Identifying Abuse
Identifying mistreatment and abuse can be hard, especially as someone who may turn out to be abusive can often seem very caring, charismatic, and attentive to your athletic goals when you first meet them and as the relationship develops. This type of behavior often falls under the tactic called grooming where the abusive person attempts to gain your trust, manipulate, and isolate you. As the relationship progresses, abusive behavior may begin to show and intensify.
The points below can be helpful steps to walk through when identifying abuse. It is also important to remember that your safety and well being are what matter most. If an athletic environment doesn’t feel right to you, whether it’s abusive or not, you have the right to leave. Leaving doesn’t make you “weak”, nor diminish you as an athlete, nor dictate your future success. Leaving an environment that doesn’t serve you shows your strength, courage, and self-awareness.
Your happiness and safety as a human are worth so much more than an athletic result.
Helpful Steps in Identifying Abuse
1) Do a gut check.
If something feels off, it’s worth exploring. Even if it’s not abuse, it is still useful to understand how someone’s behavior is effecting you and explore if there are ways they can either adjust their behavior or if it makes sense for you to limit or end contact with that person.
2) Make a list of the behavior you’re concerned about.
Just thinking about possible abuse and mistreatment you may be experiencing can be intimidating and then trying to identify the behavior for what is can add a whole other layer of overwhelm. Getting down your concerns on paper can be a good place to start with the process. It doesn’t need to be anything poetic, the goal is to just get everything on to one (or more) pages to make it easier to start seeing potential patterns, red flags, and other connections that you might not have seen when thinking about one or a few situations at a time.
3) Talk with someone.
Talking through the behavior you’re concerned about with trusted 3rd party person can be helpful for gaining an outside perspective on yours’ and your athletic staff person’s relationship. Due to grooming, gaslighting, isolation, other abusive behavior, and the normalization of abuse and mistreatment within sport, identifying abuse can be a hard task to do on your own. In talking with a trusted 3rd party, you can have a sounding-board to name out your boundaries, priorities/goals, the behavior in question, any changes you’ve noticed in the staff person’s behavior, any changes you’ve noticed within yourself since the athletic staff person has entered your life or any changes in the athletic staff person’s behavior, and how you’re feeling impacted by it all.
4) Make a plan.
Whatever your decision is in the moment on whether or not the behavior you’re seeing or experiencing is mistreatment or abuse, make a plan for how you want to proceed. This could look like making a plan to talk to another person about your concerns, to make a report, to seek support for your mental or physical health, to circle back and do a self-check in around your concerns and any changes that may have happened, or all of the things listed and more. The goal of making a plan is to get you to wherever it may be so that you’re feeling safe, happy, respected, and healthy.
Resources for Identifying Abuse
Moments to Use This Resource
As mentioned above, identifying abuse can feel intimidating and it can be hard to figure out where to start. This resource can be helpful:
To provide a starting point to the process of identifying abuse.
To check back in with yourself or another person on if there have been any changes in the athletic staff person’s behavior by comparing previous answers to current ones.
To anonymously or non-anonymously report an athletic staff person’s behavior you’re seeing or experiencing.
To validate yourself on the behaviors you’ve seen or experienced if you start doubting yourself.
What’s the Goal of This Resource?:
It can be hard to think clearly when you’re in the moment, especially if your safety feels threatened. The goal of this resource is start building out a plan to keep yourself safe before you’re possibly put in a situation where your safety feels threatened. This resource can be worked through alone or with a trusted individual. As always, if you feel like you’re in immediate danger, call 911.
Note to coaches, admin, support staff, parents, and any other athlete supporters:
We’re working on building an athlete supporter version of our athlete safety plan. In the meantime this resource can be great for thinking through how you can identify when an athlete feels unsafe, where you can help them get to if they feel unsafe, and who you’d reach out to if you have an athlete in need of non-crisis or crisis support.