Research from the University of the Basque Country highlights the grey areas in coach-athlete interactions that can foster grooming and abuse, emphasising the need for education and safeguarding measures to protect young athletes.
A study from the University of the Basque Country suggests that some conduct in youth sport, while not immediately recognised as abusive, can still form part of sexual violence. Andrea Sáenz Olmedo, working with the GIKAFIT research group, examined how young athletes interpret coach behaviour and found that the clearest warning signs are often the easiest to identify, while more ordinary-looking actions may be overlooked.
The research combined questionnaires from 292 athletes with interviews involving six people who said they had experienced sexual violence at school age. According to the university’s account of the findings, 20% of participants reported behaviour of a sexual nature from coaches, including kissing on the lips, sexualised interest and direct proposals for sexual relations. That figure underscores why researchers describe the issue as a hidden one: many people still find it difficult to believe that abuse can occur in sport at all.
Sáenz’s work points to a grey area in which apparently harmless gestures can be absorbed into a wider pattern of coercion. Athletes were asked to judge 24 coach behaviours, and more explicit acts were usually recognised as sexual violence, including requests for sexual contact in exchange for favours and inappropriate staring. By contrast, hugging, personal chats, extra attention and opportunities for one-to-one contact were rarely identified as abusive. Yet the interviews suggested that survivors later came to see some of those same behaviours as part of a deliberate process of grooming, particularly when they were repeated, personalised, secretive or tied to unequal power.
The study does not argue that every close coach-athlete interaction is harmful. Instead, it says the context matters: a hug after a match may be entirely appropriate in one setting and troubling in another if it is part of exclusive attention or emotional dependence. Sáenz and her colleagues say this is why education matters so much. Young athletes need help recognising when trust is being manipulated, while coaches and sports bodies need training to reduce isolation, make one-to-one contact more visible and strengthen reporting and support systems. The wider aim, the researchers say, is not to eliminate closeness in sport, but to make safe environments easier to recognise and enforce.
The issue is drawing wider academic attention. A separate article in a Taylor & Francis journal also focuses on how boundary-crossing behaviour can be normalised in coach-athlete relationships, while a study indexed in PubMed has examined the reliability of a Spanish-language questionnaire designed to measure sexual violence in sport. Other research has suggested that sport programmes can be effective settings for prevention, reinforcing the view that schools and clubs should be treated as important sites for safeguarding, not just competition.
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