Promoting athlete welfare: A proposal for an international surveillance system

Efforts to ensure the welfare of athletes have long existed in sport but have heightened recently across numerous countries in response to shocking revelations of sexual abuse in sport. Cases such as the sexual abuse of female gymnasts by a team doctor in the U.S. and sexual abuse of male footballers by a coach in the U.K. have drawn significant attention and scrutiny by stakeholders in sport and the public alike. These and other cases indicate that in spite of existing athlete welfare policies, educational programmes, and efforts to ensure compliance, numerous athletes were abused, the perpetrators were permitted to continue over an extended period of time, and some adults knew of the abuses and were complicit in failing to intervene. In this article, the authors use Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory to review the current landscape with respect to initiatives to prevent and address athlete maltreatment at each level of the theory. The authors also propose that to advance athlete welfare, more attention needs to be devoted to the development of interventions at the macrosystem or international level. Using Bruno Latour’s concept of the oligopticon (1992) an argument is forwarded to create an international surveillance system to promote athlete welfare.