassment, the fact that I shared some of my experiences with them served to position

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myself as someone knowledgeable. I could sense that my participants knew what I was talking about during the interview. This was not to establish some sort of territoriality, but to make sure that my participants felt they and I shared a common ground and were able to communicate at similar levels of sport experience. Moreover, sharing the same nationality and the language with my participants during the interviews I considered it to be advantageous because it helped me understand and perhaps place grater consideration to those experiences lived by athletes than perhaps, those without familiarity with the issue or environment in which it occurs. These personal experiences combined with my academic background in psychology and medical anthropology were important to understand how I address and shape the process of this research. Reflexivity for me then meant that as a researcher I have my own take on the subject of bullying and harassment in sport, my own experiences and values and disciplinary traditions which shaped how I understood and interpreted my participants stories and perceptions. Thus, I had to always be making choices about the data and its interpretation, which reflect in part where I come from and who I am, as well as the environment that I am in.

Other Approaches Considered

During the process of linking the research approach to the research problem, I also considered having focused groups because they are another way to examine shared meanings in sports teams as reflections of organisational culture. Focus groups allow for studying norms, assumptions and practices that may not be revealed on individual interviews. However, Barbour (2007) notes that narratives are much easier to elicit and clarify in one-to-one conversations. Additionally, a key disadvantage of the focus group is the sensitive nature of the topics addressed. In other words, with focus groups there is the risk of putting a specific person ‘on the spot’, which may be distressing or embarrassing, especially if sensitive topics are being discussed (Tracy, 2013). In this regard, a drawback of the focus group is that intimate experiences regarding bullying and harassment in the site of my research could have been

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less likely to be shared, particularly if sharing unique experiences or thoughts could oppose those of the group. Given the constraints of this research in time, scope and the nature topic under discussion, I considered that approaching participants on a personal level, allowing them to have a private space to share their experiences and perceptions, and how they justify certain behaviours or processes in sport was better done with single interviews. Moreover, on a technical level, organising participants for individual interviews was going to be more manageable than organising a group of people. Single interviews turned out to be a more efficient method for data collection considering that I experienced delays and cancellations of interviews during the data collection phase.

Ethics and Informed Consent in High-Risk Research

Given the subject matter, this project was considered high-risk. A high-risk application was submitted to KCL Research Ethics Office in February 2018 and full ethical approval with reference number HR17/18-5453 was granted on 25 June 2018. Informed consent was sought in written and verbal form my participants (see Appendix 2). I gave my participants information and consent forms via e-mail. These forms contained all the information about the research (See Appendix 1 and 2), and this was done in simple language, about what the study was about, what it required from participants and how their data was going to be handled. Informed consent forms in English and Spanish are added as appendices at the end of this document. However, only the Spanish forms were used, and which were based on my own translations to the English language. Verbal information about the study was also given at the moment of interviewing to make sure my participants were fully aware of the study's objectives and their participation. I gave them the chance to ask further questions if they wished to do it before starting the interviews. I also assured my participants that their participation was voluntary and withdrawal from the research would not affect them in any way. All the research information was given in Spanish, which is my native language and that of my participants. Additionally, I mentioned to my participants that they had a period of

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thirty days to notify me if they wished to participate in my research. Similarly, thirty days were given to participants to notify me if they did not wish to have their interview data in my research. The thirty-day time frame that I gave to my participants to decide if they wanted to participate in my research or withdraw their data was to give myself the time to organise my schedule during recruitment, as well as the process of data analysis in the case their interview needed to be deleted. There were participants who accepted to have an interview with me and later declined, but no participants who did have the interview with me decided to withdraw their data. Furthermore, I did consider the possibility during the recruitment process that being acquainted with potential participants given my experience in high-performance sport and being from the country of research could potentially give rise to a perceived pressure to participate. However, I took the steps necessary to mitigate this potential perceived pressure, such as reminding my participants that their participation in the study was completely voluntary or withdrawing from it would not affect our relationship, and that the research had nothing to do with the participants’ organisation, coaches or teammates. In addition, I assured my participants that no personal information shared with the me during interviews will have been passed to others, that could pose a risk or reveal the identity of my participants.

Confidentiality and Anonymity

The General Data Protection Plan states that while anonymity is best to protect participant’s privacy, it is not always possible in every circumstance to ensure complete anonymity. Therefore, for this research, I gave my participants the information and consent forms, and were reminded verbally, that complete anonymity may not be possible in all circumstances. I explained that given the sport community in the site of research, some other individuals may be able to infer if certain cases with bullying and harassment discussed in the results may have involved certain identifiable individuals. I also explained to my participants my duty as a researcher in the situation that the life of one of them was at risk. This will be explained in more detail in the section ahead.

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Furthermore, I gave my participants a thirty-day time frame to decide whether withdraw their qualitative data after the interview had been conducted. The process for the data from withdrawn individuals was to be eliminated, but none of my participants withdrew their contribution to my research. During the interviews there was a risk that the research topic might lead to disclosures from the participant concerning their involvement in illegal activities or other activities that represent a threat to themselves or others. I looked into various sources pertaining to research practices in Mexico, as well as to the Mexican law in order to protect myself and my participants. There were two ways in which I am protected under the law in Mexico and the university in the case there was a real need to break confidentiality. Firstly, the Mexican ethics code for psychologists, which is my academic discipline, states that 'the psychologist shows confidential information without the individual's consent, only when the law requires it or when it allows it for valid purposes such as:

1. Provide professional services necessary to the patient or the individual client or organisation.

2. To obtain appropriate professional advice or advice.

3. To protect the patient, client or others, from any damage.

4. To obtain payment for services, in which case, the information shown will be limit to the minimum necessary to achieve that purpose' (p. 52).

No. 3 of the article 134 of the Confidentiality section of the ethics code guides the researcher on when it is sensible to share information without the participant’s consent. This meant that in the case that I found out that there was planning of serious self-harm, assault on others or finding out systematic abuse of athletes, I as the researcher was allowed to break confidentiality and contact those who are able to handle such situations accordingly and beyond the scope of research, such as the Office of the Attorney General, which is responsible for public security and the procurement of justice of the State of Jalisco (https://fge.jalisco.gob.mx).

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Moreover, I followed the General Data Protection Plan, under the ‘Vital Interest’ condition which states that, ‘the processing of personal data should also be regarded to be lawful where it is necessary to protect an interest which is essential for the life of the data subject or that of another natural person’. Therefore, I agreed beforehand with my supervisors that if the need to disclose participant’s information arose, I would discuss this with them first as well as with the ethics office at King’s College London and then proceed according to the Mexican research and law standards as well as the university research protocols (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/aboutkings/orgstructure/ps/audit/compliance/data- protection/DataProtection-Procedure.pdf; https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the- general-dataprotection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/vital-interests/). Most of my interview data dealt with past experiences, observations and perceptions of the subject of bullying and harassment. While there were cases of bullying and harassment, none of my interviewees were in serious harm and there was no need to break confidentiality.

Identified Risks and Benefits to Participants

I was aware that talking about experiences, past or current, dealing with bullying and harassment or other forms of violence, could potentially had an effect on my participant’s emotional and mental state. One participant in particular did feel very sad and cried during the interview, mainly because she had felt there was no one who would listen to her that despite her efforts to report the harassment and being vocal about it. To make sure my participants had the most comfortable experience during the interviews, I reminded them that they could take breaks during the interview or stop the interview at any time if they wished. They were also told that they did not answer any questions that they did not feel comfortable speaking about. I also offered other ways to support my participants and mitigate the risks of emotional distress due to the interview experience, especially those athletes who had the experience with bullying and harassment. This included being referred to a therapist and medical doctors, known to myself in Jalisco, specialised in dealing and supporting individuals with histories of abuse and violence.

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Additionally, I had the contact information available of a public and educational foundation working on emotional and sexual abuse prevention called PAS Foundation, so my participants could have an organisation they could go to for more support or obtain information on their own and independent of my research. Another source of contact for me and my participants was the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (CONAPRED in Spanish), which is a state body created by the Federal Law to prevent and eliminate discrimination. The Council is the governing institution to promote policies and measures contributing to cultural and social development, advance social inclusion and guarantee the right to equality, which is the first of the fundamental rights in the Mexican Federal Constitution (https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-46/). Furthermore, before, during and after the interview, I aimed to remind my participants of their benefits from participating in my doctoral research. I told them that they know that they have an active role in contributing towards the care, protection and well- being of many high-performance athletes in their country. Another benefit was that participants were given an opportunity to share their stories, express their beliefs around the subject and be assured that there is consideration, empathy and awareness about their experiences. Particularly for those who have been targets of bullying and harassment or other forms of abuse or discrimination, sharing insights and experiences was a therapeutic or a liberating moment for them.

Data Management

The research data I collected was stored in my personal computer. Additionally, in order to make sure I had extra copies of interview audios and transcripts; I stored the data in an external hard drive of mine. My computer is password protected and no one had access to it but myself. I was the only one using personal data of my participants but was also available upon request by my supervisors. Having submitted this dissertation, according to the Records and Data Retention Schedule Research and the guidance of the SSHL Research Ethics Subcommittee, the research data will be held in my research department, Global Health and Social Medicine, for 7 years after the study.

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Presentation of Data and Order of Chapters

In the coming sections (chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, and chapter 8), I present the analysis and interpretation of participant data. I highlight here that the order of the chapters was chosen so that the progression of the presentation of data reflected the core element of this thesis, how the boundaries are crossed, transgressed, and put aside, by the perpetrators, by institutions and by bystanders. I also considered more sensible for the reader, which could be others who had experienced abuse, as well as for myself, to intake the most powerful extracts in the middle of the results chapters. This allowed for a softer and logical progression on the breaking of boundaries with the beginning and end of data chapters. The first findings chapter that I discuss next, chapter 5, is called ‘Boundaries’ because I turn my attention to interpersonal boundaries. In particular, I discuss how banter, humour, and similar forms of communication foster bonding within teams, yet it is often difficult to identify when banter or humour can become harassing, humiliating or hurting. Also, in this chapter, I explore the perceptions of coaches regarding romantic involvement with their athletes, highlighting the context of the Mexican culture, which has its own ideals about masculinity and sexuality that inevitably play an important role in sport, and how this illuminates organisational tolerance towards bullying and harassment. In chapter 6, which I called Grooming and Transgression, I move on to how boundaries are transgressed to the point of psychological and physical harassment, and the forms this takes with a process called ‘grooming’, a concept I elaborate on later in this chapter. The data interpreted and presented in this chapter come from the accounts of three female track and field athletes to illustrate more precisely the manipulation process and the role the perpetrators play in this process. In chapter 7, I turn the focus to the actions and feelings towards speaking out or remaining silent about the experience with bullying and harassment. I discuss the situational context and motivations that led my participants to talk about the transgression and about their perpetrators. In exploring the aftermath of the experience, I also discuss coping processes, and consequences of reporting the harassment. I relate these experiences to the literature on how organisations which have less structured systems for reporting cases with bullying and harassment tend to be less well prepared to handling these types of situations,

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lacking support avenues for those who experience maltreatment. In the final empirical chapter of this investigation, chapter 8, I focus on my participants’ accounts, both athletes and coaches, regarding the safety and support for athletes in the site of research. I focus my discussion on the site of research safety culture, highlighting three ‘safety points’: firstly, psychosocial hazards and safety perceptions; secondly, risky venues; and thirdly, background checks and cultural differences.

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Chapter 5

Findings 1: Boundaries

Introduction

This chapter is the first of four main findings I gathered from my interviews with female athletes and coaches who participated in my investigation. I classified each finding as a theme, and each finding is related in different ways to the experience and understanding of bullying and harassment in the site of research. My purpose with this chapter is to offer many details about stories, forms of communication, and opinions not frequently voiced among my participants connected to the possibility of experiencing bullying and harassment. In doing so, and, with the rest of the chapters, I aim to give the reader a piece of the culture of the sport organisation where my participants come from. More specifically, this theme is focused on what I called Boundaries. I chose this term because the coach-athlete interactions that came up in my interviews have to do with interpersonal boundaries and aspects of the Mexican culture, such as forms of relating, socialisation and communication, that characterise normalisation of certain practices that could facilitate bullying and harassing behaviours at the site of research. For instance, practices which fall in the ‘grey’ area of friendly socialisation or risk of crossing of interpersonal boundaries in the track and field team that I explored will be discussed in more detail in the first section of this chapter. I provide my interpretations on what my participants said about the way they interact with one another in their team, which includes the jokes, the banter, also referred to as ‘albures’, a Mexican form of speech with sexual tones. In the following two sections of this chapter, I still focus on interpersonal boundaries, but I turn my attention to the perspective of my participants regarding romance between athletes and coaches. I then discuss my interpretations and the literature on whether these behaviours among athletes and coaches can result in conflict or transgression given the power differentials existing in the athlete-coach relationship. The interview excerpts that follow are related in that my participants answered

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similar questions about the nature of interactions between athletes and coaches in their team, and sometimes what they observed from other teams. I asked questions such as 'How do you get along with your coach/athletes?' or 'How is your relationship with your team like?'. I also asked questions regarding perceptions on intimate coach-athlete relationships, such as ‘Do coach-athletes relationships lend themselves to bullying and harassment? What’s your opinion?’, to explore whether those relationships could lead to bullying and harassment according to my participants’ views.

Banter and Safe Environment?

Banter, teasing, humour and other forms of communication and interaction have always been part of play and sport. In some ways, these are regarded as an ability of players to psychologically engage, play, interact and even distract opponents or team members. Duncan (2018) discusses that ‘boastful, humorous, insulting and provocative comments’ (p. 185) have been part of the atmosphere of friendly competitions among African American athletes, for example. Duncan (2018) also explains that ‘sledging’ is also embedded in the Australian cricket culture, whereby players use it as a tactic to gain an advantage. Similarly, Martin (2013) comments that banter is ‘firmly etched into the fabric of sporting culture’ and it just goes by different names such as sledging in cricket, chirping in ice hockey and trash-talking in basketball. Banter works because by verbally insulting in combination with humour and exaggeration, the opponents can break their concentration, feel more pressure and change performance. For some, it can be a form of maltreatment (Parry and Kavanagh, 2013) Furthermore, from an organisational point of view, Van Iterson et al (2011) go as far as to suggest that even the role of gossip facilitates group cohesiveness through entertainment, creating group morale and structuring social relationships within the group that participates in it. Additionally, and not surprisingly, as Van Iterson et al (2011) point out, gossip also works in maintaining group power structure, group norms, and as such, it is an element and a way to transmit an organisational culture. Along the same lines, Einarsen et al (2020) acknowledge that humour in workplaces has positive outcomes when it is reciprocal and can be played out by those involved.

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However, when humour is used to test new members, used for punishment or to differentiate between those who do not conform with the group and organisational norms, then humour can turn into bullying. Moving to the actual interviews, I found that banter, humour, jokes and related forms of communication do form part of the socialisation, the day-to-day interaction, of the teams that my interviewees form part of. Yet, as I will show further on, banter, humour, jokes, etc., will depend on who shares it as Einarsen et al (2020) note. Furthermore, since banter is related to social boundaries, it can also be argued that certain forms can possibly create an environment where stereotypes are repeated, thus a form of symbolic violence. In relation to organisational culture, banter, humour, gossip, and other forms of informal communication can be understood as the ‘underlife’ of an organisation because they are a way to express emotions, beliefs, norms, socialisation processes and the experience of organisational life (Van Iterson, 2011). This is important to keep in mind to better understand how data shared by my participants sheds light into the culture and organisation they are part of. In the examples ahead, I will show the role of banter in team dynamics and how, even for some participants, is not quite clear where to draw the line between a good-natured joke and one that insults. I start with Fernando, a track and field coach who specialises in training athletes for middle distances. I interviewed Fernando face-to-face at the site of research and he was always opened to establish communication with me for the purposes of my investigation. He had a friendly demeanour at the moment of the interview and seemed willing to give me answers about his team, his coaching style, and his thoughts on the problem of bullying and harassment in track and field. When we were discussing forms of bullying and I asked about his team’s behaviour and socialisation, he was aware that banter, jokes and even forms of physical expressions where part of socialisation, yet that certain forms of banter may not be appropriate, particularly with women present in the team. For example, Fernando referred to the type of banter that his team engaged in as ‘albur’, which is a Mexican figure of speech referring to humour and jokes around sexuality. The albur is part of the Mexican culture, which I discuss further on and seems to transfer also to the sport culture in the context of my research as a form of socialisation and bonding. The

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concept of the Mexican albur was mentioned by Fernando when I asked him if he could share with me how his relationship with his athletes was like. This is what Fernando answered:

Since most of us are adults, it’s more like companionship. Yes, there’s respect, there’s trust and communication. It’s not as much as if there is a teacher and then his students, you know? We are more like friends, all of us. They know that I can help them on how to run better and how to prepare the competitions. If anything, some out there get a little… they like the banter, but it doesn’t escalate to worse things. (P9, Fernando, coach)

With the intention to get more information about the banter and how this was expressed in the team, I probed Fernando by asking, ‘When you say that ‘they like the banter’, what do they say?’ to which he answered:

Hmm ... in Mexico, you know, is a country of a lot of…albures. It’s in that sense how we behave here. (P9, Fernando, coach)

Here we get a cultural insight from Fernando’s answer in that in Mexico, the albur is a common form of communication and social interaction. Again, I wanted to get more specific answers in the way the albur was used in the team and I asked further, ‘That [the albur] happens more among the women or among the men in your team?’, Fernando giving the following answer:

Well, as I tell you, most of my athletes are adults, both men and women. But, maybe, a couple of them don’t think much about what they say, especially in front of the women. (P9, Fernando, coach)

Fernando’s statements reveal a cultural tradition in Mexico that is important in the context of sport. Elaborating further on the concept of the 'albur', in Mexico it is a figure of speech that as essayist Mejía Prieto (1989) states, requires great mental agility. Accordingly, the albur has a place in Mexican literature and culture and it entails a kind of verbal exchange based on sexual value, around which those involved try to mock or disarm another person, typically of the same sex (Mejía Prieto, 1989). The Mexican albur can perhaps be best understood by Fernandez (1998) as innuendo that can reflect sexual and class struggles. Fernandez (1998) explains that through popular humour, such as the Mexican albur, one can identify which aspects of society are a cause of anxiety. For instance, one of the issues that troubles the Mexican people the most is male homosexuality (Fernandez, 1998). It would not be surprising then to hear homophobic comments among group of males in Mexico, including sports since the practice of sport has historically been linked with traditional notions of masculinity. In addition, from my own understanding of the Mexican culture, there can be two

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distinctive uses of albures. The first is as a way to show wit, high-culture, complex use of language and as a form of establishing manliness in the context of more educated Mexican social classes. The second, and perhaps, the most popular use of albures is as a sex speech. This form of albur can entail words and phrases with sexual innuendos in a way that can be considered rude or vulgar and can be associated to people of lower social status because of the words or slang used. In this sense, the uses of the albur can reflect social prejudices among social classes, as Fernandez (1998) noted before. Furthermore, albures are usually employed by men more than women and can reflect the ‘machismo’ culture of Mexico. Moreover, Roldán and Malak (2019) express that albures and ‘piropos’ (flirtatious compliments or catcalls) are common practices among Mexican people, whereby through ‘sexually loaded verbal approaches’ (p. 234) one party is more validated than the other. The validation oftentimes is on the traditional attributes of male masculinity and the perceived fragility, chastity and purity of women. What is more, Roldán and Malak (2019) also highlight that the albures and piropos are the primary examples of street harassment in Mexico in that they reproduce misogyny, stereotypes around beauty, social capital and heterosexual paradigms. We see then that albures are a strong component of the Mexican culture and are a sign of the way people engage and communicate with one another, helping establish their positions among social groups. In the context of sport and this interview, Fernando seems to know what sort of communication and interaction among team members takes place with his athletes when he mentions the word albur. Interestingly, Fernando is also aware about the power dynamics of his team in terms of their age. For instance, Fernando says, ‘It’s not as much as if there is a teacher and then his students, you know?’, he seems to imply a sense of comradery in his team, considering that in the teacher-student relationship there would exist a greater interpersonal distance and perhaps greater power status in one side more than the other, than in other kinds of relationships. The analogy of the teacher-student relationship is also marked by important age differences that Fernando did not seem to have with his team, claiming the majority of the members of his team were adults, and therefore such interpersonal distance as in the teacher-student relationship does not exist. This could also signify less formality in the way the coach interacts with his athletes and the other way around too, that the athletes

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approach the coach in friendly, informal way. Furthermore, by mentioning that ‘albures’ are commonplace and that ‘a couple of them don’t think much about what they say, especially in front of the women’ does reveal a blurred boundary and a potential for misunderstanding. Power dynamics might be at play here too in the sense that men might engage in forms of humour or gendered communication that reinforce men and women societal roles and identities in the team. Yet Fernando also seems to play with the concept of companionship in the group dynamics. It seemed, from his perspective, that the dynamics of his team were generally friendly but at times could become more aggressive with the type of language that is used with the albures. Still from what he tells, we cannot gather if in their context albures have more positive or negative outcomes in team members. I also found interesting that Fernando seemed to have a different conceptualisation of how bullying and albures can be interpreted. From the way Fernando explained it, he draws a distinction between bullying and albures in terms of intentionality to hurt, with the albures seemingly being hurtful or denigrating as it is a type of humoristic communication I Although engaging in albures can imply a creative use of language and signify a form of social interaction, it can be used also to offend and denigrate others regardless of intention as Roldán and Malak (2019) explained. Here the distinction between what would count as albur and what would count as bullying is less clear than what Fernando purports it to be, since some albures, perhaps those with more sexual tones, can be taken in different ways by team members. When interviewing Fernando and probing him to see if there could be similarities between bullying and the albures, he said they were not the same thing. Fernando explained that ‘Bullying is saying things that offend. Saying things like 'why do you train so much if you can’t run? Or ‘can’t you see that you're really fat and want to run at my pace...?’. When I enquired more directly if he had ever seen or heard about cases of sexual harassment or bullying in his or other groups of his sport organisation he said:

In all honesty, no. Sexual harassment is very rare, bullying…it may happen more through jokes or albures. If the athletes are young, there may be some ‘hand games’...right? In my group, that has not happened to such a degree. It’s always the laughs, some jokes, but a great conflict has never occurred. (P9, Fernando, coach)

I sought clarification by asking, ‘What do you mean by ‘hand games’?’ and Fernando clarified:

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Yes…being pushed around a bit or giving another a pat on the back, things like that. Sometimes they don’t like it. That, I think, is seen more in the younger ones. I have also seen some young athletes fooling around and then they can’t take any jokes back. But other than that, I haven’t seen much of a conflict. (P9, Fernando, coach)

From what Fernando stated, we see that the distinction of what is a joke, albur, banter or bullying and harassment is not clear. He had previously tried to draw a distinction between what bullying and what albures were, the latter being something apparently more friendly in tone and intention. Yet the way our conversation developed shows that he does link bullying through jokes and albures at some point. It is an interesting contradiction, which gives insight into the possible ways that bullying, or harassment could be justified or minimised in the name of just joking. For example, when Fernando refers to the younger athletes, ‘I have also seen some young athletes fooling around and then they can’t take any jokes back. But other than that, I haven’t seen much of a conflict’, we do not know if this kind of behaviour is contributing to the normalisation of a lax and potentially hostile environment. We cannot gather what ‘much of a conflict means’ and it could well mean that there are indeed light-hearted jokes just as athletes truly feeling uncomfortable in the environment when this occurs.

I focused on Fernando’s interview extensively because he provided the space to discuss a cultural phenomenon in Mexico in terms of gender relations, social norms, sexuality and its relationship with bullying and harassment. Using Schein’s model of culture here, we see that Fernando reveals a basic assumption, which is what individuals believe about their reality. The assumption that the ‘albur’ is a Mexican feature shows us how it colours human experience and interaction even in sporting contexts. Sexualised communication, which can be funny or aggressive, and distinctive of the Mexican albur, then might be present in other areas and levels of the sport organisation beyond the sub-culture of the track and field team. Along the same lines, the next interview is with Karina, she specialised in middle- distances and is also a duathlon specialist, a running and cycling event only, without the swimming element that makes a triathlon. I met Karina at the site of research, but due to her schedule and my travel needs, we could not have an interview face-to-face and she was willing to have an online interview with me. With Karina as with Fernando, I enquired about her team dynamics to gather information about how they socialised, the rituals or norms that were followed and allowed. Interestingly, Karina also acknowledged forming part of a similar

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banter environment. When I asked about how she related to her teammates and about the type of interactions inside her team, she responded:

We’re many. There’s a group that likes to joke all the time. And there’s a group that is super quiet. Despite being both with the same coach, these two groups are very different. I train with both. (P11, Karina, athlete)

I enquired further, ‘When you say that one group likes to joke all the time, what exactly do you mean? What do they do?’

Well, plain rudeness, even pushing. Or a lot of albures or things like that. (P11, Karina, athlete)

‘Do you also get into that?’, I asked:

When I'm there in that group, yes (laughs). When I’m with ‘calmer’ people, you measure yourself. When you're with more daring people, you let yourself go. (P11, Karina, athlete)

‘Do you feel comfortable in that environment? Or could it be you do it to fit in that group?’, I probed further’ and Karina frankly answered:

Look, I'm not that fan, to be honest, of certain jokes. And I'm more of a positive person and not being rude and so on. But I'm not going to lie to you, I've done it too. I've been there, and I've done it. I don't feel completely right about it ... but I've done it. (P11, Karina, athlete)

Here Karina is straightforward about her feelings and behaviour towards teammates. To me, Karina seems to have learned to navigate the social dynamics of the team, learning what to say when in the presence of certain team members, giving insight into her sport environment. For instance, as shown in the quotes, we see that Karina acknowledges that joking is commonplace in the group and behaviours such as rudeness are likely tolerated in their social interactions, as well as other forms of physical contact such as pushing. When she states ‘plain rudeness’, she did not seem to refer to these behaviours as being necessarily used intentionally in a hurtful way but does accept they are common. Additionally, her answer to why she participated in the banter was intriguing because although Karina did not deny or admitted that she participated in the same type of behaviour as her teammates in order to fit in with the group, she is very honest about taking part in it, despite not liking certain forms of jokes. This would suggest to me that there is some pressure within the group to act in certain ways. However, this pressure does not come in direct form, but rather indirectly by the force of the majority of the group being more or less ‘calm’, as Karina stated in Spanish (calma).

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In addition to Karina, Adriana, a sprinter, also provided similar insights reflective of the group communication and dynamics in her training environment. For example, when I asked her ‘how do the athletes get along with each other in the group?’, she responded:

Aha, well, almost all women are 15 or 16 years old. They are younger, so we get along well with each other. With men too. But I say, sometimes, well, men are a little bit ‘loose’. (P10, Adriana, athlete)

I asked for more elaboration on this reference and this is what Adriana said:

Well ... I don’t know. Sometimes ... I mean, I hear they make comments like ... I don’t know ... disrespectful but in the form of banter. They don’t do it with me because I feel like they have a little more respect for the same reason that I’m like the oldest one and almost everyone [in the team] is younger than me. Rather, they tease each other and the younger ones ... but not me. Also, because I've been here [in the team] the longest... they never tell me things. In fact, I feel like they get along with me. (P10, Adriana, athlete)

Adriana seems well aware that her age matters in the type of relationships that have developed in her team. From the previous quote, we gather that Adriana’s environment involved training with athletes of different ages, some who are younger than her, and perhaps this age difference grants her with more respect from others. Interestingly, similar to other accounts in this section, Adriana revealed a possible gendered pattern in the way male athletes behave in her environment when she expressed that sometimes men are ‘a little loose’. The term Adriana used in Spanish was ‘llevaditos’, which is a colloquialism to refer to someone’s behaviour as lax. This Spanish term is also used when someone seeks to get a reaction from another person. For example, a child who tests their parents’ rules while at the same time not having a tantrum or necessarily behaving wrongly. I came up with the word ‘loose’ as a translation because I thought that best described Adriana’s perspective on some of her teammate’s behaviour. What Adriana shares here is important regarding normalised behaviours that could escalate to bullying and harassment or even count as bullying and harassment and compare to the other two participants I have discussed. The descriptions from participants Karina and Fernando relate to Adriana’s in the ways humour appears to affect the social norms their participant’s teams. While humour, the use of slang, and other forms of communication in my participant teams arise in non-harming ways, I also highlight that these participants have acknowledged instances of prejudice disguised as jokes. I exemplify this further with the following excerpt from Adriana, when [ I continued asking her for more detail about the kinds of things her

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teammates would say, having noticed that she uses the words ‘comments’, ‘disrespectful’, ‘banter’ and ‘tease’. Adriana responded the following:

I've heard them say things like: ‘Oh, you're so fat!’ to other girls. Or that sometimes guys make fun of girls or they are a little vulgar with each other. I mean, like saying typical sex jokes. The same doesn’t happen with the girls but since they are there in the track all the time, obviously they listen.

Curious to learn about how normal joking I subsequently said to Adriana, ‘Okay, okay. How normal do you think this of the team? Or of other teams from here?’ and Adriana expressed:

Here…I say, yes, it’s normal. There are some days that I train at the university and, no, I don’t perceive the same environment. Like everyone is much more respectful. (P10, Adriana, athlete)

Here we have evidence that part of the humour existing in Adriana’s context involves sexism through jokes. This is shown when Adriana refers to what she sees as vulgar behaviours, ‘typical sex jokes’ from some of her team members, particularly younger males. While there are no references to direct bullying and harassment from what Adriana told me, what she shared about the behaviours of other teammates and her own authority in the team the due to her age and time spent on the team highlights a socialisation process. Additionally, the way Adriana, Karina and Fernando expressed how interactions occur in their teams, through albures, ‘plain rudeness’, physical contact such as ‘pushing’ and ‘hand games’ and ‘typical sex jokes’ may be contributing to hypermasculine environments that researchers have pointed as facilitating bullying and harassment (Brackenridge, 2002; Anderson, 2009; Appleby and Foster, 2013; Howe, 2015). Thus, it may well be that the sport culture in the site of research that my participants belong to in Jalisco, may allow, through socialisation processes, sexist and homophobic language. Adapting to and brushing off rude comments and vulgar jokes that reflect societal sexism in Mexico might be more common than the opposite, intervening or stopping whenever these arise in teams. To conclude this section, I comment that, as provided in chapter 2, researchers (Brackenridge and Kirby, 1997; Fasting, 2007; Mountjoy et al, 2016; Parent and Fortier, 2018) have noted that age can be a risk factor for bullying and harassment. However, age as a protective factor relative to the rest of the athlete’s team has not been explored in detail yet. Additionally, the coach-athlete risk to violence has been a focal point in research on sport abuse, but less has been discussed about how elite young athletes can also contribute to a

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hostile environment and what the role of coaches or bystanders such as other team members are in allowing this, which also has to do with socialisation and cultural processes in sport organisations.

Coaching styles and athlete behaviours: Do coach-athletes relationships lend themselves to bullying and harassment?

I move now to another section that I related to interpersonal boundaries which is the theme of this empirical chapter. Besides exploring forms of banter or teasing during the interviews, I also aimed to find out what my participants thought about the susceptibility of coach-athlete interactions to bullying and harassment, and what they knew about the issue. Some athletes, such as Gaby, a middle-distance runner, were certain that coach-athlete relationships in their environment are susceptible to bullying and harassment based on their own experience with it. For instance, I asked her ‘I would also like to ask you about your perceptions regarding the relationship between athletes and coaches. In general, do you think these relationships lend themselves to the bullying and harassment of athletes?’, and she short and clearly put it:

Yes, a hundred per cent. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

I probed for further examples, ‘Why do you say so? Can you give me more detail?’, this was Adriana’s answer:

Well ... I already went through something like that before I came to the master's selection…and it was with a woman. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

I will discuss Gaby’s case in more detail in the next chapter. However, here we can appreciate that her perception regarding coach-athlete relationships being prone to abuse is based on her experience with abuse, and also on her own observations in the site of research. I asked Gaby if, besides her own experience, she was aware of other types of abuses in the place where she trains, to which she gave quite alarming information. For example, at the interview I said to Gaby, ‘I’d like to ask you if you are aware of any incident of abuse, whether verbal or sexual, that has occurred in the organisation?’ This was our dialogue and her answers:

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Oh, yes. There is verbal abuse there every day. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

I said: ‘Really? Why?’:

To the sprinters, I see, there are terrible humiliations. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

‘What do they say to athletes?’ I asked. Gaby’s response was:

Well ... assholes and that they are useless and that they will not achieve anything. That is the daily bread. And kids huh, too. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

‘To both men and women?’

Yes, men and women. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

What about sexual harassment?

Here there was indeed a case where there was a Cuban coach and they fired him because of the abuse to his young athletes. But then they hired him again, for about two years. I could tell you more stories, gossip not only about romantic relationships, but also about doping. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

The term ‘daily bread’ in Spanish (el pan de cada día) is used to refer to the ordinary, to events that occur repetitively. Here Gaby speaks of the daily bread of verbal abuse as if it was normalised. Verbal abuse is what athletes, in particular sprinters, as she observed, experience it on a daily basis. This narrative from Gaby, also illuminate us about methods coaches might employ to push athletic performance. In comparison, when I asked Mariana, another middle-distance specialist and with no previous experience of bullying and harassment as Gaby had shared, about whether certain athlete and coach interactions could lead to bullying and harassment, she expressed the following:

Yes, I think so. The environment is very relaxed. The athletes are very sociable, they live with many people all the time, right? And yes, there are certain behaviours that can be misinterpreted. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

‘Can you give me an example?’, I asked:

Sometimes as a woman, we can be very affectionate, like hugging others so much. You know well, that, as a woman, sorry, but it doesn’t apply much to say, 'I'm like that'. As a woman, we always have to keep that distance so that it doesn't affect us or seem that we're transmitting other messages that aren't what we want to transmit. In other words, I can be very affectionate and show a lot of affection to other people, but I always keep that line. With whom? Well, with people who can be ... the coach, the authority in certain organisations, right? You know that sometimes showing so much affection can be misinterpreted. Always, one, as a woman, has to be more suspicious.

Probing again, I asked ’Do you mean...being a woman in Mexico?’ and Mariana explained:

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Sure, in terms of safety. But being a woman all over the world too, right? Keeping that line of respect and being good, I hope, can be differentiated from the other line of excessive confidence and affection with others. And yes, it happens. I'm a woman and I do see that there're women who behave very informally, giving flirtatious compliments to members of sports organisations and then they complain... I mean, I'm not going to tell the president of the Federation how handsome he is. I don't do that. I don't do that because, I tell you, why distort the messages, no? And I'm cool and others in the sport know me well, but I don’t have that kind of attitude. So, it's not only the coaches but how women behave with them too. (P5, Mariana, athlete)

At the beginning of this interview excerpt with Mariana, she provides an account of the informality of interactions among athletes and coaches from her context. My interpretation is that boundaries may not be well-defined, there might be a lax environment. Mariana acknowledges this by saying that indeed there is a ‘very relaxed’ environment and that certain behaviours can be misinterpreted. Her choice of words is important because they describe a form of interaction that could be a cause for the misinterpretation of behaviours. Moreover, the terms Mariana uses to refer to women as ‘affectionate’ also imply an assertion of women’s nature and actions that women in her environment carry out. By saying that ‘woman can be very affectionate’, she is implying something about the nature of women. Her comments seem to suggest that being affectionate is part of women’s social interactions. At the same time, Mariana is cautious about this affectionate behaviour and emphasises that women ought not to give unintended messages to others. For instance, Mariana says, ‘But being a woman all over the world too, right? Keeping that line of respect and being good, I hope, can be differentiated from the other line of excessive confidence and affection with others. She is aware of not giving any information that can be taken as sexual advances. She does not specify that these behaviours are sexual. But she hints at this by saying ‘we always have to keep that distance so that it doesn't affect us or seem that we're transmitting other messages that aren't what we want to transmit’ or ‘You know that sometimes showing so much affection can be misinterpreted. Always, one, as a woman, has to be more suspicious’. We have to consider that, historically, sport has been constructed in a way that has excluded women and their development in a competitive context (McNamee, 2008; Messner and Sabo, 2012; Fischer et al, 2013). To this day, women’s sport is still unequal to men’s in terms of public recognition, social acceptance and economic support. This social order in sport is but a reflection of a wider social context in which women are expected, very subtly,

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to contain themselves and to tolerate forms of discrimination and aggression (2017). In a way, this part of the interview with Mariana shows a discourse (sport) within another discourse (women’s ‘nature’ and women in society). Fairclough (2003, 2010) considers language not as a passive reflection of the external world, but language as performing actions. Therefore, when Mariana uses the words ‘distorted messages’ and ‘always keep that line’, this kind of language evidences a deeply rooted social reality, as well as actions, based on women’s exclusion and behaviour expectation that transfer to sport. The fact that not all women are affectionate, yet Mariana communicates this as a general feature of women reveals a cultural belief system. The language she uses describes the way she thinks about and perceives the world. Mariana seems to draw upon not only her knowledge of sport, but also from her society which eventually play out in the sport context she is in. Furthermore, Mariana does not refer to men or other coaches as something specific such as being less affectionate. The mere omission of men’s behaviour could also point to aspects of them that are also assumed to exist in her culture and sport environment. Intriguing is also what Mariana suggested regarding women being also responsible for their actions and whether the messages conveyed in those actions are misinterpreted. By saying ‘it's not only the coaches but how women behave with them too’, illustrates, again, how boundaries at the level athlete-coach might be unclear or lax. Cultural insights from Mexico and how they influence gendered behaviour in sport in relation to bullying and harassment are also provided by Hugo, a coach specialist in both long and middle distances. I asked Hugo the following question, ‘How do you get along with your athletes? And would you think relationships between coaches and athletes lend themselves to harassment?’, to which he replied:

Yes. Look, I'm not a closed-minded person. But I don't like the idea that an athlete depends on me. And many coaches are like that. They feel the owners of the athletes… And the harassment comes when, without knowledge or anything, the athlete has an injury and well, coaches say, ‘tell me where it hurts’… here! Oh, let me see’, without knowing how to deal with it. I would say, if I have no knowledge on how to treat that injury, I will take you to the physiotherapist or a person skilled in injury treatment. And look, I have studied sports injuries, I’m qualified. But I tell you sincerely, I, strictly, in parts that I began to consider to be ‘not recommended’, I don’t use my hands. Even if my athletes ask me, because some do tell me, ‘coach, it hurts here’ and I answer ‘yes, ok, from here to here I can touch you whatever you want. But from there to there, I take you with another person more expert. Why do I do this? Because most Latinos are ‘hot blooded’, very affectionate and whatever you want. But we can also be very malicious. And that lends itself to sexual harassment, that you already touched the girl in one place and then you’re already thinking about how you are going to do it to create a similar

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situation. So, in that aspect one must have a lot of ethics and many coaches don't have it. (P14, Hugo, coach)

Hugo’s answer makes reference to what researchers have noted about the power imbalance and misuse of power in the coach-athlete relationship. We see references to physical touch with massages and where roles are not clearly between coaches and athletes. So much so that for this coach, Hugo, this is an inappropriate behaviour and refrains to engage in physical touch that can be taken as a sexual gesture. Hugo uses the expression ‘not recommended’ (‘no recomendables’ in Spanish) to parts of the body that are considered private or culturally sensual and sexual. Additionally, Hugo states that Latin Americans are ‘hot blooded’, referring to the way they express affection towards others and understanding of personal space. However, Hugo, also ties this ‘very affectionate’ way of behaviour in a way that can be malicious, as he expressed. I understood this to be a reflection of gendered roles in Mexico regarding courtship or seduction and persistence in romantic affection even when the other side declines it. Moving on to another participant athlete, Marcela, a sprinter, and also without previous experience with bullying and harassment, when I asked her about how her relationship with her coaches was, she seemed to have a positive relationship. Yet what she shared about her impressions regarding the behaviours of other coaches and athletes is revealing about boundary lines. This is her answer:

I get along very well with them because they are my boyfriend's parents. They are very effective coaches and are very respectful. In fact, that's why I came to train with them. I really liked how they work in terms of their roles as coaches and compared to other coaches. (P13, Marcela, athlete)

‘Why do you say, ‘compared to other coaches’?’, I asked looking for more information. Marcela gave me this answer:

Because I have seen other coaches, they hug their athletes, or that they are giving them massages on the track. And, yes, I’ve seen this happen here, in other places, in other states [in the country] too. Those things I think that don’t go with me, no. I see the athletes seeing this as so normal that they say nothing. In fact, I’ve even seen other athletes asking their coach to give them massages. So, it's weird because he’s the coach, not the physical therapist. (P13, Marcela, athlete)

‘Why do you find this as inappropriate?’, I enquired:

Because I think there must be a space of respect. Everyone has their job. For example, the coach should only be dedicated to training you, giving you your plan and only that. That's why you have your

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physiotherapist, that's why you have your nutritionist, that's why you have your psychologist. In that part this is how I take it. (P13, Marcela, athlete)

A positive relationship between athletes and coaches can have a substantial influence on several aspects of the athlete’s life and sport and similar outcomes on the coach as well. The role of the coach is to provide the right conditions for the athlete to learn and improve the skills of the sport, as well as a help the athlete cope and engage with competitive environments. Jowett and Cockerill (2003) point out that coach-athlete relationships go beyond mere instructional skills and reciprocity, trust and a helping nature is essential to meet goals, needs and wants. In this situation, the relationship works well for both the athlete and the coach. We can appreciate that the athlete feels comfortable in the way she refers to the coach. Yet we also have insights, shadow data, from other teams in the location she is in and from other sport environments she has been part of. The athlete-coach dynamics she has described illuminates how intimate such relationships and the varied responsibilities coaches can take. The coach often takes on different roles, such as a teacher, mentor, parent and even a romantic partner (Jowett and Cockerill, 2003). The coach then is often someone who is close to the athlete at the physical, emotional and also organisational since the coach is the one who schedules, prepares, and manages competitions and travels. Yet, again, we see that athletes, such as Marcela, perceive certain behaviours within the coach-athlete relationship as inappropriate and lacking boundaries in terms of roles and responsibilities. To conclude this section, I discuss the interview with Luis, a coach who specialises in training athletes for sprint and middle-distances and who also manages youth groups of high- performance track and field athletes. I interviewed Luis with an online call since due to travel and time constraints it was not possible to meet him in person. I perceived Luis to be a serious coach, he had a raspy and low-pitched voice that gave me this perception of seriousness. Furthermore, given his age and his coaching background, he also sounded as if he had plenty of experience in coaching track and field athletes. I thought he would have plenty of stories to share, but I found him rather cautious when talking about instances of abuse in sport. As I did with the rest of my participants, I asked Luis how his relationship with his athletes was like and what his thoughts on bullying and harassment in sport were. One of the questions was ‘Could you tell me how the environment is like of the groups of athletes that

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you train? How do they get along with each other? How do athletes get along with you? Can you give me details of that environment?’

Yes. Well, to me, the athletes, first of all, the relationship between them, I make sure they relate to each other according to their ages as much as possible, so that there aren’t big age differences. And well, the environment is that not everyone lives in exactly the same place. Some come and go together, and some don't. A training schedule is set and not everyone arrives at exactly that time because they come from different places, obviously. When they’re in training, well, the environment is totally respectful. Acts of disrespect are not accepted to avoid the feeling that there is someone who is a bullying type. They’re are not allowed. I don’t allow nonsense, or bad words to be said because they then get used to it. I train students-athletes too and exchanging points of view is okay, it adds certain dynamic to trainings, but up to a point as to not lose focus. (P2, Luis Coach)

From the start, Luis seems to set up rules in what is allowed and not allowed to do with his athletes in his team. He also seems aware of age differences, and although he does not give detail as to why age differences are important in the dynamics of the team, Luis seeks harmony and coherence within his team. Furthermore, when asked, Luis told me that he had not been directly involved in any problem related to abuse in sport. In a way, this made sense to me given his demeanour as a serious and senior coach. However, it also made think twice how a coach with an extensive career had not had any conflicts at all. I probed Luis looking to find more information related to my research topic. So, I said to him ‘I’m intrigued that you have told me that bullying, violence and harassment exist in different parts of Mexico and in sport as well. But I’m surprised that you have been in track and field for a long time as a coach, and you have not found problems in the sport environment. I would like to take you to reflect more on your career in your sport and maybe you can realise something that could have happened and that was related to violence and abuse?’ This was his answer:

As I said, I personally, haven’t directly seen something like that, to tell you the truth. Fortunately, because of my habits, my customs, my education… well, yes, fortunately, I haven’t seen or been directly or indirectly involved in anything like that. My relationship with my athletes is like this…very like a ‘hermetic’ type, but in the end my athletes feel good. I’m the classic coach who just says hello and perhaps a handshake at the track. Neither a kiss nor a hug. If they [athletes] win at a competition…a little congratulatory greeting, perhaps a quick hug, and that’s it. So far, I would say that until now I haven’t been in trouble. Unfortunately, violence, in one way or another, and abuse, not just sexual, but psychological or otherwise, I’m well aware that it occurs in the sport and outside of it obviously. Sometimes it’s in offices, even in religious events… and sports, well, it’s not the exception. …There was a very mentioned case, here in Jalisco, of a Cuban coach who abused his athletes. But I personally, for ethical and professional reasons, wouldn’t want to discuss it. There are things that are posted on the Facebook and social media of the athlete who reported him. But apparently it wasn’t the first time and he already had a record… But well, that's the only thing I can let you know. I don’t doubt that in other states or even in the facilities of the Mexican Olympic Centre these cases happen. (P2,

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Luis, coach)

Luis’s information is insightful in that he is one example of a coach that makes explicit reference to appropriate behaviour between coaches and athletes. There is even a hint that he might be too distant when he refers to himself as ‘hermetic’. In Spanish, the word ‘hermetico’ is often used to refer to an aspect of someone’s personality as hard to break or difficult to disarm or even get to know. In this case, however, Luis uses this word to also specify that he is aware of the risks of touching and informal forms of communication such as the ones I explored at the beginning of this chapter. It is also interesting to compare Luis’s with Marcela’s and Hugo’s perspectives, discussed above, between what coaches should and should not do with their athletes. For these three participants, coaches should not engage in roles that are beyond their roles as coaches, and which seems to happen often at the site of research. However, these perspectives from these participants also demonstrate their work ethic, respect and professional preparation to do their job

Coach-Athletes Romantic and Sexual Relationships: Perceptions

In enquiring about team dynamics and types of interactions among coaches and athletes, a topic that was discussed during the interviews was that of romantic relationships between coaches and athletes. The study of coach and athlete relationships has been a topic of interest in sport science for a long time given its influence on sport performance outcomes (Jowett and Cockerill, 2003). However, arguably, this research makes reference to coaching styles and athlete dynamics in terms of suitability for the athlete’s peak performance, the coaches’ career and other personal or developmental benefits that may derive from these interactions (Jowett and Cockerill, 2003). However, less studied has been coach-athlete relationships as couples or within sexual relationships and what the implications are for sport, for athletes and their safeguarding. Johansson et al. (2016) do provide from their study that coach-athletes sexual relationships result in ethical dilemmas because the professional and private spheres intersect, and it becomes a particularly highly sensitive issue when those relationship occur within legal boundaries as with underage or young athletes.

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To exemplify these ethical dilemmas that Johansson et al. (2016) discussed, consider Guillermo’s narrative, a coach and sport psychologist specialising in resistance training for triathlon in the site of my research. Guillermo, in his role as a sport psychologist, has worked with athletes with cases of abuse and harassment and shared with me his perceptions regarding coach-athlete romantic relations. He also provided me with more information on what he thought about the relationships between coaches and underage athletes. What is more, during the interview he mentioned knowing of some coaches and athletes that had ended in marriage, an observation that other participants from this research also noted. Probing and looking to find out more about this, I asked Guillermo how he saw the current state of these coach-athlete relationships and whether he thought romantic involvement among coaches and athletes was common at the site of my research. This is how he put it:

Well, what happens is that we should talk about the politically correct and the incorrect. We should talk about values. We should talk about the moral, the ethical ... yes? The principles. That is, truly, here you enter a somewhat difficult invisible line. To begin with, the coach, whether male or female, who stands in front of groups…there are infatuations as such, yes? Mainly stemming from the athlete towards the coach, mainly. And here we find several variations. That is, it’s not just saying this is good, bad or regular. It seems to me that this has several aspects… For example, one, I'll tell you ... one of the situations... What happens with that infatuation and they end up getting married? I mean, uh …come on, it was a natural process. And we are talking about adults. But what happens when there is that infatuation, the coach with the kid or someone who is a minor...The only ones who don’t want to see it are sometimes parents. Sometimes the officials, the managers. I mean, this is ... if it’s not a common practice ... I mean, it happens. When one of the parties doesn’t have a certain stability, especially the coach, female or male. (P12, coach/psych)

It intrigued me that Guillermo seemed to allude that the romantic relationships among coaches and athletes are rooted in some instability from the part of coaches. So, I probed him by asking, ‘What do you mean by ‘having stability’?’ Guillermo answered:

Well, what happens if I, as a coach, I will put myself as an example and not third parties… Regardless of sexual orientation, if I don’t have a partner and I’m looking for a relationship of any kind, emotional, sentimental ... I have people in ‘captivity’, who are my athletes. I mean…where is the ethics and morality. You know, that's also what I mean by your stability as a couple. Your stability of life, your integral development of personality. If I have my partner and we don’t have any problem, even if I have ten athletes who are in love with me ... well ... I mean, I have my commitment. That’s the principle. There is ethics and morals. You ‘copy’ me, do you not? (P12, Guillermo, coach/psych)

This excerpt with Guillermo illustrates his perceptions and thinking process regarding relations that occur between athletes and coaches. In a way it reflects what Bringer et al. (2002) and Johannsson et al. (2016) have explained regarding conflicting moral and ethical views in coaching practices and coach-athlete romantic relationships in sport. We can

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identify that Guillermo draws on knowledge associated with what is proper and improper such as values, morality and ethics. Furthermore, he does not deny that these romantic interactions occur among athletes and coaches, to the contrary. While he does not directly state this, he is able to convey this message without being direct about it. Moreover, Guillermo seems careful, perhaps even a little reluctant to judge these interactions between athletes and coaches as ‘good, bad or regular’ and points out to a ‘difficult invisible line’. Bringer et al. (2002), studied 19 British swimming coaches’ constructions of appropriateness of sexual relationships among athletes and coaches, and they reported that coaches’ perceptions of sexual relationships with underage athletes were generally understood as inappropriate. Moreover, when asked about athletes of legal age and sexual relationships, constructions of appropriateness were less clear. Interestingly, Bringer et al. (2002) also reported finding that coaches’ perceptions of appropriateness of sexual behaviour with their athletes conflicted with their preconceived ideas of ‘good coaching’, which is something that I see reflected from the interview with Guillermo. For instance, Guillermo does recognise, by mentioning it, that it is possible for athletes and coaches, including minors, to feel attraction to one another. He does so in a way that is not necessarily explicit because he plays with ethics, morality, principles and the politically correct, but is signified by the choice of terms he uses. Furthermore, Stefansen et al (2019), echoing past research, point out that coach- athlete sexual relationships are still a contested social phenomenon with conflicting views in modern sport. In their study about athletes’ perceptions on coach-athlete relationships they reported that the athletes, their study participants, considered 'illegal CASR (coaches dating underage athletes) as morally wrong in all cases' (p. 4). Yet 'legal CARS' seemed more legitimate although the line between illegitimate and legitimate CARS appeared to be malleable. Take Miguel, for example, a coach who specialised in long distances and triathlon. He shared what he ‘has heard’ regarding peculiar interactions between coaches and underage athletes. During the interview, Miguel was careful in making clear that he had not witnessed or been part of any incident of bullying and harassment. However, he reported that he had heard many ‘rumours and comments’ that had later been confirmed by the news or reports

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by other organisations. I asked him, ‘Of the rumours and comments that have come to you, what have these been about?’. This is what he said:

Of ... well, uh ... they started with situations that such a coach gave a gift to the girl, girls of maybe 12,13,14, years old. I don’t really know. And then, obviously, the girl gets confused. (P7, Miguel, coach)

I found this a powerful statement and wanted to clarify asking, ‘When you say girls ... are we talking about minors or women of legal age?’ Because in Mexico, socially, women older than 18 are still usually called girls. Miguel clarified with the following:

Yes, I know. No. That's why I make the distinction and I mention the age. Yes, they’re that age. That’s something that gets my attention. The matter is not whether they are of legal age or not is good or bad. Simply, that I’m struck by such information... coaches starting to want to confuse such a small girl. Someone who has, maybe, the power to manipulate her. To be able to give, maybe, a gift or detail with the intention that, maybe, fulfils some need of the coach and the girl, then gets the best ... the opportunity to go to some competition. (P7, Miguel, coach)

Miguel seems to suggest some kind of intentionality from the coach towards the girls, and this can be exemplified when he says, ‘the girl gets confused’. He further states that he is ‘struck by such information... coaches starting to want to confuse such a small girl’. In this regard, previous studies do suggest that coaches may use different forms of persuasion to retain an athlete or to make athletes comply with abuse and harassment (Brackenridge, 2001, 2003). Additionally, Brackenridge (2001, 2003) explains further that often the responsibilities and demands given to child athletes are blurred, mimicking those of adults. Likewise, adult athletes can be infantilised, overseeing their individual needs and personal boundaries. Johansson et al. (2016) recognise that there are subjective dimensions that are at play in coach-athlete romantic relationships. However, even if it involves underage athletes, they suggest not implying that these kinds of relationships will lead to bullying and harassment or are inherently wrong. However, it is a research-based fact that abusive coach-athlete romantic relationships do occur in sports, and in the interviews that I gathered, stories do provide an insight of the potential problems these relationships might bring. Hugo illustrated this well. He spoke in an authoritative and serious tone about being against such coach-athlete relationships when I asked what his thoughts were on the subject and whether he had witnessed such relationships throughout his career. He stated:

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Throughout life I have seen a lot, I know many coaches ... Well, let me tell you about one of them specifically. He had a group of about 30 athletes, mostly semi-professional competitive level, and other high-performance amateurs. The coach had an outstanding athlete, and the athlete had a partner, they even planned to get married. But the coach seduced the athlete and had no ethics to do so. The coach even had his own family, having children and his wife. So, that I saw it as an aberrant thing and it’s the main cause of the abuses, which is the lack of preparation, the lack of morals and ethics of the coaches. (P14, Hugo, coach)

What Hugo recounts here exemplifies again how romantic relationships among coaches and athletes are complex, but also how these relationships are still perceived as not entirely correct and prone to kinds of abuse. Moreover, taking together the perceptions and attitudes from coaches such as Guillermo, Hugo and Miguel, they provide an insight of how coach-athletes intimate relationships can occur and how mixed the views are about them in the site of research. We see from the narratives that the romantic or ‘infatuation’ potential of relationships between athletes and coaches, while ‘natural’ in some ways, they can be part of an association with success and sport progress that may be difficult to separate. Similarly, coaches can depend and associate the athletes’ sport success with their own career advancement. In addition, because athletes can have a strong bond with a coach and vice versa, both athletes and coaches may perceive that both are dependent on each other. The question is not necessarily whether or not these kinds of romantic and sexual relationships happen among coaches-athletes, which often display differences in age, physicality and authority, but rather it is about how to discuss them and how these are viewed and fit in sport. In the following chapter, I explore in greater depth how bullying and harassment was experienced by three of my participant athletes, detailing different forms of abuses of power given the greater authority position of the perpetrators. It will also be evident how coaches and athletes may misunderstand the closeness of the coach-athlete relationship and use it to subjugate the athlete or justify harassment.

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Chapter 6

Findings 2: Grooming and Transgression

Introduction

In the previous theme on Boundaries, I explored team dynamics and interpersonal boundaries through the perspectives and narratives of my participants female athletes and coaches. Interpersonal boundaries are the limits set with other people and they guide our own behaviour towards others in terms that are appropriate. Boundaries are also based on social norms and crossing of physical and psychological boundaries can lead to conflict or issues such as harassment and abuse. I provided an analysis and interpretation of boundaries in behaviours such as banter or ‘albures’ and various forms of innuendo, physical contact among team members and coach-athlete romantic relationships and what this meant in the context of bullying and harassment in sport in my research site. In this chapter I look to, figuratively, zoom in into how boundaries are transgressed to the point of psychological and physical harassment, and the forms this takes with a process called grooming, which I elaborate on later in this chapter. The data interpreted and presented here come from the accounts of three female track and field athletes, which were the ones from my cohort who had a direct experience with bullying and harassment. Of the perpetrators mentioned here, all were coaches, two of them were male and one of them was a female coach. I found that in all three cases, the coaches seemed to have chosen these athletes, either because of the potential to have intimate sexual relationship in return for sport benefits or because of a perceived vulnerability in the athlete. Interestingly, two athletes that shared their experience with bullying and harassment acknowledged some form of resistance to it, while the third athlete acknowledged ‘accepting it’ or letting it happen, on which I elaborate more in further sections of this chapter. Additionally, I named the experiences and reflections of my participants as part of the

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grooming process based on what has been documented in cases of abuse in sport. My participants themselves did not provide the label of ‘grooming’ to their experiences, although they at some point came to the conclusion that there had been an intention behind the coaches’ behaviour, understood as a certain provocation or praise they experienced, often in the form of constant criticism, increased attention or obtaining funding for competitions for a particular athlete. Therefore, I provided the ‘grooming and transgression’ label to my participants narratives to make sense of their experience and facilitate their comparison with the rest of the literature on the topic as well (Brackenridge, 2005; Bennett and O’Donohue, 2014; Owton, 2016; Owton and Sparkes, 2017). Finally, I sectioned this chapter in three parts, the first one on the grooming process; the second on the experience of transgression; and the third one on dealing and reflections on the experience of harassment and abuse by my three participants athletes.

Grooming

In this context, grooming refers to the process the perpetrator takes to ‘prepare’ the scene and the person for harassment, abuse or exploitation (Brackenridge, 2001). Brackenridge (1997, 2001) considered a continuum of sexual violence in sport where sexual discrimination was in one end more institutional in nature. In the middle of the continuum was sexual harassment and included a combination of institutional and personal issues. At the other end of the continuum was sexual abuse, which included coercion and was more physical in nature. However, the margins between discrimination, harassment and abuse are not clear cut as there are not universal definitions, and they are in constant reframing the more we try to understand and clarify them (Kirby and Demers, 2013; Mountjoy and Shute, 2019), as I discussed about terminology in chapter 2. With that in mind then it can be discussed that sexual harassment and abuse in sport often result from a grooming process (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005). Instances of groping, physical violence, forced sexual activity or sexual favours are more likely to occur after a process of entrapment or enticement of the targeted individual rather than spontaneously

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(Brackenridge, 1997, 2005; Bennet and O’Donohue, 2014). Up to this point, sport research has widely focused on theorising, preventing, and identifying abuse of child-athletes, however the process of manipulation and entrapment involved in grooming occurs in adult athletes as well, as I show here. Take the following interview excerpt with Sofia. She was a well-known and successful sprinter in the site of research because she had important local and national wins for her team. Her demeanour was outspoken and extrovert, and compared to other participants, she needed just a few questions to prompt her to share her story. She was ready to tell it especially since she had already gone public with her case. Sofia’s case highlights the process of grooming. The dynamic between her and her coach provided benefits to the athlete in the sense that there was an apparent preference for Sofia. This is how this she put it:

Let’s say that, during trainings, I noticed him [coach] very happy with me. In the gym, I would grab my weights, but he would offer help, he was always very attentive to me. I didn't have to do anything, he did everything, move things for me at the gym and stuff like that, you know what I say? So, I thought, well, he’s glad to see me during trainings, right? At the end of the day, I would feel good. And said by his own words, I had been ‘the best athlete he had ever had’. That I returned with him to trainings, of course, that made him happy, right? I always thought it was that. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

We can understand from Sofia’s interview excerpt that there is an increased sense of trust and elation from Sofia towards her coach. The coach gives Sofia a special attention helping her at the gym for things that perhaps would be normal for an athlete to do on their own. Sofia acknowledges that the coach felt a preference towards her and that she felt special during trainings. A further example of the grooming process is through the attention that Sofia received from her coach when she shared to me that her coach facilitated her to travel to other competitions and in particular to a non-official competition, by obtaining funds to cover her travel expenses and accommodation. Helping athletes to obtain additional funding can be a common thing to do from a coach to support their athletes in competing more. Yet in the context of the interview with Sofia, the intention to provide additional funding may have been a pre-meditated behaviour from the part of the coach, as some authors have noted by the increased attention, privileges or gifts given to the target (Brackenridge et al, 2008; Bennet and O’Donohue, 2014; Owton, 2016). The grooming process with Sofia is further marked by the fact that, during the travel to the non-official competition, she was asked to sign a letter of ‘commitment’ to the coach if

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she wanted to train to the possibility of participating in the Olympic Games. This is how Sofia described it:

So, the day we were traveling to the competition, we stopped halfway on the road for a break and the coach wanted to talk to me. We were at the gas station and I go with him. And he handed me this letter in which he said he was a super coach, highlighting his achievements. You know...kind of newspaper praises. And then he told me, ‘look, this is so you can see who you train with. It's not a little thing’. He went on saying, ‘read it and think well about what you say.’ Actually, I don't remember exactly what the letter said. I'm going to paraphrase… He said something like that he wanted to commit to me and take me to the Olympic Games, but I had to commit too, right? I had to stop partying, start eating well and not have a boyfriend and so on. But that was making noise in my mind. I think about four or five times, the letter said something along the lines of not having boyfriends, right? Well, that really was everything at the time. I felt very excited because he gave me that letter that I had to sign to commit to go to the Olympic Games. And as you start to see the coach's interest too, I mean, we were already on the same channel. Then he told me, ‘don't show it to anyone, because you know how they’re on the team, jealousy and stuff like that’. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

During the grooming process in sport, the perpetrator seeks to build loyalty from the targets (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005; Owton and Sparkes, 2017). This includes increasing attention and giving hopes to the athlete to have a breakthrough in their athletic career. Brackenridge and Fasting (2005) discuss that the grooming process is a conscious strategy from the part of the perpetrator, while for the athlete this is unnoticeable. The letter given by the coach to Sofia in this interview excerpt is one clear example of this grooming strategy, seeking to build commitment and hope from Sofia. Even when Sofia noticed something unusual in the letter, such as when she says that not being allowed to have boyfriends was ‘making noise’ in her mind, Sofia paid more attention to what she apparently was to gain by the commitment the coach and her were to have. In addition to the increased attention given to athletes in the grooming process, Kirby and Demers (2013) highlight that, in the case of the coaches being the perpetrator of grooming and abuse, a risk factor includes the status and prestige of the coach, such as winning records or success with certain athletes. In Sofia’s case, her coach seemed to have a level of career recognition and he used that, through the letter, to legitimate his authority and power position towards her. This power imbalance may also make coaches feel they can push boundaries without criticism or feel entitled or immune to the consequences of certain behaviours, which represented a risk to Sofia. Contrasting with Sofia, Gaby, a middle-distance runner, shared having developed a toxic and confusing intimate relationship with her coach. Yet part of her grooming process

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also involved increased attention and looked like this:

In 2014, when she became the coach of my category, I was receiving so much attention, although during trainings she treated me super badly, but in spite of that she became my friend… I knew I still wasn’t at a true competitive level... Hmm, at the beginning she was like this, 'you can’t run, you don’t have the right build because of your physique’. I went with a nutritionist and my body completely changed. I started to improve. But then I was dealing with ... don’t know, she asked for a lap in 1:20, but I did a 1:21 lap and she said, 'No, it's just that you’re not good at this. You're useless, this is not how it works.’ Whatever I did, everything was wrong. And she started telling me that athletics was about ‘hitting it hard’. I’ve always been very strong, able to withstand pain and such. Then I began to hold on and hold on, hold on, until I got injured. And in that injury, she behaved a lot like, like taking care of me, but I couldn’t get her out of my house anymore. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

What Gaby comments here also relates to what I discussed in the previous chapter on boundaries. Clearly, the coaches’ method towards training Gaby’s involves emotional, verbal and physical mistreatment. In spite of these forms of treatment, there was improvement in Gaby’s performance. However, what created a stronger dependency from Gaby towards her coach was the injury. It was then where boundaries were further crossed. It caught my attention what Gaby mentioned not being able to get her coach ‘out of her house anymore’ while dealing with her injury. I probed Gaby on this and asked, ‘How come? What do you mean you couldn’t get her out of your house?’ to which she answered:

[nervous laugh] Well, I would go home, and she would come and visiting me. Then she would stay for lunch and then she would stay in the afternoon and then she would stay for dinner. And for all this she would tell me, ‘I'm taking care of you because you deserve it’. And so little by little, little by little, until ... hmm, then the relationship became more intimate. But I was her only athlete. She would no longer pay attention to anyone else but me. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

The grooming process involves justification of the behaviours that entrap the athlete. For instance, psychological grooming can be manifested by giving more time and attention to one athlete in particular, which is what we are able to see with Sofia’s and also Gaby’s narrative (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005). Additionally, physical grooming can be legitimised by the apparent need to spend more time with the athlete for massages or care after an injury, all in the name of procuring for the athlete’s sport performance as in Gaby’s case (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005). Typically, in the grooming process, the perpetrator looks for a closer contact with the athlete and tries to gain their trust in secret or in covert ways, the outcome being harm or taking advantage of them in some way. Carmen’s case looked differently. Carmen was a successful sprinter and dedicated student-athlete. She presented herself as a confident woman and intrigued by someone like

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me researching this topic in sport in Mexico. As Sofia, Carmen was ready to share her story with me, and she also reported her case to authorities. From what Carmen expressed, I gathered her wishing that more people could empathise with experiences like hers in sport in Mexico. The grooming process with Carmen occurred through behaviours that were constructively to dismiss the athlete with bullying. We can already see contrasts in the way grooming occurred, by the type of attention given to my participants. Most of the grooming literature makes reference to just an increased attention given to the target. The most cited form of attention is that of a charming, enticing, seducing kind (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005; Bennett and O’Donohue, 2014; Owton and Sparkes, 2017). But less is mentioned the attention given to an athlete by putting them on the sport, criticising them, bullying them, basically, in order to get a reaction or compliance. In Carmen’s case, this type attention would later function to create a space for harassment. Carmen recalled being constantly picked on by the coach and emphasised how tired and annoyed she was because her coach would make constant remarks about her body and running times. Carmen shared the following:

I think there were many harassment scenarios. I had a national university competition, and it was mockery after mockery. For him it was incredible that I was there because I was worth nothing, because I wasn’t good for running. It was already a lot of harassment to make me desert, to lower my self-esteem... (P1, Carmen, athlete).

Carmen also shared that her coach was imposing that she competed in another track and field category. Looking for more details, I asked Carmen, ‘What exactly did he tell you, if you can share with me?’ to which she replied:

That I wasn’t good at running, that sprinting wasn’t for me, for my body, because I was fat. I think at that time I weighed about 50 kilos ... I think if you see me right now you would say I'm fat [laughs]. I had an average body compared to all my other teammates. And the harassment, the calling me fat, loose, that I had cellulitis, was always to attack me. He would say that I was the slowest person in the world and that it was ridiculous that I was in a university national. That I should throw [javelin] instead of sprinting because that was for fat people like me. It was always the attacking in that way. They were very specific to me. He’s a very rude person. He himself said that he’s very rude, very vulgar, but he said that in his country they talked like that. The truth is that I have a very ugly concept of Cubans. In fact, I have lived with many, and they are very rude. I think they sometimes abuse that way of talking. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

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In addition to the persistent unwelcomed remarks about Carmen’s body and criticism about her sport performance, Carmen was also in a vulnerable position by depending on her coach to secure a university scholarship. Carmen put it this way:

When I returned from the national university competition, for having competed in this national, I was then a recipient of a scholarship. I told him [coach], very excited, that I had gotten the scholarship. Nothing more I needed from him than his signature to make the scholarship valid, to endorse that I was going to continue having training from him for another season, because normally that’s what the university asks for, because with that you assure that you’ll still be in a training process for the next year. So, I asked him to support me because there's a deadline. Well, he made fun of me. He told me that, no, that he wasn’t giving me anything because it's something that I didn’t deserve because I’m not a sprinter, that I'm a thrower [javelin] and that was going to be my destiny. That, if I wanted to fight for scholarships, I needed to show it by adding medals to this category. So, that's how the first conflict started. He then changed all my speed and sprint workouts to javelin throwing. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

Analysing what Carmen shared, we can discuss several vulnerabilities she faced. Firstly, in securing a scholarship to continue with her studies. The scholarship seemed to have been a great source of tension between the two as Carmen repeatedly stated saying to her coach things such as, ‘I kept telling him, 'it’s not right, not healthy, that you restrict your athletes. You should be a person who, together with the sport, develop good professionals, good athletes, good people, not refrain them.’ Secondly, continuing with her trainings and competitions and her development as an athlete was based on the coach’s authoritarian style regarding the track and field category, she must have competed in. The situation that Carmen found herself in is one where the coach is responsible for her development not only as it pertains to her sport, but also in other areas that concern her personal and professional development outside sport. This is illustrative of what researchers have noted about the power imbalance that can exist in the coach-athlete relationship that I discussed in chapter 2. Here Carmen’s coach justifies his denial of support given his authority and apparent expertise in sport, demanding that Carmen adheres to what he thinks she is best at, which is throwing the javelin without any agreement with her. This demonstrates how an athlete is overpowered by a coach as we see that Carmen's judgement and opinion regarding her track and field specialisation is not validated. This dynamic also relates to how boundaries are established or not in these coach-athlete interactions because boundaries should be agreed and consented by both sides and in Carmen’s case they are not. Intrigued to know more about the power dynamics with Carmen’s coach I probed her

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regarding her coach not considering her input regarding the change from sprinting to javelin throwing, I asked, ‘Without your permission?’, and Carmen expressed:

Exactly! And yet I said, well, ok, I will do it, right? Because you have no choice and you say, well, I have to obey. After that situation, the coach signed me up to a javelin throw competition, which I found utterly disrespectful. The truth is that I didn't go, partly because I had another university competition, as a sprinter, where I was forced to go. This caused a huge conflict with the coach. I asked him, sometimes I cried, that he allowed me to do the sprinting training, but he clung to the idea of not letting me do that. Then one day I make the decision after my throwing training, to do some speed training on my own to move my body. For him this was something very offensive, something that hadn't been his instruction and what he did was to tell me that I had disobeyed his orders. He said, I could 'go to hell and fuck off!'. With those words. That I didn't serve the sport, and that he had given me the option to retire and was doing me a favour. He then warned me not to get any closer to the team, not to get closer to the track and from that moment he was no longer my coach. He asked me to withdraw from the track and never show my face again…I ran to my parents and told them how the situation was… My father went the next day and talked to him. Then the coach, in a very mocking way, tells my dad that he has nothing to do there because the situation with me had been very clear, I had disobeyed, and he had made the decision not to have me on the team anymore. So yes, very rude. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

Coaches can be powerful figures given the different roles they can have and the degree of influence they exert in sport decisions. Moreover, coaches, their personalities and styles of managing athletes also reveal traditions and expectations from the world of sport, still male dominated, highly competitive and reward oriented. On the field, what athletes do is primarily, if not solely, is mediated by the coach where the athlete takes more of a subordinate role. This relates to what I discussed on chapter 2 regarding docility. One aspect of an athlete is the one that is highly disciplined, skilled, and ‘trainable’ and the other is a docile subject, given the strong obedience learned by the athlete. I discussed docility in Foucauldian terms, which researchers have applied into sport, in particular the female athlete (Shogan, 1999; Pringle, 2014). In Carmen’s case, we can see references towards obedience and specific training regimes when Carmen mentions having ‘no choice’ and having to ‘obey’ her coach regarding the change of track and field category, yet she finds this obedience too much to the point of finding it disrespectful. The dependability of Carmen on her coach marked a clear power imbalance between them, creating an environment where Carmen was vulnerable for transgression, as we will later see.

Initiating Harassment and Transgression

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To illustrate more explicitly how the grooming escalated to something more physical and sexual I start with Sofia, whom I discussed first at the beginning of this chapter, a sprinter who received special funding from her coach and promises of competing in the Olympic Games. What Sofia experienced was a process of grooming that led to sexual harassment yet not to a sexual act against her will. Grooming does not always lead to a violent sexual assault and often the tension of a potential sexual coercion, feelings of entrapment and being manipulated have consequences on the victim (Bjørnseth and Szabo, 2018). In Sofia’s case, she explained that the harassment incident happened when she travelled to the competition that her coach had obtained funds for. In the following narratives, we can identify how Sofia tries to make sense of her own safety and the coach’s behaviour. She does not fully understand the risk for sexual harassment and yet senses something is not right by feeling ‘nervous’ and ‘awkward’ after arriving at the accommodation and finding that she was the only woman there and being offered alcohol. She stated:

We arrived at the house we were staying at, and I noticed that there were only men, mostly Cuban coaches. I started feeling super awkward…It was about four in the afternoon and they had brought a lot of beers, tequila and stuff like that, right? And then they all started drinking and handed me a beer. And I answered, ‘No, no, no, thanks.’ I really don't drink. If I drink it’s one or two beers maximum. I kept saying, 'no, no, no, tomorrow I compete'. And my coach told me, ‘how are you not going to join’. And I said, 'well… that's fine'. I had one and then, as soon as I finished it, he handed me another. I kept saying, 'no, no, thanks'. And he told me almost forcefully, 'No, take it, how are you going to deny it?’. Once in my hand I passed it to another coach. And then, as soon as he saw me without a beer, he gave me another one and then another. I counted about eight beers he gave me, and I was passing them on to others, giving them away or leaving them on the table. By then I thought, this is weird, I didn’t come to party. I came here to compete, right? I also got very nervous because I didn't see any more athletes in the place where we were. I thought, what's going on. I want to fall asleep, leave, I don't know... But in about that time I see that about five or six athletes arrive. Then I kind of relaxed, and said, ‘Oh, it's fine.’ (P4, Sofia, athlete)

Sofia expanded that the athletes that arrived at the accommodation were only men but that in some way she felt safer in their presence. Sofia’s coach continued offering her alcohol and not respecting her desire and need for rest, imposing and behaving in a way that was unwanted until he started sexual insinuations. Sofia shared that the harassment involved her coach pulling her towards him ‘to dance’, that her coach was becoming more forceful and that he was getting frustrated at Sofia’s resistance. She said, ‘I was blank, and, like, he started to get frustrated that, well, I was, well ...like a trunk, stiff, without doing anything. I didn't turn to see him in the eye or anything’. She then recalled that once in her room, which

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the coach had locked, he began talking about her personal issues with her boyfriend, creating a more sexual and unwanted encounter. Sofia stated:

He sat me down in the bed and tells me, ‘Let's see… it’s not possible for you to get hooked with just one person. Just because you don't have a boyfriend anymore, you don't have to be sad.’…What I still don't understand is that I had split with my boyfriend. I never told anyone, but he knew. That started to make a lot of noise, because ... how did he know? I never told anyone. I never knew how he found out. And he began to tell me something like, 'you can be with the man you want, you are super pretty, very pretty. What’s more, tell me who you want to have right now'... I'm going to say it in his own words ... he said, 'who do you want to fuck right now, and I bring him to you'. And, well, I don't know, I was blank! I remember that I was looking at the floor. And he says, ‘oh, no, no, no. I don't want you to fuck with whoever you want, or with anyone. If you need, you come to me. Because I know when you can have it and when you can’t according to training.’ …He continued saying, ‘whenever you want, you come with me, I will see if…’. I will tell you as he told me. It’s super grotesque. He told me, ‘If I just put fingers in you, or if I make you have a full orgasm’. And well, of course, I mean, I thought ... what's fucking going on here?! I just wanted him to shut up, to leave, I don't know. I didn't even know what to do. He continued saying, ‘that you are very sexy ... your body ... I have always liked you. Look at your eyes, take off your glasses, you look prettier.’ I mean ... I'm really telling you this in a super nice way compared to the words he used. I mean, Cuban, at the end of the day ... they have a slightly more vulgar lexicon. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

This quote from Sofia highlights how interpersonal barriers is broken down between her and her coach. The coach is intrusive of Sofia’s private life to the point where the coach apparently knew information about Sofia’s personal relationships that she kept to herself as was the end of her relationship with her boyfriend. Another important point to highlight from this quote is the way athletes who have experiences directly bullying and harassment may downplay the effects of their experience when retelling the event. For instance, we see that Sofia said, ‘I’m really telling you this in a super nice way compared to the words he used’. This may be done out of embarrassment or social desirability, which could perhaps give the researchers and others some distance to the profoundness of the lived experience with bullying and harassment by athletes. In Carmen’s case, the conflicts with her coach and the bullying she experienced formed part of the grooming process because they gradually broke the interpersonal boundaries with her. Carmen explained to me that she challenged her coach constantly on her studies and insisted on letting her train. The way Carmen’s coach saw an opportunity for transgression was by asking Carmen to amend the wrong things she had done. She put this way:

So, at the end he told me, 'Look we're going to do something, I'm going to show you that you're not a good friend, but that's fine, you're trying to convince me. Okay, we are going to do one thing, if you’re

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going to show me that you’re not the person that I believe you are, I’m going to ask you to amend things with proper training.' (P1, Carmen, athlete)

At the moment of transgression and already with the condition to ‘amend things’, Carmen shared that her coach would keep referring to her as being a ‘bad friend’ and asked questions about hypothetical scenarios in which a friend would need ‘help’ to see how she would react. The following narrative demonstrates the way the coach initiates questions of sexual nature and, at first, Carmen seemed unsure about the message the coach was trying to convey. Carmen asked for clarification and also responded in such a way that she implies she is unable to help, even clarifying that she would feel ‘offended’ by being asked for that kind of ‘help’ from a friend. The behaviour of the coach is inappropriate within the context of the relationship with Carmen and she was unwilling to partake in the coaches’ suggestions.

Recalling being at the coaches’ house for a massage session, this is what Carmen shared:

I asked ‘Do I leave the door open? And the coach answered: Yes! Leave the door open because others are coming’. Good perfect. So, what I do is enter the house, I wanted to use the bathroom, so I step into his bathroom and when I leave the bathroom, I see the main door closed and locked. Then I said, well, ok. The truth is that it wasn't something that made noise to me, it wasn't like a very obvious alert, right? I moved on to other things and from there the coach starts telling me that he was convinced that I wasn't a good person, not a good friend, that friends helped each other first. And, well, then I began to question him on why he had told me that, that it was something that I didn’t understand, and he says to me, ‘what would you do if a friend of yours tells you that he has problems to relate sexually with a woman?’. I said ‘How?’ And the coach said, ‘Yes! You have a friend who tells you to help him, that he has problems’. I replied, ‘let him go with a doctor!’, and he said, ‘no, no, no, but if he asks you for help’. I replied ‘Uh, help of what kind?’. He said, ‘Well, with help!’. And I said, ‘If he was my friend, he would know perfectly well that for me it would be an offense to ask me something like that. Because how can I cure it or what?’. Then he told me, ‘So you see how you are a bad person? I'm going to give you an example, I'm that friend!'. I thought, ‘What?!’ That was when I said to myself, no shit! I wasn’t comfortable anymore. Then I began to understand everything. Everything he had told me on the track before. The truth is that I was astounded, it was like a bucket of cold water thrown at me. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

The previous excerpt showed how the coach manage to create a space where he could sexually harass Carmen. This elaboration process is important to highlight because the grooming process is not linear and that is why it is difficult to identify. Owton and Sparkes (2017) explain that this non-linearity entails a combination of interpersonal seduction techniques with instructional practices or sport related aspects such as requesting or facilitating massages. The grooming process then can occur in short periods of time, although most commonly occurs over a long time where the target of grooming is seen as complicit in the process (Owton and Sparkes, 2017). With Carmen’s case, we see that she could not really

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grasp the questions asked by the coach and could have been understood as ‘playing along’ until a more direct breaking in interpersonal barrier is clear, as I show in the next excerpt on how a physical harassment occurred to Carmen. She expanded:

I continued saying that it’s something that goes against what I want, that would even disrespect my body and that was when he was very straightforward and said ‘things here are very clear, do you want to train? You can train! Do you want me to give you privileges that I give to others? I give them to you! But those things are not given easily. If you want, I can make you a national champion, take you here, take you there, find you a scholarship. Why do you think this athlete has a scholarship?'. He was talking about another athlete, whom at some point I talked to and mentioned my situation to her. She gave me her support, but she was also concerned because she admitted giving in order to have this scholarship. But when I was with the coach, I made it explicit that I wouldn’t do it. And he said ‘No? Well, things are not going to be like this, so easy. I don't want to see you ever again on the track again’. I shouted, no! And in the shock of the moment, kind of thinking is this a dream or am I living it? I shut up, I said nothing. Then he takes the opportunity to approach me to try to touch me, saying he wanted to ‘make love to me’ and like that… (P1, Carmen, athlete)

In the previous two cases of transgression with Sofia and Carmen, the coaches, both males, were forceful and approached and touched them in a way that they described as unwanted and resisted. The case that follows with Gaby was perpetuated by her female coach. Gaby experienced sexual harassment that was undisclosed until the moment of the interview, different to Sofia and Carmen who decided to be outspoken about it. The main difference in the experience of harassment between Sofia and Carmen, is that Gaby stated ‘giving in’ to the harassment several times. There was no quid pro quo situation, conditioning of opportunities, as in the previous two cases. Gaby found herself entrapped in a toxic relationship with her coach who threatened to take her own life if Gaby said something about the sexual harassment and emotional abuse. The following excerpt with Gaby reveals the escalation from grooming to transgression. Similar to the other athletes, a ‘massage’ session was the reason to meet with Gaby. This is what she stated:

The coach called me at her house. There was no one else but the coach. And the coach told me, ‘this is the massage; this is what we will do' and so on. And then, the coach started to ‘touch’ me... I stopped her, stood up and said, 'what the hell! I didn’t come here for that'. The truth is that I did feel fear. And, well, the coach began to tell me that if I didn’t accept that the coach touched me [Gaby paused]

At this point in the interview, Gaby made a pause and I enquired about the kind of touching that had occurred to see if we could continue with the narrative, I asked ‘Was the coach touching you somewhere private or was the coach touching you in some way...?’ to which Gaby answered:

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Yes, in a private part. And well, the coach said to me, 'if you resist, I will say that you were the one who started with me'. But everything was like…blocked… because I didn’t know what to do. I had already gone through something similar. So, I didn’t understand why everything related to the coach had to do with that. And then, well, I accepted… because I said, 'if I'm not going to have problems with this, it's fine'. This went on like this about four or five more times. But I never wanted it, never. The last time this happened we were in training and I went into the bathroom. She followed me and closed the door and got super crazy, saying that she was in love with me and that she knew that I wanted it too. She tried forcibly to kiss me, but I didn’t let her this time and pushed her back quite hard. From there she told me that that was it, and she kind of apologised. After that moment she behaved nicely with me again but sometimes she behaved rudely. She also told me that she had a video of the massages and that she had recorded me accepting the massage. Because of that, I couldn’t defend against her and didn't tell anything to anyone. (P3, Gaby, athlete).

The majority of the research has pointed to male coaches being the perpetrators of abuse in sport, which can be partly explained by the fact that there are more males in coaching positions than women. This is based on the targets’ descriptions of their direct experiences with bullying and harassment and also from evidence showing that men still dominate coaching and administrative positions in sport organisations (Bringer et al, 2002; Roper, 2013; Parent and Fortier, 2018). However, women are also capable of bullying and harassment or other forms of harm-doing behaviours, and men or other women being targets of abuse is no less serious (Hartill, 2009; Hartill and Lang, 2015; Hartill and Lang, 2018). Moreover, abuse perpetuated by a woman coach in sport may be hidden and tainted by cultural ideals about the ‘nature’ of women, such as being less aggressive or more nurturing, conceiving them less as perpetrators of abuse. Apart from cultural ideals, in sport, abuse perpetuated by women, due to the gendered context of sport, authority and power dynamics between female coaches and athletes may be perceived differently that in male coach-athlete relationships, possibly affecting the experience of and dealing with bullying and harassment. For instance, athletes may be less willing to speak out about bullying and harassment if it happened within a same-sex relationship, in the case of a female coach-athlete relationship, due to fears of facing stigma regardless of sexual orientation. In effect, that was a reason why Gaby, whose case I discuss further in the next chapter felt could not talk about her experience. She did not identify herself as gay or LGBT in any way, yet she was afraid of others showing disapproval by mere association with another woman if she spoke out.

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Dealing with and Reflections on Grooming and Transgression

The grooming process and transgression that I presented here are similar to other experiences documented on studies regarding abuse in sport (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005; Owton, 2016; Owton and Sparkes, 2017). Important to note is that, firstly, the three cases here involved forming a special and dominant relationship with the athlete by giving a type of attention which was beneficial in nature or condescending. Secondly, in these relationships there was a ‘keeping silent’ and ‘quid pro quo’ factors where the coach asked and threatened the athletes not to say anything about the incident or special favours or attention given to them. Thirdly, grooming took the athletes to a point where they felt confused and entrapped by the relationship and where there was disbelief and shock to what was happening to them. It was after the incident with sexual harassment and the understanding of the events that led to it that, on hindsight, my participant athletes recognised feeling manipulated. Furthermore, also upon reflection my participants elucidated that their coach’s behaviours had a specific purpose For instance, Gaby showed confusion by having had a belief that her sport improvement was due to her coach, which created a sense of dependence. Gaby stated:

I thought that all this, my achievements, were because of her and that there was no other coach who was like her because she made me see it that way…I started to improve, and improve, and improve, so that part of the success I thought was because of her. Not because of me, that I trained and took care of myself a lot. The results where rather mine not hers. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

Gaby also reflected that despite her toxic relationship and experience of harassment with her coach, she still considered her as a ‘friend’. When I asked, ‘Why do you call the coach a friend, if she made you feel bad, feel trapped? Gaby shared:

Well, I don't know ... I considered her my friend at the beginning. When she started as my coach, I saw her as a friend because, I don't know ... But I know she’s super manipulative and I don't have so many friends. She started to give me that part, support. She told me, ‘yes, talk to me’. I told her my whole life, so I considered her my friend. And maybe the problem was there too. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

These reflections by Gaby highlight why it is often difficult to not only identify the grooming process and the risk for harassment, but also to leave an abusive coach-athlete relationship. Gaby reported confusion at the friendship role that her coach had with her as

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her coach provided a space for Gaby to feel support. It was in this way that intimacy and trust was gradually built, which left Gaby perplexed when experiencing abuse. In a similar manner, Sofia reflected about her experience and relationship with her coach. This is what Sofia said regarding her coaches’ intentions:

So ... this ... well, it went on like this for months, and of course you also start to feel special, don't you? That there is that preference towards you. You feel cool. You think ‘Look! My coach loves me, he cares about me’. And well, yes, it was all to work me up little by little. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

Similarly, Carmen, reflected on how the coach had played with the idea of amending that she was a bad person by offering ‘help’ to a friend. This is how Carmen made sense of the grooming and transgression during the interview:

What exactly did all these comments on the track mean? Well, to everything he had told me before, that I wasn’t a good friend, that I wasn’t a sincere person…it wasn’t really that. I finally understood why he would ask questions about helping a friend, to which, at first, I answered yes, indisputably. I understood that he meant that I would give him what he wanted sexually. When I realised this I reacted and said of course not, right? (P1, Carmen, athlete)

Other reflections included ideas of how they could have acted at the moment of incident, for example, Carmen shared:

And now I think and say, ‘What a fool!’, why did I not return. I could have called the police and tell them where I was. But then I thought I could put myself in a difficult situation, right? But those are silly things. Oh well, those are situations where one says, 'why the hell I didn't do that, what a fool!’ As I ran first thing and didn't take evidence. But what can I do, these are situations where everything happens fast, and you don't think.. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

Furthermore, Kirby and Demers (2013) explain that the perpetrator during the grooming process targets athletes who have existing vulnerabilities, such as problems at home, eating disorders (Greenleaf et al, 2009) or previous experiences with abuse. Gaby was one example of an athlete with an existing vulnerability based on her self-esteem and previous experience with abuse. It is also the case that the perpetrator chooses the athletes who may be more talented or successful at the time given the possibilities to build trust and intimacy combined with the coaches’ own potential for sport accomplishments, as was the case with Sofia, a high-achieving athlete. This may lead to compliance during the grooming process as athletes may seem to partake in the process of manipulation without them being conscious of it (Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005).

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Compliance may look like Sofia’s case, where the successful reputation of her coach, the attention given to her, her own athletic success, and the opportunity for tangible outcomes such as a career breakthrough led her to continue trusting and getting psychologically closer to her coach. However, compliance can also be ascertained by the use of threats such as being removed from the team and withholding of rewards as in Carmen’s situation, or the intent to inflict self-harm and showing an intimate video, which was what Gaby experienced. She shared, for instance:

When she gave me a massage, but she began to cross the line and I said to her, 'no, I don't like women or anything like that', she told me, 'if you say something, I'll kick you out of the selection. I'm so depressed and I'm going to kill myself.'…This was for two years, with only threats. She repeatedly threatened me saying: ‘If you don't accept, I will remove you from the selection and I will commit suicide. Well, I told her that ‘it was fine’. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

In retrospect, my participant athletes were able to recognise and articulate the signs previous to the harassment, yet they acknowledged not being attentive to ‘alerts’ when it happened. The lack of recognition for risk might be partly explained by a scarce knowledge of the concept of grooming and bullying and harassment, the ways in which it can be presented, and the ways perpetrators behave, as Brackenridge (2001) has thoroughly discussed. The normalisation of certain behaviours and unclear boundaries among the team or with the coach could also explain why certain signs of bullying and harassment are not properly conceptualised and understood as such (Brackenridge, 2001; Brackenridge and Fasting, 2005). Additionally, the trust within the athlete-coach relationship and the physical strength and sport competence that athletes feel may make them think as less vulnerable to harm of this kind (Fasting et al, 2007; Stirling and Kerr, 2013). For instance, the following narrative from Sofia, at the moment of harassment, illuminates how some athletes due to the close relationship with their coaches may be oblivious to signs of potential abuse or their own vulnerabilities within risky sport environments. Sofia recalled:

He [coach] tells me, ‘okay, ah okay. Let’s to go your room to show it to you, and it helps that we talk about the letter. I want you to tell me what you thought’. I said disinterested, ‘ah, okay.’. We go up, and he says, ‘this is your room’. I go inside and he was behind me. Really, at the time I didn't think badly. I mean, I had been alone with him a thousand times in a room talking. So much was the confidence that I had that I went with him to the room, right? I didn't think anything bad. I thought, well, he wants to talk. When I thought something was wrong was when he closed the door and locked it. And there, I panicked. I thought, what is happening here?! But a part of me told me, no, like he wants privacy, wants to talk about this issue only with me, that nobody listens to us. I was super

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confused. I had no idea. And the first thing he tells me is, ‘dance to me’. I thought ‘what the fuck is this?!’ (P4, Sofia, athlete)

Finally, a common pattern seen across all interviews included in this analysis was the perceived authority of the athlete’s coach and what this implies in the context of bullying and harassment. From my participants’ accounts, the coach was the one with the greatest authority in the athlete-coach interaction. This authority stemmed from the reputation of the coach and apparent sport knowledge. In the context of bullying and harassment, the perceived dependency on the coach for sport performance was a factor for athletes not to speak up or change environments. In the chapter ahead, I will move on to discuss the aftermath of harassment, the process of speaking out, the reasons for keeping silent after the bullying and harassment, as well as consequences of reporting the harassment.

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Chapter 7

Findings 3: Dome of Silence

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I focused on three cases with direct experience with bullying and harassment. I discussed and interpreted the process of manipulation, called grooming, that my participant athletes, Sofia, Carmen and Gaby, went through before experiencing a more direct transgression in the form of sexual harassment. In this chapter, I continue with the analysis of Sofia’s, Carmen’s and Gaby’s stories but I turn my attention to their actions and feelings towards speaking out or remaining silent about their experience and coping processes. Firstly, I explore the situational context and motivations that led my participant to talk about the transgression with their perpetrators, who had been their coaches. The process of speaking out included talking to family members, calling the police and seeking help with a therapist. Secondly, I discuss the processes that two athletes, Sofia and Carmen, went through when formally and legally reporting bullying and harassment to authorities, as well as the obstacles and outcomes of the reporting process. In the last section, I discuss the consequences of reporting the harassment, such as withdrawal from sport and ostracism that these three athletes experienced. Finally, I relate these experiences with the literature on reporting and handling cases of bullying and harassment.

Aftermath of Harassment: Coping and First Motivations to Speak out

Documenting experiences and the process leading to bullying and harassment in sport is essential to continue growing the body of evidence in this context. Equally important is the discussion of what happens after the incident of abuse, such as reporting processes. It is in this discussion that we can become more critical of factors, interpersonal, organisational and social, that point to how bullying and harassment in sport continues and ways in which

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bullying, and harassment can be better addressed in benefit of athletes. My data show different ways in which the three athletes who experienced bullying and harassment, Carmen, Sofia and Gaby, dealt with their experiences formally and informally. Starting with Carmen, her main source of help was her family. She spoke out about her incident readily and the reactions of her family led to the calling of the police, which provided an opportunity for this participant to take her case to an authority and speak with professionals that would deal with her case. In what follows, Carmen describes the moment after the incident with sexual harassment with her coach, recounting going back to her home, accompanied by a friend and telling her parents about the incident:

When I got out of there [coaches’ house] I didn’t know how I got home. Until the next day was when I told my parents. A friend from school accompanied me to my house…and well…there we made the decision [to sue] ... obviously my dad wanted to kill him! Obviously, my parents did get very bad…we had to speak to the police because my dad was uncontrollable. Well, we were suggested by the same police officers there that we better do things ourselves through legal channels, and that is why we started looking for a lawyer. (Carmen, athlete)

Important to highlight here is the support network that can help targets of bullying and harassment come forward with reporting. I interpret that the way Carmen described the strong reaction against the incident with sexual harassment by her family, served as incentive to call the police and taking the matter legally. For Sofia, the process of speaking out and reaching out for help was slightly different, although eventually she also reported the incident to personnel in her sport institution. The outcomes of reporting will be discussed in later sections of this chapter. In the following excerpt we can appreciate how Sofia initially felt about not talking about the incident and her feelings towards her coach. We will also see the thought process, justifications and reasons why Sofia would choose not to report the incident as soon as it happened. Sofia revealed:

But well…this happened, and I didn't tell anyone. I remained silent. At mid-season it's impossible for you to change coaches. I mean, you spoil the season, right? I said, I'm going to stay with him, but I'm going to draw a line. I mean, I get to training, I don't say hello or anything. I train, I leave. Without having contact with him or anything... so yes, I drew my line with him. I went to trainings and didn't say hello. And if I greeted him it was a 'hello from afar' to not be rude either. And then I trained, but I no longer asked him if I had ran well or about my technique as before, right? There was no longer that relationship. The following days, like, what was ... two or three weeks, he behaved with me as if nothing had happened. He would come and try to say normal things, make jokes. I didn't laugh. I mean, it bothered me a lot that he came with that attitude as if nothing had happened. But I feel that he began to realise that I wasn't happy with what had happened. I was angry. And always, his way of recovering his athletes when they got angry was. 'I no longer pay attention to you and the same attention that I put on you I put on another person'.

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Then he stopped talking to me. He didn't even turn around to see me or anything. And I said, well, better for me... truly! And he started to treat another teammate the same way he treated me. So, I think I started to get even angrier, not because he was paying attention to the other teammate, but because I knew where he was going…All that had a great impact on my sports career. My performance started going super bad. I was always angry. I was always also carrying this weight of what had happened, right? Of not being able to speak of ... well, yes, carrying all that weight. (Sofia, athlete)

Sofia reasoned that her training season would be interrupted by reporting her case of sexual harassment. Evidently, she cared about the consequences on her sports career had she reported the incident immediately, so she consciously tried to find a way to maintain it, or not spoiling it, as she referred to it in the interview. Moreover, Sofia when stated, ‘I'm going to stay with him, but I'm going to draw a line’, suggests a coping mechanism. Coping mechanisms are described in the literature as efforts to manage demands of the environment when resources are exceeded (Kavanagh et al, 2017). Sofia’s coping mechanism fits with one of the strategies that Kavanagh et al (2017) described in their study about coping strategies by athletes who experienced emotional abuse. Of relevance in this part of Sofia’s story is the first category, coping in the moment, and coping actions of situation avoidance and dissociation. This is exemplified when Sofia tried to manage keeping the structure of her life together, her training and competitions while dealing with the coach who had transgressed her. What prompted Sofia to share her experience with sexual harassment was the realisation that her coach was behaving with other athletes in a similar way as he had done with her. Sofia expressed that she had difficulty in talking about what she had experienced but found the opportunity and felt compelled to raise the issue with other teammates during a competition. This is what she shared:

Until one day in a competition, already months later [after the harassment] …we were four girls together and who trained with this coach. And for me, then, really it was already very difficult to keep all this. And seeing that he was already working on another girl and I didn't do anything, right? So, then, I grabbed their attention and told them, 'Listen, I need to tell you something that happened to me' ... and ...I told them… One of them broke down crying! And she said, 'that's something very similar to what happened to me very recently'. Then, there, I thought, no, it's not possible. This is...this is not something that happened to me or a while ago with this other athlete. That is, if we already are three people and with super similar stories ... how many women will there be that will have gone through that under his coaching...That's when I decided to speak, speaking first to the institution. An investigation was opened, but they really didn't do anything, absolutely anything. (Sofia, athlete)

Interesting here was Sofia’s observation that her coach was having similar grooming behaviours with another athlete. When she expressed, ‘…really it was already very difficult to

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be keeping all this. And seeing that he was already working on another girl and I didn't do anything, right?’, Sofia demonstrates familiarity with the athlete-coach dynamic she and her coach had. Further, when Sofia says her coach was ‘already working on another girl’ and then added ‘I didn’t do anything’ indicates a concern, demonstrating the emotional burden Sofia was feeling. I interpreted that it was almost a duty to tell her teammates about her experience with sexual harassment as a form of prevention, but also as a way to feel better emotionally about it. There Sofia realises that she is not the only one who has experienced bullying and harassment from her coach and that is a crucial point that leads her to report the case more formally.

In exploring Gaby’s process to speak about her incident, she shared that she did not come forward to an authority or her sport institution. Her process of being able to tell her experience with sexual harassment with a female coach entailed going to therapy with a psychologist and then eventually talking to her family. Besides her therapist and her family, I was the only one with whom she had shared her experience of harassment. I asked Gaby ‘How did you start getting over this incident? Did you talk about it with others?’, this is what Gaby replied:

Yes. I ended up with the psychologist. The first day, well ... whenever I fought with her [the coach], it was a horrible draining of energy. I didn't sleep. I worried constantly about not making her mad, because if I did ‘I knew what was coming’. So, I arrived at the psychologist and the first day I remember that she asked me what I needed help with, and I couldn’t really say anything, just said that I had many problems with a friend. I couldn't tell more, until about a month or so after. The psychologist gradually encouraged me and told me that if I didn't tell her what the problem was, she wouldn't be able to help properly even if she sensed there was something more. And from there I started telling her many more things. It took me all two thousand seventeen to come out of the hole because I couldn't get out of there. At the end, she [the coach] took me out of the team, but that was actually good. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

Gaby also mentioned during the interview that she was afraid of other people finding out about the relationship that had developed with her coach because she did not want others to think ‘wrong things’ about her. In checking with Gaby, the type of relationship that had developed with her coach I asked, 'and you were always clear that you never wanted a romantic relationship with her?’, to which Gaby clarified, 'Always. Always, always, always'. I also repeated to Gaby what she had said to me before to check that I was gathering the information in the way she wanted it to be understood. I rephrased, 'basically, you accepted

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these manipulations, the touching, the massages, etc., because she was threatening to expose you, to expose something you didn't want, the video ...?’ And Gaby remarked:

And the emotional and verbal abuse too ... Yes, that is, I always ... Well, yes, out of fear. Before I had a hard time talking. Perhaps on another occasion I would not have accepted an interview. In fact, the first day I went to the psychologist was … well, I didn't cry. I mean, I always cried, but alone. And when I could speak it. I mean, I tell you it was ... uff, it was like until session ten maybe. I mean, because I couldn't say things. I couldn't understand what I was going through.

When I asked how she explained her experience to her family Gaby added:

One day I arrived home and... I get along very well with my family... well, more with my mom. But also, my boyfriend was there. And then, they asked me if something had happened, if someone had done something to me. And then I said that I had been two years under a horrible crisis of not being able to say things. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

The tone Gaby had during the interview was peculiar compared to Carmen and Sofia. While the experience of sexual harassment and bullying that Carmen and Sofia experienced had profound consequences in their sport and personal lives Gaby seemed to have struggled much more in coping with the experience. She was less detailed in her responses and her narrative seemed less coherent. What Gaby shared here are two features of the experience of bullying and harassment that are commonly described in the literature, and which I will be discussing further in the section ahead. The first is fear of retaliation and social ostracism as a reason for not reporting harassment (Holland and Cortina, 2016). The second aspect is coping mechanisms over time. Taking again Kavanagh et al’s (2017) categorisation, we find that for Gaby, coping over time required eventually seeking support with a therapist, which helped her move on with her life after the harassment transgression and long-term abusive relationship with her coach. Encouraging and expressing appreciation towards Gaby for sharing her story with me I told her that it was 'super brave of her'. She agreed and repeated how difficult her process of speaking out had been.

Formally Reporting Harassment, Silence and Outcomes

With Carmen’s case, she decided to approach lawyers and go to the State Commission for Human Rights in Jalisco to seek advice and report the incident of sexual harassment with her coach. The commission is a mediating body between the authority and the citizens, its purpose is to ‘defend, protect, study and disseminate the human rights of the

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people who live or transit in Jalisco, in order to preserve the constitutional state of law, through programs of culture, governance and defence of human rights’ (cedhj.org.mx). However, despite formally reporting the incident, Carmen could not have her case properly resolved. The following is what Carmen declared:

There were many alterations in my case. For example, when I went first to Human Rights [the State Commission for Human Rights in Jalisco], well ... at the beginning I was told that mine was a case that was not going to transcend…that it was not a case of rape. I told them, ‘Hey! But that's harassment, he touched me!’ And they answered, ‘No, it's not. And better not to say that!’. The same lawyer told me, ‘Don’t say that he touched you, don’t say that he grabbed you forcibly. We are going to fight it this way: saying the man wanted to have sex with you, nothing more’. I said, oh my god! And I still remember that one of the lawyers who was handling my case… I yelled at her and I even cursed because she was outrageous! I lost my dignity! One believes, well we, my family, believed that we were going to win this case. Because we said, well, I’m Mexican and the coach is not. I’m also a woman and I’m a minor. In this case, when this happened, I was underage…I'm under the tutelage of my parents…I'm Mexican, I'm a student, I'm a woman, they'll believe me! And ... just the opposite! Quite the opposite. Because I tell you, in Human Rights ... Human Rights for me is an institution of ridicule. An institution that you go to like a confessional. You go, you say everything, they listen to you, they write it down and that is it. The truth is that I have a terrible criterion of them… and sad because I say, we are women and how is it possible that among women we doubt ourselves? I can’t doubt of a woman who tells me that she went through such a situation. Because to begin with, they’re very difficult situations. They’re situations that, unless one is very sick to invent it ... but not every woman dares to raise her voice in that way…to stain her image. Because in cases like this, they [women] stain their image, they are a target for the other people to attack them…to make fun of them, to pity them. So, then I shouted to those ladies, ‘It's not fair that you treat me like that! It's not fair that you don’t want to help me!’. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

This excerpt reveals that approaching a case of harassment is complex and the way the story and evidence is presented matters. This is illustrated when Carmen expresses, ‘…there were many alterations in my case’ and that her case was not going to ‘transcend’. Carmen used the Spanish word ‘trascender’, which I translated in English as transcend. The term ‘transcend’ means to go beyond limits or go beyond the perceived normal. The use of this term is important here because the experience of bullying and harassment can also be influenced by the reporting process (Cortina et al, 2008; Holland and Cortina, 2016). In Carmen’s context, to transcend seems to be related to the evidence she presented and her credibility. Precisely because of the weight placed on evidence, primarily physical, reporting cases of bullying and harassment that have no observable or physical evidence can be difficult for authorities to fully believe or to proceed. In fact, there is a name for this kind of interpretative phenomenon called hermeneutical injustice, coined by philosopher Miranda Fricker (2007). Hermeneutical injustice happens when an individual is not understood, because she/he is prevented from doing so, because she/he is unable to do so or through

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lack of meaning-sharing practices from the dominant group. Medina (2017, p. 41) explains hermeneutical injustice when the ‘intelligibility of communicators is unfairly constrained or undermined’. As Carmen recounts, she encountered inefficiency and confrontation from the lawyers she was working with. Carmen’s mood in this moment of the interview was frustration. She argued about the conditions the lawyers had put on her case, and she was clearly irritated at the perceived incompetence of the people responsible to manage her case. It is also intriguing that Carmen and her family were confident about approaching the case given Carmen’s status when she claimed, ‘I’m Mexican and the coach is not, I’m a woman and I’m a minor.’. Carmen seemed to have implied that a Mexican person would somehow have more credibility than a foreigner, and that by being a minor at the time and a woman, perhaps, should grant her more attention and protection but instead found many complications when moving forward with her case. This is important in the context of hermeneutical injustices in that the standard of proof lies on not only the capacity of the target to make the experience with harassment probable, but also on their sex/gender and age, which may give more or less voice, and thus, more intelligibility in Medina’s words, to their experience. Additionally, Carmen equated the State Commission for Human Rights to a confessional. In the catholic tradition, a confessional represents the method by which people expose or confess their sins. Interestingly, Carmen does not associate herself with the process of confession itself, but rather she associates the people behind the confessionals, the priests, with the people at State Commission for Human Rights. Carmen connotes that just as priests do not do anything in particular with people’s confessions, neither does the State Commission for Human Rights with people’s cases, like hers. Thus, we get a cultural glimpse of the complexity of the process of reporting incidents of abuse about bullying and harassment in Mexico. Moving to Sofia’s process of formally reporting her incident with sexual harassment with her coach, she showed her dissatisfaction at the way her case was handled. Similar to Carmen’s experience, Sofia needed to prove her case was not ‘isolated’. Sofia had told me that when an investigation was opened for her case nothing had been done and when I probed asking ‘Why wasn’t anything done’, she replied:

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I approached them first and they told me. 'You know what, we cannot do anything because it's an isolated case. If you bring us someone else that has asserted the same has happened to them, we could take it as repetitive behaviour. ' Then I went to this girl who broke down crying and said, 'this is the thing: nothing can proceed because it's an isolated case' and whatnot... And she told me, 'yes, I'm going to tell the truth ...' And then no. It was to speak against me, to say that everything was basically a lie. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

From Carmen’s and Sofia’s cases presented here about their reporting experiences with bullying and harassment, a broader cultural interpretation can be formulated. We see that the reporting process may take a couple of hours or it may take days, maybe even more. This signifies that the case can take long to resolve, becoming a frustrating situation for the target. Furthermore, the target is asked to provide more evidence, as we see with Sofia when she was requested to find more similar cases otherwise her case would count as an isolated one. Once a report is created, the aggressor maybe notified, which increase the security risk of the target, since it allows the defendant to retaliate against them. Furthermore, the conditions for a Mexican woman that encourage her to report instances of bullying and harassment seem to be different from a man. As highlighted in chapter 2, the number of women who formally report instances of bullying and harassment is very low and even lower is the number of cases that have positive outcomes, in terms of justice for the victim (11.1% and 2% respectively). Reasons why women who experienced violence did not report it legally was because they felt no permanent impact in their lives or were convinced not to do so, which might be partly explained by the social and political context of women in Mexico, in which they seem that they need to prove twice such instances of bullying and harassment have occurred, and thus, discouraging women to report. These reasons are important to have in mind as they are examples of epistemic injustice present on a national and legal scale (Fricker, 2007). Related to the above, analysing further the interview with Gaby, we will see that the reasons for Gaby not to formally report her experience with sexual harassment were harm and retaliation. The following narrative contains emotional terminology such as ‘I was afraid to do something’, ‘I was afraid of her’. Gaby also uses the words ‘threatened’ and ‘kill herself’ which are associated with harm, injury and fright. Furthermore, Gaby also alludes to a future harm, to which she is afraid by saying ‘what if’, ‘does something to me’, ‘does something to my family’. The narrative developed

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when I asked, ‘Did it ever occur to you to report it? to which Gaby responded, ‘Yes. But it always scared me.’ Then I probed asking what she was scared of and Gaby added further:

Well, it's just that ... As she often threatened me ... she once told me that she wanted to kill herself. She said that I would help her if I would kill myself afterwards. So, I said 'the fuck! What if she does something to me? Or does something to someone in my family?'. She never said to me: 'hey, I'm going to kill you'. But, like, those things ... I was afraid to do something. Well, I was afraid of her, of her telling me that she wanted to kill herself because her life was crap. And she said to me, 'you help me, and then you kill yourself and the problems are going to end.' So, then, like that ... I always thought that one day everything would end. Well ... but, don't know, I never did [report to authority] but I did think about it. (P3, Gaby, athlete)

Athletes not having enough influence and agency in decisions about their sport, as well as facing lack of organisational support systems is what Kirby et al (2000) have referred to the dome of silence, a culture of sports that discourages athletes from speaking up when facing bullying and harassment or other forms of violence. My data in this section show that part of the outcome on whether a case of bullying and harassment proceeded or not depended on whether the authorities believed the athlete and if they were willing to help and go further with the case as we saw with Carmen and Sofia. For instance, when Carmen expressed, ‘The truth is that I have a terrible criterion of them… and sad because I say, we are women and how is it possible that among women we doubt ourselves?’, she is implying that the main component of her frustration and her view on an authority which was supposed to help her, doubted her story. Likewise, Sofia needed to prove that other athletes had experienced the same harassment as her in order to proceed with her investigation. To this, research shows that when it comes to dealing appropriately with issues of bullying and harassment of athletes, sports organisations and sport practitioners are not ‘doing enough to identify the problem areas’ (Kirby et al, 2000, p. 132; Engelberg and Moston, 2019).

Consequences of Reporting Bullying and Harassment

Carmen and Sofia, the ones who decided to report formally their experience with bullying and harassment faced two main issues, one at the organisational level and the other one at the social level. At the organisational level, Carmen and Sofia expressed that their cases were not addressed diligently. These athletes faced delays in the way their cases would

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progress, which inflicted stress and emotional burden on them, further affecting their sports career as well as personal relationships. To exemplify this, Carmen faced complications not only with lawyers and the Human Rights Commission in Jalisco but also within her own team which made the reporting process and her experience with it even more complicated. The following excerpt shows the social reaction to Carmen’s case, as well as how counter evidence was provided. As we see in the following lines:

… The gentleman [the coach] …it’s very clear to me that he’s sick. I told them [lawyers], ‘How is it possible that you can’t help me and instead come to me with a list where the names of all the athletes that supposedly don’t believe me?’. They told me: "Look, here is the list of all your comrades [athletes] who say the opposite of what you say…They stated that I was inventing that I invented all that because my coach had banned me from training. Then he [coach] began to put together pieces in such a way that appeared I invented the harassment, to make it seem that I had taken revenge on him. That was his way of making people believe that I was the one who was ... lying. And I was like ‘wow my coach! He who has made me a national champion, is the one who has taken me here ... here’…Yes, I have received comments and ridicule of my situation, to date. And I say, ugh good. ‘Hey! OK good! I thought you were a good person!’ (P1, Carmen, athlete)

At the social level, Sofia faced backlash from other athletes, coaches and members of their sport, admitting that her sports career in track and field had ended because of the incident with bullying and harassment. Sofia expressed the following, which can give clues as to why athletes choose not to speak out against bullying and harassment:

I retired a year ago because of the problem of sexual harassment and other personal things that didn't allow me to continue in the sport. When that season ended, it meant I wasn't going to return to train with that coach. I began to lower my performance, because I was ‘swallowing’ all that. But I decided to speak, and it seems that it's the worst thing I could've done, you know? Because ... everybody was against me. The whole world. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

I probed Sofia to explain further what she meant by ‘the whole world’ being against her and she explained:

All the coaches, all the athletes from here. Men and women, more women than men. Oh my, they sent me super ugly text messages, saying rude things to me. People that I thought were friends... well, they weren't friends. But they were ... good people, know what I mean? What can I say...I really don't care if they’re themselves on the side of the coach or if they’re on my side. But save your comments against me if you don't know me, right? The least they would tell me was bitch, slut, and ... like that. So, I said, I won't care. I'm going to train. I started looking for a coach and nobody from here in Jalisco wanted to train me. Their excuse was ... ‘I don’t want to get into trouble with that coach’ and that's how weird it was. I thought 'Oh my, how is that your excuse! What do you have to do with my previous coach?’ The truth is that at the end, I didn't want to create any more problems for myself there. So, what I did was that I said that I was going to train by myself. I knew a coach from another state, so I trained from a distance. The coach would tell me what to do and I would do it myself here. But then, when I got to the track, they kicked my backpack, they threw my water jug away ... saying comments

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and doing things like that, know what I mean? And so, I didn't feel comfortable. I'm a person who doesn't care much about what people think of me, but there comes a time when you don't feel any comfort at all when everyone is attacking you. And the track, the place where I was going to relax, to forget everything, turned a place for trouble. So, I didn't even like to go training. (P4, Sofia, athlete)

Research suggests that perpetrators of bullying and harassment are likely to remain unsanctioned and undetected when sport organisations do not have adequate policies and procedures against bullying and harassment (Roper, 2013; Parent and Fortier, 2018). Bridging research from non-sport workplaces, Duffy and Sperry (2012) explain that organisations where bullying and harassment is frequent are likely to continue with this due to the way their system works. These parts include leadership, culture, structure, strategy, and its members. Drawing from the research on bullying and harassment in non-sport workplaces, for the few individuals who do approach their organisations, the most common point of contact and strategy for them to seek help with bullying and harassment is turning to supervisors or human resource departments yet doing so can carry some risks if individuals are not well advised (Ferris, 2004). Research in this area provides that human resource departments may not be the best to deal with abusiveness because they typically become involved when formal complaints are placed (Rayner and McIvor, 2006; Serantes and Suarez, 2006). Shapiro (2005) maintains that human resources main functions are not to protect organisational members but to protect organisations from legal issues or lawsuits and unforeseen difficulties. In other words, human resource departments may exist to take the best course of action, which will often signify those actions that will pose less impact to an organisation. In sport organisations, this point of contact for help for athletes is less well-defined, which can create organisational blindness to bullying and harassment, or what Duffy and Sperry (2012 p. 212) call a ‘deaf ear’ to individuals seeking support in informal ways. Unless the appropriate interventions are placed in the distinct levels of the organisational system, individuals in a given workplace experiencing fear of loss of jobs, fear of consequences for taking a stand, or lack of transparency, are likely to continue experiencing these.

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Chapter 8

Findings 4: Safety Culture

Introduction

This is the final empirical chapter of this investigation. In this chapter, rather than focusing on specific cases of bullying and harassment, as I did in the previous two chapters, chapter 6 and chapter 7 with Carmen’s, Gaby’s and Sofia’s cases, I focus on my participants’ accounts regarding the safety and support for athletes in the site of research. I first discuss participants’ descriptions of the minimal supervision and availability of services for athletes at the track, and how those may relate and extend to instances of bullying and harassment as they relate to the organisation’s safety culture. Then I discuss the processes by which athletes and coaches organise their practices and competitions such that places they share become risky venues for athletes to be transgressed. In the final section of this chapter, I discuss participants’ feelings and experiences regarding the suitability of certain coaches to train athletes, as well as cultural clashes that may arise in the site of research through the hiring practices by the organisation of foreign coaches.

Safety point 1: Psychosocial Hazards and Safety Perceptions

I start the analysis and interpretation with the interview excerpt of Tomas, a middle- and long-distance track and field coach. I interviewed Tomas face-to-face at the site of research. Tomas had a friendly disposition, as other coaches that participated in my investigation had, and at the same time he showed nervousness and excitement about the interview (see Table 1 for further participant reference). Tomas’s way of speaking was distinct because he spoke in slang terms in Spanish and in a way that was not always grammatically correct. Perhaps an example to illustrate Tomas’s linguistic style is comparable

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to the African American Vernacular English. I highlight this feature because my translations from Tomas’s Spanish to English do not account for this variation in style, and rather I use a standard informal English to represent Tomas’s quotes. This part of the interview with Tomas was centred around his opinions about the overall safety of the research site, and how this related to the safety of athletes as well. During the interview, Tomas commented that in the past, the sports organisation had not provided enough structure and support to keep facilities and overall quality of environment in check. I asked further whether this was the case now and if he could give more detail as to what he meant by support and quality of environments. This is what he said:

In other countries, there is a well-developed training plan for them [athletes]. They have them…like jewels. They have their water fountains; they worry that they drink good water. I mean, their facilities have some decent places to give athletes sports massages, some decent places to do their workouts in the gym ... even for the restroom! Here what we have…they are not clean, nor are there water fountains… it's important because you say, ‘I think there are resources’, because there is a fee. You pay to use the facilities, all the people you see now, pay a contribution. So, I think it’s a motivation if you see that there are the necessary services of security and facilities, that there is an appropriate place to train. It gives you more energy. (P8, Tomas, coach)

Tomas’s comment about the specific facilities not being ‘decent’ caught my attention and wanted to get more information about this. Tomas used the word ‘decente’ in Spanish, which I translated as ‘decent’ in English. Here Tomas seems to imply that facilities at the track are not well-suited or well-kept. Yet another possible meaning considering Tomas’s choice of words could be related to morally proper or improper, that is, decent, places where athletes need to go to get their needs covered. Thus, knowing from my participants’ experiences with sexual harassment that it was ‘justified’ by giving sport massages, I probed Tomas: ‘Massages, for example, where are they given?’, question he clarified and added further:

Over there, in that little door. But there is a lack of order. I hope that this research helps to expose that, that we are neglecting the athletes. That we should have what’s necessary. For example, the necessary equipment for first aid. There was a case were an athlete had an accident, broke one foot and there was no one to help. (P8, Tomas, coach)

What Tomas shared may be indicative of what is known in the field of organisational psychology as psychosocial hazards. Psychosocial hazards are aspects of the work environment, such as type of work performed by employees, as well as the social, and organisational context that have the potential for causing psychological and physical harm (Leka and Houdmont, 2010). Psychosocial hazards can range from role ambiguity and job insecurity, lack or excessive supervision, exposure to unsafe use of equipment, lack of social

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support and work overload, and violence such as bullying and harassment practices. I kept asking Tomas for more details. For instance, I asked, ‘What kind of emergency equipment do you have here?... If an athlete, on this same track where we are, suddenly faints or has heart problem, do they have emergency equipment? What do they do?’ He expressed:

Who knows. Because there is no facility here where a paramedic can be seen and who is watching. It would be important that there was something, something like an emergency bell, but something. (P8, Tomas, coach)

Clarifying further, I paraphrased, ‘So, there is no drinking water, no emergency services or someone supervising on the track, is that correct?’, Tomas responded:

Yes. There is no adequate service and that means neglecting the athletes, from the emotional to the physical. (P8, Tomas, coach)

While psychosocial hazards are situation specific, they are related to the way work, such as coaching and training practices for athletes, is organised and managed (Leka and Houdmont, 2010). Drawing from the occupational safety literature, Law et al. (2011) explain that a psychosocial safety climate should be an important and specific component in organisations as it relates to the freedom from psychological harm at work. Therefore, suggesting that risk assessments should be conducted to assess the healthiness of an organisation with the aim of improving and protecting employee’s health and well-being. This should also apply to sports organisations. By nature of the work that Tomas performs at the site of research means that not only he is affected by it but also the athletes, which he recognises are being ‘neglected from the emotional to the physical’. Additionally, a psychosocial safety climate is argued to be part of a broader organisational culture and consists of aggregated perceptions of organisational members regarding the attention and commitment given to protect their psychological and physical health and safety. In this piece of information given by Tomas, even though there is no explicit mention of bullying and harassment, the narrative gives insight into his experiences and perceptions of the environment and safety structures of his working context. Through Tomas’s opinion that athletes are not being taken care of properly, shown when he says, ‘there is no adequate service and that means neglecting the athletes, from the emotional to the physical’ could also apply to lack of processes or mechanisms when handling and preventing bullying and harassment. Exploring Fernando’s account, I found common themes when compared to Tomas,

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related to the lack of supervision and support available to athlete’s safety and development. Fernando is the coach who specialises in middle-distances and also has amateur level track and field groups. In chapter 5, I discussed Fernando’s use of the term ‘albures’ to describe his team’s socialisation processes. This account of Fernando reveals aspects regarding the availability of trained personnel to deal with emergencies on the track. He shared:

…There is no one, practically. I have a long time coming here, many years, and the medical services I see are when there are events. For example, right now, while we're talking, I don’t think there is a doctor in the office, but I don’t know if he’s around either. So, if some athlete faints or gets hurt or ... because suddenly they collide when running…because the track fills up, then, everyone looks after themselves the best they can. We lack that security culture a lot. (P9, Fernando, coach)

Related to Fernando’s quote, Chmiel and Hansez (2016) explain that accidents in the workplace, in this instance, the track and field of a sport organisation, that occur due to disregard of safety procedures can be regarded as violations. The literature on organisational psychology regarding the safety of organisational members (e.g., employees, athletes, coaches, sport staff, etc.) suggests that one reason for disregarding of safety procedures, and the accidents that may occur, may be caused by following ‘the path of least effort’. These practices may be allowed to persist over time which at any given point are no longer perceived as unsafe by organisational members. The quote from Fernando highlights a safety aspect from the site of research and perhaps the path of least effort in that we get a picture that the ‘track fills up’ with many athletes and they can get injured. Further evidence of possible psychosocial and physical hazards through Fernando’s description of support for athletes and coaches in the site of research is shown here when he says:

Well ... it's the only track we have. Then there are too many runners, semi-professionals, professionals but also amateurs in the state. There are three, four races that are organised every eight days and you see two thousand, three thousand people. Jalisco, fortunately, is a state where athletics is practiced very much. But I think that a single track is not enough for everyone. In that sense we are a little behind, although Jalisco has been national champion in the Olympiad for 14 or 15 years. In many sports Jalisco has had a lot of wins. And you say, how can there be only one track? ... it is not possible that we only have one track. A single velodrome. Official swimming pools, I think we have only one or two. So, I do believe that there is a lack of infrastructure for the athletes to develop more and there is the need for more security as well. In a state that is very, very participatory, people practice a lot of sport, whether it's running, triathlon, cycling, swimming, baseball ...you know what I mean? (P9, Fernando, coach)

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Here Fernando is revealing a cultural aspect that might be particular of Mexico, that is, the general attention and investment given to sport. From his account, Fernando acknowledges Jalisco to be a state in Mexico with people who are ‘very, very participatory’ in sport, having had important regional and national results. Yet he finds a contradiction in that despite success, facilities and support do not match with the results had by athletes from Jalisco. Additionally, from Tomas’s and Fernando’s accounts, we can start forming a picture of how the training environment in track and field could be like in the site of research. This is evident when Fernando describes that many athletes of different levels use the track all at once with the risk of colliding and injury and with no proper supervision in place to deal with emergencies. Schein’s (2010) model of organisational culture is applicable at the artifacts level of culture of the site of research. Schein (2010) explains that in the artifacts culture level, individuals would be able to describe the visual surroundings of their environment. For instance, when Tomas states that there are no drinking fountains in the track, the restrooms are not clean, the area for massages is small and disordered, and there are not first aid services available. An ‘emergency bell’, as Tomas stated at the beginning of this section, denoted a need for attention and supervision, a way to say that urgent matters need to be attended quickly. Similarly, Fernando expressed that athletes and coaches are left to their own devices on the track and mentioned collisions and risk of injury when the track fills will many runners. These are all observable characteristics of the environment and, according to Schein (2010), artifacts are important to identify as they cover areas of a group’s life in an organisation. Tomas and Fernando deal with different groups of athletes and training regimes, yet they are giving similar observations regarding basic support for athletes, facilities in the track and medical supervision. Thus, they provided insights to important safety aspects that could be addressed by levels of management support and cover needs for athletes. Thinking further about how Tomas’s and Fernando’s perceptions can relate to the safety of athletes and the risk of bullying and harassment, we can consider that bullying and harassment do not exist in only one dimension or separately from other organisational issues. De Lara (2016) explains that they take place in a system and there is something that precedes them and allows them. That is, the members, management structures, policies,

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norms and practices that contribute to the system and each contribution can be active or passive. Accordingly, regarding bullying and harassment would result from a system that allows it to occur either inadvertently or with knowledge of it. For instance, De Lara’s (2016) refers to active contributions to bullying and harassment as direct instances of coercion or violence, while passive contributions may involve the type of support available, lack of policies or lax rules that could give way to it. What Tomas and Fernando shared provided an insight to that possible sport system, demonstrating, as I interpret it, a possible passive contribution to bullying and harassment because if there is a perceived lack of supervision regarding safety of athletes at the track, medical services and facilities in the site of research, it is not far to think that the lack of supervision and safety could branch to the way bullying and harassment develops and is handled. In addition to Tomas and Fernando, the following excerpt with Karina, a middle- distance runner and duathlon specialist, provided a newer view on the type of safety checks and structure in the site of research. This time the narrative did not have to do with basic needs such as water availability or medical services, rather with the accommodation where athletes stayed in. When I asked Karina about what she thought about the safety and supervision of athletes, this is what she responded:

Mmm ... now I think there’s a little more supervision. Before it was ... that part was very neglected. It was very easy to enter the facilities. If you lived there as an athlete, it was very easy to enter and leave at the time you wanted. You gave the warden their ‘coca-colas’ and they were like, ‘oh yeah, go ahead’…I didn’t live there but I spent a lot of time there. Many times, I went in there and had breakfast or went out. That is, I came and went as if I were an athlete living there. And it was very, very easy. So, now I think they have become a little stricter on that side because of certain events they’ve had there. So, I think people are a little more careful than before, but still. (P11, Karina, athlete)

From this narrative, Karina’s account also provides insider information regarding accommodation facilities for athletes. She offers a retrospective account of what it was like to enter and leave the athlete’s accommodation at the site of research. Important to highlight is that in the Mexican culture, the expression ‘to give someone their coca-cola’ is a common way to refer to subtle forms of bribery, whereby the person receiving the ‘coca- cola’ is the one giving a favour to another. This is a colloquial Mexican expression and Karina’s description of the wardens allowing entrance to the sport accommodation to people who would give them their ‘coca-

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colas’ reveals the ease by which they would give up supervision duties. This expression is also used to refer to people of lower social strata that can be easily swayed. Interestingly, and combining the three previous accounts with Tomas, Fernando and Karina, there appears to be some sort of consensus or shared opinion about lack of supervision and past and present support available at the site of research.

Safety point 2: Risky Venues

In sport, Bringer et al. (2001) argue that organisations should have coaches’ behaviour guidelines that clarify what is acceptable and what is not. However, establishing guidelines is not enough to ensure that professional and personal boundaries are respected or that adequate support for reporting bullying and harassment will exist. Different parts of an organisational system need be taken into account to make sure there are adequate resources to prevent and support for athletes that want to report bullying and harassment (Fasting et al, 2018). Apart from availability of support and reporting procedures, a safe environment must ensure that training sessions, trips to competitions and interactions out of the ‘track’ such as in homes, hotels or vehicles, ought to be more guarded to prevent conflicts, which are often the contexts where bullying and harassment occur. For instance, Gaby exemplified how massages can be given in any place without much consideration of possible transgression vulnerabilities. Gaby shared:

First, the coach was super good with me, out of training. And after that, one day the coach told me: 'you're already tired of so many workouts. If you want, so you don’t spend money or go with the physio, I give you a massage at my house. And I responded: 'ah, well, yes, it's fine’. (P3, Gaby athlete)

Researchers have noted that given the financial pressures of sport, it is not uncommon for athletes to share the same room with coaches while traveling or use locker rooms and private homes for meetings (Brackenridge, 2001). Likewise, hotels and vehicles used to transport athletes to competitions, as well as private homes to give massages can become risky venues where athletes can be exploited or abused. Gaby’s comment shows this dynamic clearly where her coach facilitates a massage at house. Similarly, the next excerpt with Sofia shows another an example of risky venues that

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Brackenridge (2001) and others have pointed to. In this case, Sofia shows how athletes and coaches organise their accommodation for competitions in relation to their finances, facilitating a risky venue. Sofia shared:

He tells me one day, ‘Look, this is the solution. You only have to pay this on your own and the rest is covered. You can have housing with this coach who also receives other athletes.’ He told me further, ‘several from the team are going to stay there too because they don't have money to pay for the trip either.’ Then I thought about it and said, ‘well, well, if more people go...I asked several of my mates and they said they would stay there. I thought that since there’re more people going, well, no problem, right? I agreed to stay in that house, right? (P4, Sofia, athlete)

This section about risky venues is also related to the chapter on boundaries because of the role coaches and athletes have, the team dynamics, as well as the spaces they share. Sofia’s harassment case, which happened in that competitions ‘housing’, was discussed in a previous chapter. Here we can see how different elements of the sport environment, such as financial concerns, as researchers have highlighted, combined with the perpetrators harassing intentions can make certain propositions sound sensible while being oblivious to potential harms. Yet another insight into the vulnerability of athletes and risks of harassment at certain venues is Carmen’s narrative. In chapter 6 on Grooming and Transgression, I also explored in depth Carmen’s harassment, which occurred at the coach’s private home and will not discuss it here detail. What I want to show in the following excerpt, is lack of boundaries between Carmen’s coach with her athletes, and also how Carmen and her teammates are taken to risky venues as part of the organisation of their training practices. Here Carmen explained how her teammates received massages and were taught to give other athletes massages. This is how she put it:

We, as part of our training had a massage session every week. The coach had a partner that he flaunted, and he had asked her to do him the favour of giving us the massages…he said this very openly. When that relationship between the two of them ends… Oh, before all this… he asks his partner, with whom he lived, to teach us how to massage others. So then, at that moment, the coaches’ partner and the coach realised that since I understood the practice [giving massages to other athletes], I knew how to do it. So, the coach asked me to give massages to the youngest girls because he obviously couldn’t deal with all of them… At that time, it was our turn, it was massage day, and he obviously asks me to support him in giving the massages to other athletes. He said that the following day, on Thursday, I would have training. So, he tells me: ‘go to my house, I'll be there soon’. As always, I didn’t notice anything weird, it was not the first time that I stopped at his home. Then I went ahead and waited for him there…and from a distance, I see that he comes with groceries because he used to buy us juices, biscuits... (P1, Carmen, athlete)

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To make sure I was understating properly, I probed Carmen asking, ‘Forgive me for interrupting you, were the massages given at the coach's house?’ to which she clarified ‘Yes.…that's right.’ And I further enquired, ‘And why was this?’. This was her response:

Because look, many times…emm… I knew of a parent who got upset, who questioned: ‘Why not here on the track?’. Previously, they gave us massages at the track and we had our [massage] bed there. We had a small room next to the track, they gave us massages there. But, hey, suddenly, the ‘man’ [coach] changed his mind…he thought it was more comfortable in his house and we all agreed to go to his house on a Monday or Wednesday in groups. So, we went, we were going to give and have the massages there. These are issues that you don’t see that bad. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

From this quote from Carmen, I identify three main issues that reflect a lack of boundaries between coach-athlete interactions, risky venues, and overall safety practices that are linked to the site of research. The first one is that massages to athletes are given by several people not properly responsible for it as is the coach, the coaches’ romantic partner and other athletes. Further, the way Carmen discusses this suggests that the coaches’ romantic partner may have not been part of the sport team, and rather had an informal role in this situation. Carmen also mentions that the coach had a partner ‘that he flaunted’ and was open about her giving athlete massages, demonstrating further the coach not separating personal and professional matters. The second issue is that Carmen mentions that she was taught how to give massages to her teammates. From Carmen’s statement, it appears that she learned to give massages without any particular background or qualification. The words Carmen uses to justify her learning and giving massages such as ‘because he obviously couldn’t deal with all of them’, reveals how the coach may have often relied on other athletes to complete the training. The coach delegated work that should not be delegated to athletes. Additionally, this instance also demonstrates that there were no specialised team members in charge of supporting athletes with their massages, illustrating a lack of support available to cover athletes’ needs, which is consistent with what other participants such as Tomas and Fernando shared. The third issue from this narrative is that Carmen’s refers to the fact that massages were given at the coaches’ house. For Carmen this activity was not seen as a risky venue, a space where athletes could be vulnerable to bullying and harassment. This is highlighted when she says, ‘Well…as always, I didn’t notice anything weird, it was not the first time that I stopped at his home’. However, Carmen also provided the point of view of another person, a

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parent who questioned why athletes went to the coaches’ house for massages. Carmen seems to have become aware that maybe having massages at the coaches’ house was not well seen and was noticed by other people. Yet still Carmen minimises the risk, stating, ‘These are issues that you don’t see that bad.’ One more account regarding risky venues is Miguel’s account, revealing informal interaction among coaches and athletes and highlighting potential harms. He expressed:

Another example is the masseurs or rather, coaches who give massages to their athletes. When, supposedly, being in a public institution or already in a national selection... you would suppose that you have to have a multidisciplinary body where there is a masseur will give the treatment to the athlete and not the coach. And not because the coach is doing this is bad in itself. But the situations that I've listened to... that massage therapy, to put it in quotes, well ... it goes with other intentions. (P7, Miguel, coach)

Safety point 3: Background Checks and Cultural Differences

Another finding from the interviews related to the safety of athletes was the acknowledgment that not all the coaches they have known have professional qualifications to be coaches, and that some foreign coaches had different styles of treating athletes. These differences seemed to create an internal yet unspoken tension among coaches in the site of research, which are important to highlight as potential stressors and causes of conflicts and violence. Mariana provided a novel view on coaches and acknowledged that even if coaches had the proper background to work as coaches, some could be perceived as lacking skills to communicate, motivate or help athletes overcome personal or emotional difficulties. When asked about their thoughts on the qualifications of coaches, Mariana explained:

Well, that's a very good question because the basis of track and field is defined by the practice of running. I believe that seventy percent of coaches are empirical. They were great athletes, they retire, and they open their club or own group ... Some do care about their preparation and study. And others say 'ah, later'. And well, they’re already having their own athletics school, their beginners and youths’ group, the group of people who are just going to exercise for health, and because of that they believe that it’s very easy to enter the high-performance arena…I think to say 'I am high performance coach' is a greater word…Because I think nothing depends only on your experience, regardless of how long you've been in sport. You have to have that preparation, especially the pedagogical part. How are you going to transmit your knowledge? Well, in track and field, as is something physical, you have to have knowledge of physiology, workloads, adaptation...because we're talking here that you can harm a person if you over train them. You can also affect a person psychologically if you have the pedagogy of how to treat the psychological part...Ah! because that's another issue. I also see coaches that make athletes see it's never their mistake. There is this kind of talk 'you're wrong, and not me... I take my role

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as a coach and you assume your role as an athlete'. It's this thing of 'no, I'm fine and you're the one who's really bad’. (P5, Mariana, athlete)

For Mariana, professional coaching qualification is essential for the proper training of athletes. Her perception of the number of coaches that are ‘empirical’ is striking, as this perception reflects her view that not many coaches in her environment may have official or recognised professional coaching qualifications. What is more, Mariana is aware that an athlete can be harmed if the ‘pedagogy’ (pedagogía in Spanish), as she referred to the knowledge and coaching preparation, is lacking. Furthermore, still related to background checks, participants often referred to coaches of Cuban origin being very present in the sport of track and field in Jalisco and for some of my participants this was seen in a negative way given the experiences they had with them. What Hugo expressed in the following narrative not only illustrates his own dissatisfaction with those coaches, but also opinions about the suitability of them to train athlete in Jalisco. He stated:

The mistake that sports institutions make is that to have a ‘dream team’…I mean, sports institutions should be updating and supervising people. They pay here so many sport staff of Cuban origin who are useless. They should pay really trained people, people who have been excellent. (P14, Hugo, coach)

I enquired, ‘Why are many Cubans in Mexican athletics?’ to find out more about this issue at the site of research, to which Hugo responded:

Because there is an agreement between governments. I know that they tell Cubans that they’re going to pay them so much money. They give them half. The coaches sign for something less and that money is left to the authorities. The Cuban government also receives a percentage, and in the end the Cuban coach keeps anything. In the end, the coach can earn enough money because apart from his work at the sport institution, he does private jobs in sport. But my point of view is that they have methodologies from 25 years ago. They must update and it’s the institution’s job to check. I don't have much confidence in them…And speaking of it, there was a Cuban coach who was sued for sexually abusing one of his athletes. I knew him. We talked to each other well. But the ethics and lack of preparation was noticeable because we were on the track and he was smoking. In a ‘sacred’ sports venue as is the track…Look, I agree that he smokes if he’s on the stands, far from the track. But this is a coach setting the example to his athletes ... I repeatedly told him that smoking wasn’t allowed, and he replied, ‘I do what I want, whenever I want.’ What happened to this coach? Nothing happened. He retired from the institution only. (P14, Hugo, coach)

What Hugo expressed here is further evidence that there are tensions and perceptions of unfairness in treatment among coaches in the site of research. Furthermore, and related to background checks, Hugo made emotional claims that his sport organisation needs an update and more monitoring of the role of coaches, which may lend to sexual

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harassment. Additionally, the anecdote Hugo provides us about one of the Cuban coaches smoking in the track is insightful into the type of frictions coaches have between each other, how aware they are of codes of conduct, as well as how their own behaviours could impact their athletes. Similar to Hugo, Adriana’s account makes references to Cuban coaches, cases of harassment, and shares a similar background to other participants here, which is insightful from an organisational and team perspective. When asked about team dynamics, the type of coaches she interacted with and whether she knew directly or witnessed cases of bullying and harassment, she said:

In here, they are like five coaches from track and field that I know, and everyone has their group. And there was a coach ... there are many Cubans, there are about four... There was a Cuban specifically who… I didn't train with all the time but was always in charge of the relays. So, whenever I did relays, I would join him...And once I had to travel with him to a competition and I witnessed that some ladies started throwing bottles of water and were yelling at him that he was a criminal and things like that, that he had abused his daughter. Mad ladies. And I saw that and left…The truth is that the coach never did anything to me, but I tell you, I didn't train with him, just the relays. And since I haven't been ... I mean, I saw that many girls spent more time with him. Like, when they were at competitions, they ate and sat with him and things like that. I, really, have never been that close with my coaches. I also know this girl who did train with him and she said that this coach tried to abuse her. It came out even in the newspaper. That whole case came out and it seems they fired him. (P10, Adriana, athlete)

Looking to find more about Cuban coaches and coaching behaviour after she expressed, she trained with one when practicing relays, I asked Adriana, ‘When it was your turn to train with this Cuban coach, how was his way of training or communicating with athletes from what you could perceive?

Well ... I don't know if that is normal in Cuba, but it was always that I saw that he hugged his athletes. I never really felt so comfortable with him. What I always did was going to the training, do what I had to do and leave. (P10, Adriana, athlete)

I probed further, ‘Do you know if anyone supervised? Or if someone currently supervises how they train here?

From what I know, no. From what I know, it's rather that each coach arrives at the institution and organises his group and does his training. (P10, Adriana, athlete)

Similar to Mariana, Hugo and Adriana, Luis, the ‘hermetic’ coach whom I discussed back in chapter 5 on Boundaries stated his opinions on the hiring of Cuban coaches in

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Mexico, in Jalisco specifically. This is what Luis stated after I asked ‘Why do Cubans have a preference? How are they prepared to give them that protection?

Well, look, this ... I do want to be very cautious here because, well, I don't want to be involved. Unfortunately, they handle everything politically and I want to avoid getting involved in a ‘he said, they said this or that’… I guess there were international or economic exchanges, so Cubans were brought here to Mexico, since the 1990s. Some were very good, others not so good but they stayed. And I don’t know what political negotiations there exist currently. But, here in Mexico, it feels like there is a preference. (P2, Luis, coach)

Andrea, a middle-distance coach, shared similar information regarding an ‘agreement’ between Mexico and Cuba in track and field, and more subtly and politely remarked that cultural differences are manifested in the way athletes and others are treated. This is what Andrea stated when asked about the issue of Cuban coaches and coaching dynamics:

In our country many foreign trainers have arrived. I think that we Mexicans are able to show with results what we can do in our sport. But there is an agreement that Mexico and Cuba have, I don't know for how long, to bring coaches to support the sport. The real reason for this agreement is unknown to me. But I think the treatment of Mexican coaches with their athletes compared to foreign coaches is different. Some are gentler and more respectful, and others are not. You realise this treatment, it’s s something that is perceived, seen, felt. It’s shown, you can't cover it with a finger. (P6, Andrea, coach)

The treatment that Andrea refers from coaches to athletes offers some support to Carmen’s account, who acknowledged having many conflicts with her coach, was a target of harassment and attributed many of the issues to cultural differences. This is what Carmen expressed:

At the time, my brother also trained in the same place as me. My brother was a javelin thrower, and well, my parents made the effort to give us a car to go to trainings and facilitate things. And that was taken by the coach as a bad thing, telling me that in his country of origin the young didn’t aspire to that. He was very harsh with me on that, saying that my parents, the only thing they were going to provoke was that I became a rebel. And I did say: ‘Hey, wait! This is to facilitate things for us!’ I felt like this whole thing was very, very personal. I think the differences in culture, education, were an issue……Another thing that was outrageous was that he was smoking in the track. It was one of the things that I did complained openly about. I did tell him ‘really?! One is pulling air from wherever one can, with the lactic acid to the brain, looking out for breath and we get to the track line exhausted, dying and inhaling the smoke of your cigar?!’. And that also bothered him. I mean, the truth is that all my life ...I don’t stay quiet! [laughs]…I also told him that it was very bad to make other athletes leave university, or for those who were in high school, to leave school. The truth is that I was outspoken about this. Excuse me, but this isn’t right. Fortunately, my parents always gave me the freedom to express myself, they never told me, ‘girl, shut up! Don't think! Don't say!’. On the contrary! We’re in a free country and I can express and say what I want and what I feel, what I think. Of course! Without disrespecting anyone. (P1, Carmen, athlete)

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It seems that for Carmen, culture and education were important aspects in the type of dynamics that developed with her coach. Regarding a safety culture for athletes, Brackenridge (2003) identified that it is through the organisational culture of sport organisations that close contact among athletes and coaches, where there is a clear separation of power imbalances, personality and cultural differences, as well as integration of the coach in other areas of the athlete’s life goes unsupervised. Stories like the ones presented in this chapter with important events and people are revelatory of socialisation processes in organisations and act as a reinforcer of beliefs and assumptions regarding leadership and management practices (Schein, 2010). Moreover, these stories and shared knowledge about cases of sexual harassment and differences in perspectives regarding coaches’ behaviour and cultural clashes, include work and interactions that is done behind the scenes and might not be openly discussed as are the thoughts and feelings of my participants regarding Cuban coaches and their training methods and possible tensions arising because of this. Finally, many professional athletes make their living through sport. Similar to an employer whose responsibility is to protect the health and safety of its employees, a sport organisation ought to protect that of its main players, the athletes. Already twenty years ago, Kirby et al. (2000) argued that high-performance sports are largely unregulated workplaces. They argued that athletes can be ‘ill-protected by regulations, laws and policies that would normally offer workers’ rights and avenues of redress’ (p. 27). Progress has been made to improve athlete welfare. However, sports organisations as the site of my research might still be structured in such a way that demand of athletes to have strong work-ethic, represent the organisation with winning results, but fail to supervise practices, coaches, and provide adequate facilities and services to cover athlete’s and coach’s needs. These features of sport organisations can passively or inadvertently facilitate not only physical, but also psychosocial hazards set the stage for abuse of athletes

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Chapter 9

Conclusions

Main Remarks

The aim with this doctoral dissertation was to contribute to the understanding of the manifestations of bullying and harassment in Mexican sport by investigating through a qualitative design the organisational culture of a public sport organisation in the state of Jalisco, Mexico. The title of my research reflected a core component of my thesis that is particular among the findings emerging from my qualitative interviews. Overall, the problem of bullying and harassment seems to me to be related to interpersonal boundaries as much as rules, policies, and processes in organisations, which are themselves forms of boundaries. Thus, the title ‘Blurred Boundaries’, reflected the core component of my thesis. In what follows, I elaborate this conclusion chapter on the implications of this thesis. I start with the theoretical implications of my investigation. Then I proceed with a discussion on the challenges I encountered when choosing the terminology to study the behaviours and experiences of my participants in this thesis. Next, I discuss the methodological implications, and last, I discuss further research recommendations.

Theoretical Implications

I consider this investigation an important contribution to the field of abuse in sport with further applications to the field of organisational psychology for various reasons. I contribute theoretically to the field by illuminating how culture influences individuals in sport organisations, and how adherence to norms and behaviours of such culture can be associated with bullying and harassment. For example, as I explored in chapter 5, the Mexican idiosyncrasies such as ‘albures’ and other forms of interactions can recreate gendered roles and spaces, and potentially lead to hypermasculine sport environments, in which sexual objectification and displays of aggression are tolerated. The conceptual framework that I used based on Schein’s theory of organisational

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culture gave me a way to theoretically understand bullying and harassment in the Mexican sport context, supported by the evidence suggesting that organisational cultures can brew environments where bullying and harassment are tolerated, as discussed in chapter 2 and chapter 3. The investigation, from the viewpoint of some of the members in the site of research (my participants athletes and coaches), helped to draw attention to an aspect of this organisation, sport and country, that has been understudied. Furthermore, advocates of the theoretical application of organisational psychology to sport, including myself, argue that it is important to become more aware that athletes, especially those at the elite level operate in highly complex social and organisational environments (Wagstaff and Krane, 2005; Wagstaff et al, 2012; Cruickshank and Collins, 2013; Wagstaff, 2017; Nite and Nauright, 2020). In any organisation, including sport organisations, there will be people (e.g., athletes, coaches, volunteers, managers, physicians, etc.) that will engage in a purposeful activity with common goals (Keyton (2005; García Solarte; Schein, 2010). In the case of sport, roles between organisational members may be distinct, yet they all share the goal and vision that athletic success will also bring organisational success. To this end, there is a widely held notion that we need to pay attention to, that the success of an athlete or a team is the result of individual efforts alone. Wagstaff (2017) has called this the ‘myth of individualism’, which stems from a social fixation with talent alone, as well as on an ignorance of a ‘wealth of interpersonal, group, and organisational factors that impact performance’ (p. 12). Important to note is that in sport, the study of organisational culture has focused primarily on leadership practices and how they might facilitate successful elite team performance (Fletcher and Arnold, 2011; Cruickshank and Collins, 2013; Skille and Chroni, 2018). These studies give insights that the main orientation and priorities of sport have been towards the commercial and competitive aspect of sport management. Less has been the focus integrating the components mentioned by Wagstaff (2017) on welfare issues and counterproductive behaviours such as bullying and harassment. Lastly, this research adds to the literature in another important theoretical way. Illuminating the need to study what may precede or sustain bullying and harassing practices, with the role of boundaries in mind, and how the quality and safety of an environment is created. Perhaps this could lead to a preventive focus rather than diagnostic one. Along the same lines, it is important to turn our attention to features beyond the victim-perpetrator

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relationship, such as norms, values, forms of communication, beliefs or assumptions, which are often deeply engrained in people’s habits, cultures, and ways of working, and learned through socialisation processes (Branch, 2008; Schein, 2010; Duffy and Sperry, 2012; 2014; Branch and Murray, 2015). These features are important in the organisational culture research, and I argue they need to be further emphasised in sport research, as discussed in the literature review (chapter 2) and in the conceptual framework (chapter 3).

Challenges on Terminology Terminology was an important debate that I highlighted exists among researchers on the field of bullying and harassment, emphasising that bullying, and harassment has been contextualised with different terms inside and outside sport environments (Leymman, 1990; Sáez and García, 2001; Barón Duque et al, 2003; Einarsen et al, 2003; Escartín-Solanelles, 2010; Duffy and Sperry, 2012; Kirby and Demers, 2013; Barmes, 2016; Mountjoy et al, 2016). I sought to combine both literatures, from organisational psychology and research on abuse in sport, with the purpose of enriching the understanding of bullying and harassment in sport and in my research context. Certainly, finding a suitable terminology to include a wide range of experiences presented a challenge for me conducting this investigation. This was so because coming across with too many term variations led to a confusion as it would appear that scholars are virtually researching similar forms of behaviour. I showed, for instance, in chapter 2, that terms that will often be found in these literatures will include bullying/mobbing; abusive supervision; emotional abuse; sexual harassment and abuse; sexual exploitation; non- accidental violence; maltreatment; interpersonal abuse/deviance; ostracism; non-accidental violence, neglect, among many other terms. Likewise, I pointed out that intentionality of harm seems to be contested among researchers as it is difficult to prove, and perceptions of intentionality might play an important role on how a behaviour is taken as intentional or not by both the perpetrator and the target (Nielsen et al, 2016). Yet it has been argued that by examining the context in which bullying, and harassment occurs, intentionality can potentially be established (Olweus, 1993). To some extent, I found that my data did show that the bullying and harassing behaviours

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were intentional and entailed a process of manipulation and participation of the targets, the athletes, seen in chapter 6 and chapter 7. Clearly, there are many forms of aggression towards athletes, that often occur in conjunction and with other forms of violence such as financial manipulation. The question would be then to what extent do we narrow down our constructs to study these harm-doing behaviours and displays of aggression. It is complicated to research each behaviour separately, or equally, all of them at once. The terms that I used here were heavily based on the available literature from the field of organisational psychology, since I found most of the literature on abuse in sport refers to concepts around child abuse. My participant athletes experienced bullying and harassment not in childhood, and many of their relational dynamics in the team and their sport organisation resemble more closely those of an adult working place than those dynamics of child-athletes, although they may share features given the highly disciplined environment of elite sport level at younger ages. Lastly, while I understand that providing definitional criteria can constitute a piece of work on their own, in this PhD dissertation I did not focus on providing a newer or validated definition of bullying and harassment. Rather, my focus was, taking an scholarly established terminology, to encompass a range of experiences, in order to study narratives giving insights to norms, values, practices and organisational life that would reveal an aspect of how bullying and harassment may develop, is understood, and may affect those individuals in the context of Mexican sport.

Methodological Implications

The data that I collected from my participants athletes and coaches was informative of working and training environments as guided by conceptual framework on organisational culture. These environments in Mexico can involve sexually charged forms of communication (chapter 5); unclear boundaries about physical touch among teammates and coaches (chapters 5 and 6); cultural practices in Mexico about reporting and dealing with bullying and harassment (chapter 7), such as the level of credibility given to victims; relations among people, most notably between athletes and coaches; as well as areas of conflict such as tensions among Mexican and Cuban coaches (chapter 8).

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These rich insights were possible to obtain because of the qualitative approach to this investigation, explained in chapter 4. The qualitative research design that included the use of semi-structured interviews in online forms and, when possible face-to-face, allowed me to capture stories that are not commonly voiced among my participants in their own culture and sport organisation. Therefore, this type of interview was a valuable tool, perhaps more so than observations in the context of this research. It helped to create a context where background information about issues that are not commonly voiced or are difficult to observe in the field in Mexico could be talked about with safety and trust (Markula and Silk, 2011; Tracy, 2013). On this front, the online forms of conducting research, and given the current global circumstances, offer great opportunities to continue gathering data on a topic that by its nature is difficult to research (Markula, 2005; Creswell, 2007; Hooley et al, 2012; Braun and Clarke, 2013). Furthermore, the qualitative method of inquiry allowed me to connect with athletes at a personal level and led them to share their experiences and thoughts about bullying and harassment, which had a beneficial personal effect on both sides. This was done through the establishment of a certain level of trust. The trust between my participants and myself was paired with the fact that I also shared personal experiences with them from when I was involved in elite sport as a tennis player. The rapport that my participants and I created was very important, in particular, with those who experienced bullying and harassment directly, to share intimate details about the process of manipulation and how the perpetrators of abuse in my investigation justified it (chapter 6). Trust is the key word and aim with this type of research design that allow organisational and interpersonal stories to come afloat. Rapport and trust were also very useful to gather aggregated perceptions around safety. For instance, in chapter 8, Safety Culture, I discussed perceptions of safety in the site of research, while in the previous two empirical chapters I focused on detailing the process leading to and speaking out about sexual harassment. In this final empirical chapter, I concentrated specifically on the aggregated perceptions, experiences, and observations of my research participants as they pertained to their daily work as coaches or training as athletes. For instance, during the interviews, it was specially highlighted by two coaches, Tomas and Fernando for example, that at the running track at the site of my research there were not medical services readily available to treat injuries or accidents.

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There were also descriptions of how the track could become crowded and basic water facilities were not strategically designed to be at the track for those who needed it. Other narratives that emerged that were relevant to this chapter were the interaction between coaches and athletes with foreign coaches and how cultural differences accounted for differences in coaching styles and treatment towards athletes. This, again, speaks of how different boundaries may indirectly dictate interactions in the same sport site. Evidence from organisational psychology related to workplace stress and aggression suggests that perceptions of freedom from psychological and physical harm by organisational members can reflect attention and efforts given by the organisation to protect members health and safety (Law et al, 2011). My interpretations of these perceptions, experiences, and observations from my research participants are that, in some ways, they reflect management and organisational commitment to coaches’ and athletes’ physical and psychological health in the site of research. In other words, perceptions of psychosocial safety can be a lead indicator of not only workplace stress, but also abuse and other forms of violations and negligence (Leka and Houdmont, 2010; Chmiel and Hansez (2016)

Further Research Recommendations

There are many factors that can shape organisational cultures in sport. They include the ideas of the director of clubs or managers of teams, the particular nature of a sport, the national context, the market conditions and technology. People outside the organisation such as sport afficionados, regulatory authorities or local communities, can also influence organisational culture. Organisations are complex social entities involving human, material and financial resources and in order to manage this complexity, there is a need for some kind of guideline for interactions. Thus, having an understanding of an organisational culture opens up several opportunities for consultants, researchers, managers, directors, and even athletes and other stakeholders. This understanding helps reveal the organisational priorities, the values and rewards systems. But also, how different groups in a sport organisation might interpret the prevailing values, norms and practices. Subsequently cultural and organisational knowledge can help a manager, an athlete, or a CEO to better understand work attitudes and behaviours

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around the practice of sport, and therefore make decisions about how to manage the sport and motivate change. An organisational lens is important to incorporate in greater extent in sport because sport can and often displays similar characteristics to non-workplaces (Hanin, 1993; Wagstaff, 2017). We live in a world were organisations are the medium of modern social life. Sport, as we know it, operates with rules, structures, policies, and goals that are set up in formal organisations dedicated specifically to sport outcomes. Ashkanasy and Hartel (2014) explain that cultures can have an impact on productive outcomes, satisfaction, and overall feelings of job security, as well as an impact on deviant, harmful, and unproductive behaviours (illustrated in chapter 8). Interestingly, Ashkanasy and Hartel (2014) argue further that the experience of emotions on a day-to-day basis is an effect of the organisational culture, suggesting that values, norms and assumptions have an affective component in organisational members. Recalling again the cases in chapter 8, coach Tomas showed some disappointment, not with his work as a coach, but with the system and support given to his organisation. Similarly, coach Fernando recognised that athletes at the site of research are not necessarily given what they need to train and develop well. Thus, the affective and emotional states experienced by members of an organisation, such as these coaches, may be a function of a supportive or non-supportive working environment, which would be interesting to explore in future studies. Another recommendation for further research is to study the nuances of the grooming and transgression processes in sport comparing males and female athletes. I dedicated an entire empirical chapter (Grooming and Transgression) in chapter 6, to discuss how the process of grooming in the site of research took time and was often combined with giving special attention or privileges to my participant athletes in terms of funding and accommodation for competitions, unusual help in training sessions, and other times threats and condescension. An interesting question for future studies could be how athletes conceptualise the experience of grooming and whether targets are able to recall warning signs. Overall, my participants were willing to talk about their experiences, allowing me to explore the grooming theme. Although some participants were more ready than others, they found the interview experience positive and helpful for their healing process. I believe that if

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trust is well-developed during the research, there lie interesting opportunities for researchers to dig deeper on this manipulation process and help us all to form a more solid theoretical and empirical base pertaining to sport.

On Representative Statistical Data It is a reality that Mexico faces issues with gender-based violence in the form of sexual violence, discrimination in the domestic, educational, and organisational domains (Gall, 2004; Camacho, 2005; Fregoso and Bejarano, 2009; Ansoleaga et al, 2015; López, 2016). However, in spite of these issues in Mexico, there has been progress in gender equality and issues of violence in the country (Gallangos, 2007; Moreno, 2011). Academic scholarship on gender relations, gender-based and feminist perspectives have indeed been implemented in public policies (Gallangos, 2007). Still a big gap remains between the areas that have been covered with these perspectives and the ones that have not, as is organised sport. This lack of scholarship of violence in sport in Mexico is evident when we see that discussions about violence in the ‘public sphere’ do not involve sport environments. There are now numerous studies demonstrating that sport is not immune to violence and that it is worldwide and more often than commonly perceived (Kirby and Greaves, 1996; Fasting et al, 2002; Volkwein-Caplan and Sankaran, 2002; Fasting et al, 2007; Kirby et al, 2008; Leahy et al, 2008; Brackenridge et al, 2009; Fasting et al, 2011; Kavanagh, 2014, Vertommen et al, 2016; Kavanagh et al, 2017; Vertommen et al, 2018; Yabe et al, 2018; Jeckell et al, 2018; Timpka et al, 2019; Cetin and Hacısoftaoğlu, 2020; Ohlert et al, 2020, among other studies). To think that sport in Mexico would be exempt of these issues is a mistake. What to do then? A proposition is to include organised sport in representative surveys on violence. I highlighted the gaps in statistical data of the ENDIREH surveys in chapter 2 (ENDIREH, 2011; 2016). These are national investigations and are supposed to be representative of the Mexican population in terms of measuring experienced gender-based violence. However, when revising these surveys there was no mention of sport whatsoever. A recommendation would be that in future surveys a specific category could be created to measure violence in sport, this could perhaps give different and surprising results. The sport category could be a subsection of workplace settings to account for professional and semi-professional athletes’ responses (just like a full-time or part-time

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employees), as well as amateur sport to account for those involved in sport that may experience violence too outside the elite level of sport performance, for instance.

On Barriers to Reporting, Evidence, and Support Networks It is still essential to grow in our understanding of the barriers that athletes and other sportspeople face when they experience bullying and harassment or other forms of violence. In chapter 7, Dome of Silence, I provided evidence and interpretations of the challenges that my participant athletes faced in the aftermath of bullying and sexual harassment and that potentially others might face. One of the first problems, I noted, emerging from these narratives, was that of not being able to access a support network; knowledge on how to report, and safe platforms for the reporting of bullying and harassment in the site of research. Previous investigations suggest that when addressing cases with bullying and harassment, the targets may not be well advised or trust the advice given or the organisation, all of which may halt successful reporting efforts (Kirby et al, 2000; Ferris, 2004; Shapiro, 2005; Duffy and Sperry, 2014). In the case of my research, not only my participant athletes were inappropriately advised and supported (those who sought to speak out). But also, they faced consequences and delays in the processing of their cases, leaving them frustrated, angry and inclined to stop from competing in their sport, in addition to other psychological and social consequences. A second problem that I explored in this chapter 7 was the way evidence necessary to appropriately report incidents of bullying and harassment was gathered and articulated. Not only are the perpetrators likely to remain unsanctioned and undetected if lax rules and policies exist in organisations (Kirby et al, 2000; Kirby et al, 2008; Roper, 2013; Adams and Kavanagh, 2020), but also targets of abuse are less likely to be believed when their stories are presented in ways that are not seen as rational or if their culture normalises or fails to understand bullying and harassment. On this, scholars (Fricker, 2007; Alcoff, 2017, 2018; Kidd, 2017) have argued that judgements of blame often fall on targets of abuse, diminishing their level of credibility based on sex, dress, ethnicity, sexual orientation or other social or biological markers of difference. Therefore, not only is the experience with bullying and harassment harming, but the reporting process might be as well. Only knowing more about these barriers will allow us to

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come up with better solutions towards safeguarding and athlete welfare. Finally, Fricker (2007) referred to being inadequately understood and facing incredulity towards the abusive experience as ‘hermeneutical and testimonial injustice’. Further research regarding credibility and capabilities of targets (Adams and Kavanagh, 2020) or Eurocentric practices on this topic (see Alcoff, 2017), may also be conducted, which I believe, can add to the literature substantially with enormous practical implications as well.

Final Remarks

The analysis of elite sport environments illuminates the broader social context of the #MeToo movement. Elite sport is one more example of a domain in which bullying, and harassment is pervasive, where power imbalances and the exploitation of the vulnerable exist. And equally, the exploitation of individuals who may become vulnerable. In the current context, while athletes are at the centre of performance, they, ironically, are not normally the ones who are on the power end of relationships. This can be problematic, and concerns should be legitimately raised. A learning outcome from this thesis is that people need a continuing sense of what their reality is in order to act appropriately in a given organisational setting. Culture can be understood as a system of collectively accepted meaning that is in effect for a given group at a given time. Certain beliefs, norms, and practices, that have formed part of the culture at the site of my research have been identified. Illustrating that culture is a learned behaviour that gets passed on through different mechanisms and processes and is important to continue studying. Lastly, it is my hope that the findings of this study can provide more context, motivation, tools, and ideas, with which to critically study work environments including sports ones. It is also my hope that this study empowers athletes to become more involved in the decision-making processes of their sports and, equally, empower them to voice issues that may arise in their sports organisations and teams. My wish is that steady and surely, we create a more welcoming and safe sport environment, and eventually, a better sport experience for all, which we know has enormous potential to have an impact in different dimensions of life.

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Appendix I (Information Sheet Spanish Template)

HOJA DE INFORMACIÓN PARA PARTICIPANTES

Número de referencia REC: HR-17 / 18-5453

SE LE DARÁ UNA COPIA DE ESTA HOJA DE INFORMACIÓN

Título del Estudio: Hostigamiento y Acoso en el Deporte de Alto Rendimiento: Un Estudio de Atletas Mexicanos.

Invitación al estudio

Me gustaría invitarlo a participar en este proyecto de investigación que forma parte de mi investigación de doctorado. Antes de decidir si desea participar en este proyecto de investigación doctoral, es importante que comprenda por qué se está realizando la investigación y qué implicará su participación. Por favor tómese el tiempo para leer la siguiente información cuidadosamente y discutirla con otros si lo desea. Siéntase libre de preguntarme si hay algo que no está claro o si desea más información.

¿Cuál es el propósito del estudio?

El propósito del estudio es examinar si ciertos ambientes deportivos pueden favorecer el hostigamiento y el acoso de atletas mexicanos de alto rendimiento. A través de un estudio y análisis de las vivencias y discursos de atletas en el deporte de atletismo y la organización en la que se entrenan o representan ayudará a comprender mejor los factores y mecanismos que facilitan el hostigamiento y el acoso de atletas de alto rendimiento en México.

Esta investigación se llevará a cabo desde la perspectiva del campo académico de la psicología organizacional (el estudio del comportamiento de las personas en el trabajo, enfocado especialmente en la salud y la seguridad de las personas en los lugares de trabajo). Se espera que los hallazgos de esta investigación sugieran formas de empoderar y dar más voz a los atletas, así como también buscar mejorar el entorno deportivo para proteger a los atletas mexicanos del hostigamiento y el acoso.

¿Por qué me han invitado a participar?

Lo invito a participar en este estudio porque su experiencia dentro del deporte de alto rendimiento es valiosa ya que puede ayudar a revelar una realidad que muchos otros atletas podrían estar viviendo en relación con el hostigamiento y el acoso en el deporte de alto rendimiento.

Para participar en esta investigación usted debe ser mayor de 18 años, atleta de alto rendimiento (a nivel semi profesional y profesional) o entrenador o administrador deportivo o encargado de asuntos relacionados con el tema de esta investigación.

¿Qué pasará si participo?

Si elige participar en el estudio, se le pedirá que tenga una entrevista conmigo, la investigadora. La participación se realizará a través de Skype, Zoom u otras formas de comunicación en línea. Depende de nosotros programar la entrevista en un momento apropiado y conveniente, y de una manera que

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sea flexible a sus necesidades. Se recomienda que elija un lugar cómodo y privado con buena conexión a Internet para la entrevista.

Como parte de la participación se le pedirá que brinde información, como su edad y sexo, y que comparta información sobre sus experiencias o percepciones sobre el hostigamiento y acoso en su deporte y la organización deportiva en la que participa o representa.

La entrevista durará aproximadamente una hora y se basará en una guía de temática, pero está diseñada para ser flexible y satisfacer sus necesidades. La entrevista será grabada, sujeto a su permiso. Tenga en cuenta que incluso si ha decidido participar en esta investigación, puede suspender su participación o tomar descansos en cualquier momento durante la entrevista.

¿Debo participar?

Su participación es completamente voluntaria. Sólo debe participar si lo desea y elegir no participar no le perjudicará de ninguna manera. Una vez que haya leído esta hoja de información, contáctenos si tiene alguna pregunta que lo ayude a tomar una decisión sobre su participación. Si decide participar, le pediremos que firme un formulario de consentimiento y se le entregará una copia de este formulario de consentimiento.

¿Cuáles son los posibles beneficios y riesgos de participar?

Podría haber ciertos riesgos indirectos derivados de los temas tratados en las entrevistas, como sentirse angustiado, preocupado o triste. Si es necesario, puedo compartir con usted el contacto de un psicólogo y un médico para ayudarlo en cuestiones específicas que pueden considerarse más allá del alcance de esta investigación. Además, también puede buscar apoyo e información en la Fundación PAS, una organización educativa y pública enfocada en la prevención del abuso sexual y emocional en Guadalajara, Jalisco.

Manejo de datos y confidencialidad

Sus datos serán procesados de acuerdo con el Reglamento General de Protección de Datos 2016 (GDPR).

Tenga la seguridad de que la información que comparta conmigo se anonimizará o será alterada de tal manera que no sea identificable en ninguno de los informes creados a partir de esta investigación. Solamente el equipo de investigación y el traductor profesional tendrán acceso a sus datos con propósito solamente de investigación.

Tenga en cuenta que la confidencialidad y la anonimización de sus datos se mantendrán en la mejor medida posible. Esto significa que bajo la condición de 'Interés vital' del Reglamento General de Protección de Datos y el Código ético para psicólogos en México, sus datos pueden compartirse sin su consentimiento explícito si existe un riesgo legítimo de daño hacia usted o hacia otros.

Durante la investigación, sus datos serán almacenados de manera segura en archivos protegidos con contraseña y encriptados. Una vez que la investigación haya finalizado, sus datos se guardarán de forma segura durante siete años, de acuerdo con las pautas de la universidad.

Declaración de protección de datos

El controlador de datos para este proyecto será King's College London (KCL). La Universidad procesará sus datos personales con el propósito de la investigación descrita anteriormente. La base legal para

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procesar sus datos personales con fines de investigación en virtud de GDPR es una 'tarea de interés público'. Puede proporcionar su consentimiento para el uso de sus datos personales en este estudio completando el formulario de consentimiento que se le ha proporcionado.

Usted tiene el derecho de acceder a la información que se posee sobre usted. Su derecho de acceso puede ejercerse de acuerdo con el Reglamento General de Protección de Datos. También tiene otros derechos, incluidos los derechos de corrección, objeción y portabilidad de datos. Si tiene preguntas, comentarios y solicitudes sobre sus datos personales se pueden enviar al oficial de protección de datos de King's College London, señor Albert Chan [email protected]. Si desea presentar una queja ante la Oficina del Comisionado de Información, visite www.ico.org.uk.

¿Qué pasa si cambio de opinión sobre participar?

Usted puede retirarse en cualquier punto del estudio sin tener que dar una razón. Retirarse del estudio no le afectará de ninguna manera. Puede retirar sus datos del estudio hasta treinta días después de la entrevista, después de lo cual ya no será posible retirar sus datos debido a los procesos y tiempos de la investigación (ya que los datos ya ser analizados después de ese periodo). Si decide retirarse del estudio, no conservaremos la información que ha proporcionado hasta el momento.

¿Cómo se financia el proyecto?

Este proyecto de doctorado está siendo financiado por el Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT).

¿Qué pasará con los resultados del estudio?

Los resultados del estudio se resumirán en forma de disertación doctoral. Los resultados se publicarán en revistas académicas y conferencias en el Reino Unido y México. Si lo desea, puedo proporcionarle un resumen del informe final de la investigación que describe los principales hallazgos.

¿A quién debo contactar para obtener más información?

Si tiene alguna pregunta o necesita más información sobre este estudio, por favor contácteme usando los siguientes datos de contacto:

Victoria Lozano (Investigadora) [email protected] Departamento de Salud Global y Medicina Social Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Políticas Públicas King's College London

¿Qué pasa tengo más preguntas o si algo sale mal?

Si cree que este estudio le ha perjudicado de alguna manera o si desea presentar una queja sobre la realización del estudio, puede ponerse en contacto con King's College London usando los detalles a continuación para obtener más consejos e información:

Dra. Silvia Camporesi (Supervisora) [email protected] Departamento de salud Global y Medicina Social Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Políticas Públicas King's College London

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Gracias por leer esta hoja informativa. Su información es muy valiosa y se aprecia su consideración para participar en esta investigación.

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Appendix II (Consent Form Spanish Template)

HOJA DE CONSENTIMIENTO PARA PARTICIPANTES EN ESTUDIOS DE INVESTIGACION

Por favor complete este formulario después de haber leído la Hoja de información y / o escuchado una explicación sobre la investigación.

Título del Estudio: Hostigamiento y Acoso en el Deporte de Alto Rendimiento: Un Estudio de Atletas Mexicanos.

King’s College Research Ethics Committee Ref: HR-17 / 18-5453.

Gracias por considerar participar en esta investigación. La persona que organiza la investigación debe explicarle el proyecto antes de aceptar participar. Si tiene alguna pregunta que surja de la Hoja de información pregunte al investigador antes de decidir participar en el estudio. Se le entregará una copia de este Formulario de consentimiento para conservar y consultar en cualquier momento. Please tick Confirmo que entiendo que al marcar / cerrar cada cuadro, doy mi consentimiento a este or initial elemento del estudio. Entiendo que se supondrá que las casillas no marcadas con iniciales indican que NO ACEPTO esa parte del estudio. Entiendo que, al no dar mi consentimiento para ningún elemento, se me puede considerar no elegible para el estudio.

Please tick or initial 1. * Confirmo que he leído y entendido la hoja de información con fecha [31 de mayo de 2018 versión 5453] para el estudio anterior. He tenido la oportunidad de considerar la información y hacer preguntas que han sido respondidas satisfactoriamente.

2. * Doy mi consentimiento voluntario para participar en este estudio y entiendo que puedo negarme a responder preguntas y puedo retirarme del estudio en cualquier momento, sin tener que dar ninguna razón, hasta [treinta días después de la entrevista].

3. * Doy mi consentimiento para el procesamiento de mi información personal para los fines que se me explica en la Hoja de información. Entiendo que dicha información será manejada de acuerdo con los términos del Reglamento General de Protección de Datos.

4. * Entiendo que mi información puede estar sujeta a revisión por parte de personas responsables del Colegio con fines de supervisión y auditoría.

5. Entiendo que la confidencialidad y anonimización de datos se mantendrán en la mejor medida posible. Entiendo que bajo la "Condición Vital" del Reglamento General de Protección de Datos y el Código Ético para Psicólogos en México, mis datos pueden

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ser compartidos sin mi consentimiento explícito si existe un riesgo legítimo de daño hacia mi persona o hacia otros.

6. Acepto el uso de mi información por un traductor profesional solamente con fines de transcripción para esta investigación.

7. Doy mi consentimiento para que mi entrevista sea grabada en audio / video.

8. Entiendo que la información que he enviado se publicará como un informe y tesis doctoral y deseo recibir una copia al yo solicitarla.

9. Acepto que se mantenga mi información segura durante siete años después de que el estudio haya finalizado, de acuerdo con las pautas de la universidad, y ser contactado en el futuro por investigadores de King's College London u otras instituciones para invitarme a participar en estudios de seguimiento, o estudios de naturaleza similar.

______Nombre del Participante Fecha Firma

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Appendix III (Interview Guide Spanish Version)

GUÍA DE ENTREVISTA

Introducción e información de investigación del investigador al participante:

• Presentación: Psicóloga de la universidad KCL, estudiante de doctorado especializándome en psicología organizacional.

• Breve resumen de mi investigación: Estoy interesada en estudiar si ciertos ambientes deportivos pueden favorecer la violencia de las atletas mexicanas de alto rendimiento en Jalisco. Específicamente, estoy interesada en saber lo que usted ha experimentado y ha percibido a lo largo de su vida deportiva cotidiana puede ayudarme a comprender mejor los factores y mecanismos que facilitan la violencia hacia los atletas. Espero que los resultados de esta investigación revelen ideas interesantes sugiriendo formas de potenciar y dar más voz a los atletas, así como mejorar el entorno deportivo para proteger a los atletas de la violencia en el deporte.

• Breve recordatorio sobre confidencialidad y manejo de datos: Tenga la seguridad de que la información que comparta conmigo será seudonomizada Esto significa que sus datos serán alterados de tal manera que no será identificable en ninguno de los informes creados a partir de esta investigación. Sólo el equipo de investigación y un traductor profesional podrán acceder a sus datos únicamente con fines de esta investigación.

Me gustaría aprovechar este momento para recordarle también que la confidencialidad y la anonimización se mantendrán en la mejor medida posible, ya que existe una excepción según la cual tengo el deber de compartir sus datos sin su consentimiento explícito si hubiese un riesgo legítimo de daño hacia usted o hacia otros. Esto está bajo la condición de 'Interés Vital' del Reglamento General de Protección de Datos y el Código ético para psicólogos en México.

• Antes de comenzar esta entrevista: Me gustaría asegurarme de que está de acuerdo con que se grabe esta entrevista. Además, por favor dígame si no comprende una pregunta, si necesita aclaración o si simplemente desea no responder una pregunta. Es particularmente importante que tenga la representación más precisa de sus experiencias y percepciones. Por lo tanto, siéntase libre de corregirme cuando lo considere apropiado. Finalmente, ¿hay alguna pregunta acerca de esta investigación que le gustaría hacer?

Objetivos de la entrevista (qué tener en cuenta a lo largo de cada sesión) 1) Experiencias de intimidación, acoso o discriminación manifestadas en los deportes. 2) Preguntar sobre el entorno en el que se llevan a cabo estas prácticas. 3) Identificar las relaciones de poder, las jerarquías, la dinámica de grupo y las relaciones con los atletas y otros (según las cuentas de los atletas)

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ESTABLECIENDO RAPPORT Y PROFILING DEL PARTICIPANTE

Preguntas de fondo:

• ¿Podría hablarme sobre el deporte que practica? • ¿Cuánto tiempo lleva jugando o jugando tu deporte en ese nivel? • ¿Cuánto tiempo lleva jugando en este equipo? [si está en un equipo] • ¿Cómo se involucró / interesó en ese deporte? • ¿Podría hablarme sobre su entorno de trabajo / cómo es la capacitación? • ¿Cómo se organiza su deporte: equipos, competiciones, etc.? • ¿Podría decirme sobre los objetivos / clasificaciones del equipo y cómo se deciden? • ¿Podría describir su relación con su entrenador (s)? • ¿Podría describir su relación con sus compañeros de equipo? • ¿Podría decirme sobre los roles de las personas en el equipo? • ¿Cuál es el ambiente fuera de temporada y durante la competencia? • ¿Podría contarme sobre los aspectos que disfruta (o los que no) de su equipo / deporte? • ¿Podría decirme sobre el proceso de selección para competiciones importantes? • ¿Cómo se tratan las lesiones? [en el equipo o individualmente] • ¿Qué tipo de lesiones son las más frecuentes? • ¿Has jugado mientras estabas lesionado? (En caso afirmativo, haga más preguntas) • ¿Cómo son los hábitos alimenticios de los atletas de tu equipo? ¿Podría hablarme de su dieta? • ¿Cómo se manejan las ganancias y pérdidas? • ¿Cuánta ayuda cree usted que tiene cuando la necesita? • ¿Alguna vez se ha sentido abrumado durante las sesiones de entrenamiento y competiciones? • ¿Podría decirme qué piensan la mayoría de las personas de su equipo sobre la forma en que los entrenadores tratan a los atletas?

EXPLORANDO EL HOSTIGAMIENTO Y EL ACOSO EN EL CONTEXTO DEPORTIVO

Preguntas (de posible naturaleza sensible):

• ¿Ha experimentado conflictos en Su equipo / deporte? ¿Qué tipo? • ¿Cómo manejó estos conflictos? • ¿Ha enfrentado problemas relacionados con la discriminación, el acoso, la intimidación o la agresión? [Si es así, solicita la elaboración] • ¿Le gustaría compartir su historia conmigo? • ¿Has sido testigo de algún problema relacionado con la discriminación, el acoso, la intimidación o la agresión? [Si es así, elaborar al respecto] • ¿Dónde y cuándo tuvieron lugar las acciones / incidentes? • ¿Sigue sucediendo? • ¿Podrías identificar quién cometió esto? [el presunto incidente, si está dispuesto a compartir]

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• ¿Alguna vez ha indicado que se sintió ofendido, lastimado o de alguna manera disgustado con el acto o el tratamiento? • ¿Quién más podría haber visto o escuchado el incidente? ¿Ha discutido el incidente con alguien? • ¿Conoce a otras personas que pudieron haber visto o escuchado el incidente? • ¿Conoce a otros que puedan haber sido afectados por las acciones? [Vea si los participantes dicen quién más pudo haber sido afectado] • ¿Sabe si alguien más reportó el incidente? • ¿Cómo han sido afectados usted y su trabajo por el incidente? • ¿Ha buscado apoyo o tratamiento médico como resultado del incidente? • ¿Hay alguien más que pueda tener información relevante sobre incidentes de este tipo? • ¿Qué acciones desea o cree que se deben tomar para abordar y prevenir estos problemas de manera más efectiva? • ¿Quisiera comentar o añadir algo más a esta entrevista? • Conclusión de entrevista y agradecimiento a los participantes por su tiempo y por compartir su información conmigo.

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Appendix IV (Information Sheet English Template)

Version 5453 31st May, 2018

INFORMATION SHEET FOR PARTICIPANTS

Ethical Clearance Reference Number: HR-17/18-5453

YOU WILL BE GIVEN A COPY OF THIS INFORMATION SHEET

Title of Study: Bullying and Harassment in High-Performance Sport: A Study of Mexican Athletes

Invitation Paragraph

I would like to invite you to participate in this research project which forms part of my PhD research. Before you decide whether you want to take part, it is important for you to understand why the research is being done and what your participation will involve. Please take time to read the following information carefully and discuss it with others if you wish. Ask me if there is anything that is not clear or if you would like more information.

What is the purpose of the study?

The purpose of the study is to examine whether certain sports environment may favour bullying and harassment of athletes in Mexico. Through studying, carefully, athlete’s experiences and discourses in their sports and their organisation they find themselves in will help better understand the factors and mechanisms that facilitate bullying and harassment. This investigation will be conducted through the perspective of the academic field of organisational psychology (the study of people’s behaviour at work and concerned with the health and safety of people in working places). It is hoped that the findings of this investigation suggest ways to empower and give more voice to athletes as well as enhancing sports environment to protect athletes from bullying and harassment.

Why have I been invited to take part?

You are being invited to participate in this study because your experience as a high-performance athlete is valuable in that it can help reveal a reality that many other athletes could be experiencing in relation to bullying and harassment in sports. In addition to being a high-performance athlete (semi-professional and professional level), if you are 18 years of age you are eligible to participate in this investigation.

What will happen if I take part?

If you choose to take part in the study, you will be asked to have an interview with me, the researcher. Participation will take place via Skype, Zoom or other on-line forms of communication. It will be up to us to schedule the interview at an appropriate and convenient time, and in a way that is flexible to your needs. It is advised that you choose a comfortable and private place with good internet connection for the interview.

As part of participation you will be asked to provide information such as your age and gender, and share information about your experiences or perceptions of bullying and harassment in your sport and the organisation you participate in.

The interview will take approximately one hour and will be based on an interview topic guide, but it is designed to be flexible as to meet your needs. The interview will be recorded, subject to your permission. Please note that even if you have decided to take part in this investigation, you are free to stop your participation or take breaks at any time during the interview.

Do I have to take part?

Participation is completely voluntary. You should only take part if you want to and choosing not to take part will not disadvantage you in anyway. Once you have read the information sheet, please contact us if you have any questions

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Appendix V (Consent Form English Template)

Version 5453 31st May 2018

CONSENT FORM FOR PARTICIPANTS IN RESEARCH STUDIES

Please complete this form after you have read the Information Sheet and/or listened to an explanation about the research.

Title of Study: Bullying and Harassment in High-Performance Sport: A Study of Mexican Athletes

King’s College Research Ethics Committee Ref: HR-17/18-5453

Thank you for considering taking part in this research. The person organising the research must explain the project to you before you agree to take part. If you have any questions arising from the Information Sheet or explanation already given to you, please ask the researcher before you decide whether to join in. You will be given a copy of this Consent Form to keep and refer to at any time. Please tick I confirm that I understand that by ticking/initialling each box I am consenting to this element or initial of the study. I understand that it will be assumed that unticked/initialled boxes mean that I DO NOT consent to that part of the study. I understand that by not giving consent for any one element I may be deemed ineligible for the study.

Please tick or initial 1. *I confirm that I have read and understood the information sheet dated [31st May 2018 version 5453] for the above study. I have had the opportunity to consider the information and asked questions which have been answered satisfactorily.

2. * I consent voluntarily to be a participant in this study and understand that I can refuse to answer questions and I can withdraw from the study at any time, without having to give a reason, up until [thirty days after the interview].

3. *I consent to the processing of my personal information for the purposes explained to me in the Information Sheet. I understand that such information will be handled in accordance with the terms of the General Data Protection Regulation.

4. *I understand that my information may be subject to review by responsible individuals from the College for monitoring and audit purposes.

5. I understand that confidentiality and pseudonymisation will be maintained to the best extent possible. I understand that under the ‘Vital Interest’ condition of the General Data Protection Regulation and the Ethical Code for Psychologists in Mexico, my data may be shared without my explicit consent if there is a legitimate risk of harm to me or to others.

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Appendix VI (Interview Guide English Template)

INTERVIEW GUIDE

Introduction and research information from researcher to participant:

• Introduce myself – Psychologist from KCL university, PhD student specialising in organisational psychology; high-performance athlete; experience in tennis nationally and internationally.

• Brief overview of the nature of my research: bullying and harassment in sports. I want to explore the ways in which aspects of the sport environment may favour or legitimise/normalise violence of female high-performance athletes in Jalisco, Mexico. I’m interested in knowing what you have experienced and perceive through your sporting activities to help me better understand the factors and mechanisms that lead to bullying and harassment of Mexican athletes. Hopefully, interesting insights can come out from this investigation, and suggest ways to empower and give more voice to athletes as well as enhancing sports environment to protect athletes from bullying and harassment in Mexico.

• Brief reminder of details on confidentiality and anonymity: Be assured that the information you share with me will be pseudonymised. This means that your data will be altered in such a way that you will not be identifiable in any of the reports created from this investigation. Only the research team and a professional transcriber will be able to access your data solely for this research purposes.

I’d like to take this moment to also remind you that confidentiality and pseudonymisation will be maintained to the best extent possible. But there is an exception whereby I have the duty to share your data without your explicit consent, if I consider that there is a legitimate risk of harm to you or to others. I am following my university’s ethical guidelines (this is under the ‘Vital Interest’ condition of the General Data Protection Regulation) and the Ethical Code for Psychologists in Mexico.

• Before we begin this interview: I would like to make sure that you are okay with having this interview recorded. Please tell me if you don’t understand a question, if you need clarification or if you simply do not wish to answer a question. That’s okay. It’s particularly important that I have the most accurate representation of your experiences and perceptions. Therefore, please feel free to correct me when you feel appropriate. Finally, are there any questions about this research that you would like to ask before we begin the interview?

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