Managing cases of abuse in sport

Abstract

New National Standards for Child Protection in Sport require state-funded sport organizations in England to record and monitor allegations of abuse, yet very few sport organizations have robust case-recording and management systems in place. Those that do have found the task of collecting and managing data very challenging. The management and research functions of data systems for abuse allegations are explored with reference to sample data from a study of extant referrals to the Football Association. A preliminary template for the analysis was generated using variables from previous inductive studies. Data for an initial set of 50 variables were extracted from 132 case files and entered into the database. The resultant descriptive data were subjected to visual inspection against a set of concerns from the literature about, for example, false allegations, perpetrator roles and location of abuse. Fears of false allegations of abuse against coaches and other authority figures were shown to be unfounded. However, the case-recording system utilized yielded very few usable data, underlining the need for a functional recording system based on a more tightly specified data-recording method. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.