Gymnastics and child abuse: an analysis of former international Portuguese female artistic gymnasts

Abstract

The growing competitiveness of modern sport means that children, from very early ages, are increasingly submitted to intensive training programmes. These programmes are problematic for young athletes not only because their developing bodies are particularly susceptible to different kinds of injuries, but because athletes are also particularly vulnerable to experiences of different kinds of abuses. Using data collected through semi-structured interviews this study examines the various kinds of abuse that former Portuguese female gymnasts underwent during their sporting careers. Interviewees were asked to reflect on their past experiences and discuss aspects of the gymnastics subculture. Weight control, training/competing with injuries and corporal punishment emerged as key themes. The study therefore shows that the physical and psychological abuse of young athletes occurs even beyond the confines of elite professional sport, and thus that a broader spectrum of athletes learn to consider these forms of exploitation and abuse as normal.

Keywords:

• Gymnastics
• Abuses
• Young athletes
• Elite non-professional athletes
• Power

Notes

1. The ‘sports ethic’ is defined by Coakley (2003, p. 168) as an ‘unwritten set of norms that many people, in power and performance sports, have accepted as the dominant criteria for defining what it means to be an athlete and to successfully claim an identity as an athlete’.

2. While the concept of habitus is more closely associated with Bourdieu, it is a term also used by Elias. Habitus is used to evidence the importance of the influence of others upon individuals' behaviours, ways of talking, postures and so on. Due to the networks of social relations in which people are enmeshed, they incorporate the norms, values, beliefs and so on which become manifest in their attitudes, emotions and embodied actions and thus appear as a kind of ‘second nature’ (Elias, 1989, 1990).