By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
Many of us probably watched or heard about the drama this past week in the Women’s Olympic Figure Skating event. Kamila Valieva — just 15-years-old, but with a dominant combination of quad-jumps and world class performance style — tested positive for a banned substance. What followed for the Russian skater was a quick succession of suspension, reinstatement, objection, appeal, and ultimately a much-criticized decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport put her back into competition in the Olympic women’s free skate despite the positive test. After that, the world witnessed a young woman go from being overwhelmingly favored to win gold to not even reaching the medal podium after failing jump after jump.
The full spectacle revealed attitudes about youth and sports that carry some relevance to the U.S. litigation environment. For example, when a sobbing Valieva left the ice after her program, she was immediately berated on live TV by her stern coach, Eteri Tutberidze who demanded, in Russian, “Why did you let it go like that? Why did you let it go? Why did you stop fighting? Well, explain!” When that was criticized, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov weighed in, “Everybody knows that the harshness of a coach in high-level sport is key for their athletes to achieve victories.” As much as there was widespread criticism over the athletes from Russia again involved in a doping scandal, after the country was — somewhat symbolically — “banned” from the Games after Sochi, there was still a lot of sympathy for Valieva. After all, as a minor, she is at the mercy of her coaches and the full weight of the Russian Olympic machine.
According to new research, some of this sympathy may also be gender biased. In an article entitled, “He Yells Because He Cares”: Jury Perceptions of Emotional Abuse from a Sports Coach Toward Child Athletes (Rawn, Pals, Golding, 2021), researchers varied civil litigation scenarios and found that in lawsuits alleging abuse in sports, male victims receive fewer favorable judgments. The disparity is because the research respondents believed that the male victims deserved less sympathy and experienced less emotional distress. Even when testing the same behaviors, the coach’s actions toward males were seen as less blameworthy. One additional factor is that the respondents’ previous sports involvement, instead of creating more sympathy for abuse victims, did the opposite for both males and females. In other words, the belief is that sports is supposed to make athletes tough, and boys are supposed to be tougher.
I see some specific and general implications of this for litigation.
The Specific Implication: Sports Abuse Is a Litigation Area
Young people participate across a broad spectrum of sports in the U.S., and the area is seen by many as ripe for more litigation. In some sports, like gymnastics, we’ve seen widespread patterns of sexual abuse, even at the sport’s highest levels. Probably even more common is the wide variety of physical or emotional abuse that comes from a coach or a team culture that ends up taking the goal of “toughness” to an extreme.
From a litigation perspective, coaching abuse cases have everything: large (and insured) national organizations, young victims, a potential for lifelong physical or mental effects, and scenarios highly relatable to many parents who will be on the juries. But the research shows that cases in this area will have to contend with attitudes about sports “toughness” and gender. This may be one reason why many of the sports abuse cases that have become national issues so far have been those that involve female competitors.
The Broad Implication: Some Old-fashioned Norms Persist
Even 60 years after the start of the modern women’s movement, there is still a durable tendency to see women as uniquely vulnerable and worthy of protection, rooted in gender-based social assumptions about both males and females. We still expect our boys to be tougher than our girls, even when it comes to abuse in sports.
That, of course, can be a two-edged sword in scenarios where women have been harmed: It can make jurors more likely to find for the plaintiff, or it can make them more likely to turn the claim around as a point about individual or familial responsibility. In other words, people might wonder, “Why would Valieva’s parents ever turn her over to someone like Tutberidze?”
It is a common observation that we tend to view sports, particularly international contests like the Olympics, through the lens of combat, and use that to excuse or soften all manner of crimes. And as this post goes to press, Russian tanks, ships, missiles, and ground troops have just started the largest European war in a generation in Ukraine: another more tragic example of abuse masquerading as toughness.
Other Posts on Sports Litigation:
Rawn, K. P., Pals, A., & Golding, J. M. (2022). “He yells because he cares”: jury perceptions of emotional abuse from a sports coach toward child athletes. Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody & Child Development, 1-21.