Survivor voices and collective action are key to building a safer culture in sport

My name's Kat Craig. I've been a human rights activist for 30 years. I've been a human rights lawyer for almost 20 years. And for the last 10 of those, I've worked exclusively in sport.

Over that time, I've campaigned on many causes but all with a common question: how do we create change when power is exploited by some to the detriment of others, and where systems that purport to protect everyone fail those who are harmed when they need it most?

One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is that it's important to have one eye optimistically on the future and one eye slightly sceptically on the past. 

That's why today I’ll be examining: 

1. What has worked: what has brought us success over the last 10 years or so, and what we therefore need to protect in times of increased division, where there is an erosion of gender equity and racial equity.
2. What still needs to change? Without losing hope, without losing ambition, we need to look to the future and recognise that we do have a long way to go. We are fighting centuries of societal inequities and oppressive cultures, and we're doing well, but we do have more work to do. 

And because we only have 10 minutes, forgive me if I miss out critical change makers in the course of this. This is just an overview based on my experiences. 

What has worked?

So let's look first at what works.

One of the most significant change makers in this space is have been the voices of affected persons, and I want to pay tribute to those changemakers today. Even a decade ago, when much work had already happened, few were able to speak, and today survivors are rewriting the rulebook, speaking as keynote speakers at critical events.

And I want to pause on this, because my impression, going into many sports organisations with victims, survivors and whistleblowers, is that is often seen as a nice-to-have: an ethical or moral kindness that we offer when we ask people to take a seat at the table. And that's categorically wrong.

Survivor voices, lived experience, are a critical part of understanding what went wrong, diagnosing the problem, and therefore understanding the solutions.

Survivor voices have been responsible for critical peer support when others impacted by abuse had nowhere to turn, building independent contact points, making referrals, feeding into reviews, inputting on policy, and even in Joanna Maranhão’s case, changing the law.

And we need to not just listen to survivors. This has to be a dialectic approach, and we need to share power. And that has happened to some degree. And thinking about that, that transfer of power, makes it even more extraordinary when we reflect back on the change that victims, survivors and whistleblowers have made.

Autonomous movements are critical to making sport safe

My second key point of progress is collective action.

Those changes were hard fought. It was often lonely, it was often dangerous for those who raised their voices.

I want to briefly refer to a piece of research from 2012 outside of sport, actually related to gender equity. And it looked at what were the key determinants in society to increase effective policies to combat violence against women and girls. And I recognise that abuse in sport impacts many people. It impacts boys and men. It includes race-based discrimination. But I still think that the comparison stands.

So this research, quite extraordinary, looked at 70 different countries over 30 years. And it looked at various things, things that I thought would be key determinants. Is it a left or a right-wing government? What's the GDP? How many women are there in legislature? How well do they adhere to international norms?

Does anybody know what the key determinant was for effective policies for violence against women and girls?  It was autonomous feminist movements. That is what makes change. 

And I would say that autonomous movements, independent from sport, are a critical success factor when we try to make sport safe. It's an antidote to the isolation that survivors feel when they speak out.

But I'm also speaking about organisations that understand fundamentally the structural inequities and inequalities and who understand how to leverage, change and tackle institutional power imbalances. I'm speaking particularly about player unions, collectives and civil society organisations.

And if you don't understand the importance of player unions in this space, I recommend that you look at one of my heroes, Meghann Burke of the NWSLPA, and her work in collectively bargaining the rights of women's players, including their right to play free from abuse.

So we've made much progress, not only because of these two categories of work, but I would argue that survivor voice and collective movements are the keystone species of our sporting ecosystem and must be protected at all costs.

And of course, there are too many to name. But the progress has been phenomenal from survivor organisations to unions to various other civil society organisations, organisations that have profiled and promoted the voices of survivors and are led by survivors and athletes impacted by abuse.

What still needs to change?

First, is sporting culture. We heard about it yesterday. I would argue that sport is in a crisis when it comes to its culture. And I'll give you one example.

We've spoken a lot about gymnastics. So I'll take that as an example. In a period just over 12 months between 2021 and 2022, there were at least three independent major reviews, the Whyte Review in the UK, the Australian Human Rights Commission reviewed systemic cultural issues in gymnastics, and there was a New Zealand review that all spoke about the insidious sporting culture: a perfect storm that enabled athletes and others to be abused.

So this is the obvious next step, and I'm reasonably optimistic that some sports organisations are ready to look at it, to shift from that reactive crisis management to preventative safeguarding. 

And what I mean on the field of play, we've heard it before, is (1) that win-at-all-costs mentality. (2) a lack of psychological safety where we praise compliant athletes and punish them if they raise their voice, dissent or speak out, and (3) a culture where we fetishise certain traits, we celebrate aggression, we celebrate training on injury. But we discourage empathy, we discourage those athletes who are demanding acceptable and safe working conditions. 

That is the culture that we must change.

There's an obstacle here, if I may offer an observation, that we're quite a short-termist sector, right? 

We work in cycles, whether that be four years or a season, and I think that's bled into some of the thinking at a leadership level. 

There's an All Blacks (the New Zealand Men’s Rugby Team) saying that we should plant trees that you will never see. I think there's a Greek version that says a society grows great when we plant trees in whose shade we will never sit. And I think that's what we should be aiming for. 

It's doable and it is happening. I've had some of those conversations with sports bodies who asked me to come in because they had less and less diversity in their team,  or there were some conversations or comments made that they felt uncomfortable with and initially they asked me to do a workshop or a talk. 

I told them that’s not going to work because what we need is a fundamental reassessment of a culture: what does a safe inclusive high performance sporting culture look like off the pitch in those corridors of power that will then transfer to those onto the pitch. 

Institutional attitudes also need to change

Second, is institutional attitudes. I know there are people in the room with whom I've shared spaces in sports bodies. It's an early stumbling block to constructive collaboration. Often we encounter dismissiveness, defensiveness, and at times even hostility. At first this frustrated me but then I started reflecting on why that might be the case. 

One of the reasons that I think is important to acknowledge is that sport is populated by many people who have had really positive experiences. They gain success, they gain status, they love their sport, they're proud of it, and it's become part of their identity. It's almost natural that they seek to protect it.

So when they're confronted by people who had very negative experiences, who had to leave because it was unsafe, or who were pushed out, those experiences attack the very thing that brings them joy. It's hard to hear criticism.

So what I would encourage in sports bodies is to reflect on the inherited truth that exists for every single person who works in a sports body. We have faced decades of denial. Endless cover-ups.

People dragging their feet. It may not have been you, but it was others. We must acknowledge that.

Now, of course, sports bodies and people in sports organisations are not a homogenous group. There are some exceptional people creating incredible change, some who have their own lived experience.

And it's really important that we don't treat them as the same. It's counterproductive. But I think the goal that we need to reach for within institutions is a deep empathy and belief, but with a bit of healthy detachment.

Again, I'm pretty optimistic that we can learn this. I have worked with a couple of sports leaders who eventually came around to the idea that they were getting it wrong. They needed to change their attitude, how they engaged with impacted persons. And slowly they educated themselves, they put in systems, they trained their staffs, and they turned those dynamics around. 

We need to move beyond ticking boxes

Third, we need to move beyond tick boxes. This is something that has been discussed as well and it builds on those inherited truths. Where we have these decades of failures, the onus is on sport to show that it has changed and to rebuild trust. We are a sector where rhetoric often outweighs substance. So it's really important that we prove and measure that change is happening.

I was delighted to hear our Finnish friends from the NOC yesterday saying they would be transparent about recommendations coming from the working groups. It's always nice to be able to be complimentary of your hosts. It would have been very awkward otherwise...

But that's what we want. We want people to publish action plans, of course, co-created with lived experience and civil society. We need accountability metrics. We need transparent decisions. We need progress updates. Those are all things that we need to see in measurable ways to rebuild trust. And we need funding to be contingent on those demonstrable advances.

We need to talk about the autonomy of sport

Finally, we need to talk about the autonomy of sport. There is not enough time today to go into this big topic in detail, but I wanted to touch on it today. Sport doesn't operate in a vacuum. We heard that yesterday.

Yet its autonomous governance disconnects it from wider systems and structures that have evolved over time. It's maintained this really tight grip on power and as a result it has fallen behind when it comes to responding to protecting people from abuse in sport.

Now I recognise there are some circumstances in which you need independent, specific systems, such as games time related, quasi-judicial mechanisms to deal with urgent matters. I'm not saying to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But I don't accept that a system justified by the specificities of sport can be applied unquestioningly to issues that are not sport specific. We need to re-examine which parts of our sports governance are fit for purpose when we're dealing with abuse and we need to make changes where appropriate.

Unsurprisingly, sport has struggled to cope with the issue of abuse. We know sports bodies feel overwhelmed. This is a complex societal issue that exists outside of sport, but you can't have your cake and eat it. You either do it right and adopt human rights standards, or you relinquish power to external and independent scrutiny.

In conclusion, I've had the privilege of working with hundreds of victims and survivors: from Afghanistan to Argentina, from Haiti to Hungary, across sporting disciplines, across continents.

The work of affected persons has been nothing short of transformative. And I really hope for those of you with lived experience that you take away from today my deep gratitude and the deep gratitude of many here for that change. Without you, it would not have been possible.

It also wouldn't have been possible without allies, the incredible journalists who publish stories, the academics who give us hard data, the funders who pay for that research, the union leaders who bravely have acknowledged that this is part of health and safety and labour conditions and even, occasionally, human rights lawyers.

And I acknowledge the early adopters in sports bodies. There have been some courageous leaders who are changing sport and having difficult conversations behind the scenes. Sponsors, too, I would urge to engage with this issue.

So change is happening, but more has to be done. As a sector, as a community, we are at a crossroads and the next step will demand courage: we have to listen, we have to learn, we have to act together to make sport safe for and inclusive of all.  

Thank you.