The Next Hurdle in Protecting Athletes from Sexual Abuse

USA Swimming has made some improvements in the past 18 months, since the multitude of sexual abuses by coaches against swimmers have come to light. They’ve instituted a mandatory background check for all coaches. They teamed up with Praesidium t0 institute a very high-quality education program. They’ve instituted the most basic and obvious guideline for prevention – no adult should ever be alone with a child that is not their own. Progress has been made, as is evidenced by the slew of cases that are coming to light that have happened over the past decade or so.

But the problem has not gone away. It is still unacceptably easy for pedophile coaches to do unspeakable things to their swimmers and get away with it.

There still looms a challenge that is much more difficult to overcome is what I view as “local power bubbles”. This is sort of a parallel to what has plagued the larger organization, but not identical. There are parts of the country where the USA Swimming coach is much more powerful and influential than the USA Swimming organization.

There are certain coaches who likely have absolutely no problem getting alone with swimmers. Either because the parents are too intimidated to speak up, too trusting of the coach to be concerned, or just are too ill-informed about what has been going on in the broader community as a whole.

Many of us in the swimming community have heard non-specific accusations filter out through the grapevine about major coaches. But in that case, it’s like a big game of telephone. By the time the accusations are far-enough removed that it reaches ears who are outside of the sphere, and thus unconcerned about reprecussions, the story could be dilluted and twisted, and there’s a whole different set of aprehension to getting involved, which is that people have little confidence in stories heard so-many steps down the road, and don’t want to get caught up in a huge time-consuming investigation for something that doesn’t directly affect them. It’s sad but true – most humans are very self-serving in this way.

There’s a reason why most of these sexual abuse cases go unreported. If you look at the way that these things are usually revealed, it’s either through report of a friend (who wouldn’t feel the same pressure from the coach). When victims come forward, it’s only usually years later after they’ve succeeded in some other part of their life, and feel more comfortable with their place in the world that it’s fair for them to be angry about what happened to them. What’s worse is that many of these coaches aren’t brought down until after their retirement, which means that the reprecussions are much less immediate.

Chris Desantis at the Swim Brief made a great parallel a few weeks ago between the Joe Paterno situation at Penn State and the USA Swimming situation. What this situation did do, however, is bring to light the other side of feeling threatened. If you make a false accusation, and it does get out, your coach/boss may hate you. However, if you fail to make an accusation when you know what’s going on, it can do ten-times the damage to your reputation, that is to say if the charges ever get in front of the correct audience.

Part of the concern is about the reprecussions of an uber-powerful coach. Until we see false-accusations come out (and we all know that there are vindictive people in our community who will attempt to use this sexual abuse process to take down innocent coaches), and see exactly how USA Swimming will enact these anti-retaliation statutes, there’s some uncertainty about them. This stems from a general distrust of the organization given the evidence that we’ve seen that USA Swimming likes to protect the powerful. We’ve seen the backlash from reporting on this very site – though USA Swimming won’t list specific reasons for why certain coaches have been banned, because the abuse happened before the current code. We have reported on a hugely prominent coach who was banned, and there was immediate cries of “jealousy” and people trying to take him down because he was successful, without knowing the exact reason for his ban. After being contacted by the victim’s attorney, it was alleged to be absolutely the worst-case scenario, and made the context of those comments seem ridiculous.

These power bubbles are the next monster that needs to be attacked in our sport. It’s a challenge to do so, but not impossible. The first is to extend the mandatory education to the parents. Parents all probably know somewhere in their heads that “any coach can be a predator, no matter how well-liked they are,” but until the idea is forced in front of them, it might not occur to them. I still meet parents every season where I am the first person to inform them about the epedemic problems in the sport.

If all of the parents know and understand the rules about a coach never being left alone with a swimmer, then it eliminates the uncomfortable moment when a meet is being planned where a coach has to stand up and say “hey, I might molest your son without you ever knowing it, don’t leave me alone with him.” This would also help USA Swimming get the message out to parents that there is no coach who is too powerful to be brought down by the new rules.

After that, it becomes a difficult balancing act. How do we make sure that everyone knows that no coach is bullet proof without hindering the authority and prestige that so many honest coaches have used to create great swimmers and great young adults? It becomes a difficult philisophical question. If you ask anybody, they would say “get rid of all of the child predators by any means necessary, even if means the collateral damage of driving away coaches who are both good at what they do and have never abused anybody.” But that approach isn’t a real-world solution. You can’t just go Salem on everybody, proclaiming that “they can prove that they aren’t a witch by drowning”.

I contacted USA Swimming protection officer Susan Woessner to see what her strategy was for fighting these “bubbles,” and here was her response:

“It is extremely difficult to report – sexual abuse, assault, rape, misconduct, etc, is the most underreported crime in the US for a variety of reasons.  Much of the work I’m hoping to do with our abuse prevention, awareness and education efforts is to help curb the bystander effect by empowering our membership with information and training to help them recognize inappropriate or questionable behavior.  I can do a lot with a little bit of information … but I can’t do anything with no information, so we need our membership to each be champions of safe sport and fight abuse together.”

Here is her contact information ([email protected] and 719-866-3589) for reporting, and as Woessner alluded to, there’s no rule that any organization will ever be able to enact that will protect athletes better than reporting, reporting, reporting. But when you’re dealing with children, sexuality, and real-world society, that’s easier said-than-done.

At the least it sounds like USA Swimming, at some level, is aware of the issue, but Woessner’s response didn’t address specifics about how to attack these sort of local fiefdoms of power. She did, with some vagueness, hit on the “empowering the membership with information”, which is a good first step, but until USA Swimming recognizes and acknowledges the psychology of the local structure of teams that aren’t involved in the national team system, and don’t send huge squads to Juniors every year, there will still be bad men and women who slip through the cracks.

As we move into the rest of the decade, this is going to be the most difficult challenge that the sport will face. By comparison, the last two years of progress made in sexual abuse will appear simple.