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Abstract
Following the success of its all-male refugee football team, the Italian voluntary-based association Liberi Nantes created a touch rugby team as a pilot project aimed at involving female forced migrants. Initially set up as an all-woman activity to provide a less intimidating environment, the touch rugby group was later turned into a mixed-sex team. While potentially enabling transformative experiences and generating opportunities for challenging gender stereotypes, the mixed-gender character of the touch rugby provision also served broader objectives within Liberi Nantes’ mission. Focusing on the accounts of the activists and volunteers involved in the project, this paper investigates the practical and symbolic reasons for the strategic use of mixed-gender sport and its implications. Notably, by analysing the development of the touch rugby team, we highlight how its mixed-gender nature contributes to nourishing a wider rhetoric of social mixing and celebration of diversity, in which Liberi Nantes’ identity is embedded.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Liberi Nantes and UISP International for their precious cooperation. They are also indebted to Mike Forshaw, Megan Chawansky, Luca Mori, Chiara Marchetti, the guest editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Touch rugby is a limited-contact version of rugby in which players seek to avoid being touched, rather than tackled, while in possession of the ball.
2. A growing attention to the provision of sports opportunities for migrants in Italy is however shown by a number of initiatives run by sport-for-all organizations (e.g. Borgogni and Digennaro Citation2015).
3. The massive increase of asylum requests in Italy due to the very recent humanitarian emergencies in North Africa and the Middle East has increased the proliferation of legal types of partial protection, such as constitutional asylum, conventional refugee status, subsidiary protection, humanitarian protection, temporary protection (Marchetti 2010). This means that a decreasing proportion of all the asylum-seekers are actually given the full status of refugee. Hence, forced migrants, rather than refugees, would be a more appropriate term to define them all. However, for ease of reference, we will use the terms ‘forced migrants’ and ‘refugees’ interchangeably in this paper.
4. This partly consisted of labour migrants attracted by Italian economic prosperity up until the recent credit crunch (1980s–2000s) and largely of asylum-seekers and refugees following a sequence of migratory waves. Particularly from the 1990s onwards, these were generated by the terrible conflicts in Central and East Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and more recently North Africa.
5. Moreover, most of the subsequent interventions have focused more on regulation and repression, rather than on reception and support (Ambrosini Citation2013).
6. For instance, in June 2010 – when Liberi Nantes’ touch rugby was taking its first steps – the municipality of Rome claimed their reception centres were hosting around 2000 forced migrants but a further 3000 requests were on the waiting list (interview with the Councillor for Social Policy, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UIbtO7NfS4).
7. The founders were inspired by their participation in the Mondiali Antirazzisti (Antiracist World Cup), a non-competitive multi-sport and intercultural festival organized by UISP (Unione Italiana Sport Per tutti), one of the main Italian sport-for-all providers. Aiming at celebrating diversity and promoting anti-discriminatory practices, the Mondiali deliberately blur sporting categorizations and foster the creation of mixed teams by gender, age, origin, physical and technical ability (Sterchele and Saint-Blancat Citation2015 – both for mainstream disciplines such as football, basketball, cricket, volleyball and rugby, as well as for lesser known sports which are already inherently open to mixed-gender practice, such as tchoukball and touch rugby.
8. This network includes among others the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Italian Council for Refugees, Jesuit Refugee Service, Diocesan Caritas of Rome, UISP-Italian Union for Sport for All, Shoot4Change and some local amateur sports clubs such as Touch Rugby Roma, Spartaco Rugby and Red&Blue Rugby, and receives limited financial support from the Lazio Region and the Province of Rome.
9. See the video-documentary by The Guardian, available at: http://www.theguardian.com/football/video/2015/oct/01/liberi-nantes-football-team-italy-refugees-video.
10. Liberi Nantes’ website stated that ‘in addition to persecutions, violence, torture and cruelty similar to those experienced by men, women often suffer abuse related to their gender, both physical (e.g. rape) and social (e.g. discrimination and prohibitions or constraints on certain behaviours)’. Assuming that all this would cause ‘a strong sense of helplessness, passivity, lack of self-confidence and lack of trust in other people’, sport was considered as ‘a useful practice to progressively re-appropriate your body, generating self-esteem and a self-awareness that facilitates the way women relate to the host society’.
11. In the first period of Liberi Nantes’ touch rugby (2010–2013), examined in this paper, the guests ranged from minors to over-50s, though most of them were aged 18–30. The majority came from the Horn of Africa (notably Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia) and other West and Central African countries (Ivory Coast, DR Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, Guinea).
12. Since these interviewees shared similar characteristics in terms of age, social background, political orientation and level of involvement in the project, their accounts are reported in the text without attribution to each specific respondent. Instead, pseudonyms were used to anonymize any other people mentioned in the text.
13. Two of these migrant women came from English-speaking countries in the Horn of Africa, while the other two were French-speaking (one from North Africa and the other from Senegal). The linguistic divide was one of the main issues the Italian volunteers had to address in order to facilitate communication and relationships amongst the participants.
14. The difficulty or impossibility of keeping in contact with them was clearly frustrating for the volunteers as it showed how precarious and transitory the relationships can be, no matter how intense, when working with asylum-seekers and refugees.
16. This is not surprising if we consider that their founders come from the same cultural and political milieu and the same networks as the Mondiali, with some of them being directly involved in both organizations.