Study finds normal-seeming coach behaviors can be part of sexual abuse

A research team at the GIKAFIT group of the University of the Basque Country asked young athletes to judge whether specific coach behaviors counted as sexual violence. The study combined survey responses from 292 athletes with in-depth interviews with 6 athletes who had experienced sexual violence at school age. More than 80% of respondents correctly identified the most explicit behaviors as sexual violence, including proposing sexual relations in exchange for privileges, kissing on the lips, or staring at an athlete's breasts or buttocks.

But the same survey showed a large blind spot. Behaviors such as hugging, asking about an athlete's leisure time, offering individual attention, or arranging one-on-one contact were rarely classified as sexual violence by respondents. Yet the interviews with survivors told a different story: those who had actually experienced sexual violence looked back and identified some of these same everyday behaviors as part of how the abuse unfolded. The researchers call this gap between perception and lived experience a "grey zone."

A separate report from the same research group found that 20% of the athletes surveyed had experienced sexualized behavior from a coach directly, ranging from kissing on the lips to explicit proposals for sexual relations. Lead researcher Andrea Sáenz said people are often surprised that she studies this topic at all, because they assume abuse of minors does not happen in sport. She describes it as a taboo subject that gets swept under the carpet.

The survivors' accounts suggest that sexual violence in sport does not usually begin with an obvious act. Instead, it can start with special attention, gifts, or personal conversations — things that, depending on a child's age, might even feel positive at the time. Sáenz explains that this special treatment forms a pattern precisely because it happens repeatedly and is aimed at one athlete rather than shared generally.

The researchers are careful to say that a hug or personal attention is not, on its own, evidence of abuse. What matters is context: whether the behavior is repeated, personalized, tied to secrecy, or takes place inside a relationship where the coach holds significantly more power than the athlete. Sáenz gives the example of a hug after a good game, which she says could be entirely appropriate for an athlete with low self-esteem who needs encouragement. The question the study raises is not whether any single gesture is good or bad, but whether it is part of exclusive attention or emotional dependency that isolates the athlete.

A broader review of research on the coach-athlete relationship, covering 25 publications from 2000 to 2019, describes why coaches in particular carry heightened risk for this kind of abuse. The review points to several features common in competitive sport: unequal power between coach and athlete, hierarchical structures within teams and clubs, a need for physical touch during training, and the trust and closeness that intense coaching relationships require. The same qualities that make a coach effective at developing a young athlete can also make it harder to see when a boundary has been crossed.

The review also cites survey findings that illustrate how coaches' role as perpetrators changes with the level of competition. In a UK survey cited in the review, teammates and peers were the most frequently reported perpetrators of sexual harassment at every level of competition, but coaches became more prevalent as perpetrators as the level of competition increased. A separate survey of competitive athletes in Germany, also cited in the review, found that coaches and supervising staff were responsible for the majority of cases involving sexual violence with physical contact, while harassment without physical contact was most often committed by other athletes. In a qualitative project spanning seven European countries, cited in the same review, 72 people described experiences of sexual violence in sport, and in most of those cases a coach was the person identified as responsible.

A separate prospective study of Norwegian high school students offers a wider view of sexual harassment and abuse in youth sport, though it uses a broader definition covering verbal, nonverbal, and physical behaviors. Surveying 919 adolescents across elite sport schools and ordinary schools at two measurement points one year apart, the study found a 12-month prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse of 38.6% at the first survey point and 35.1% a year later. Most participants, between 74.6% and 85.0%, reported no change in their situation between the two surveys. Girls reported more of this harassment than boys, and elite athletes reported less than recreational athletes or students who did not do competitive sport.

This study found that peers, not coaches, were the most commonly reported source of harassment, named by 83.1% of those who experienced it, compared with 20.1% who named a trainer, teacher, or health professional. That finding sits alongside the coach-focused findings from the other sources: different studies, using different definitions and populations, point to peers as the more frequent perpetrators overall, while coaches are described elsewhere as responsible for a disproportionate share of the more severe, physical-contact cases. The study's authors note this is the first known attempt to track sexual harassment and abuse prospectively among athletes over a year, and stress that well-targeted prevention is needed for both athletes and non-athletes.

None of the sources argue for eliminating physical closeness or one-on-one contact in sport altogether. The Basque study explicitly states that trust-based relationships between coaches and athletes are positive and necessary, and that the goal is not to prohibit them. Instead, Sáenz argues that athletes need the tools to recognize when ordinary behavior might be shifting into something inappropriate, so that if something similar happens to them, they can recognize it and ask for help.

The research team also calls for training sport professionals to understand where boundaries lie and to avoid situations that make abuse easier to hide. Suggested steps include reducing avoidable situations of isolation between a coach and a single athlete, increasing the visibility of one-on-one meetings, and strengthening mechanisms for reporting and support. The broader review of coach-athlete research similarly notes that a rise in media attention and campaigns has sometimes led to blanket "no-touch" policies, which the review's authors say can produce uncertainty and unjustified suspicion of coaches rather than addressing the underlying patterns of power and closeness the studies describe.