Landmark Study Into Online Harm In Womens Sport By Deakin University

Addressing online harm in Australian women's sport is a landmark investigation by Deakin

University into the online harassment and abuse of the nation's top sportswomen.

It explores the experience, impact and potential solutions to online harm of professional and

elite women's sport athletes across Australia.

I had the chance to sit down with the researchers, Dr. Kim Topoletti and Dr. Caelan McCrane,

so I'll tell you a little bit about each of their experiences in the research world.

Dr. Kim Topoletti is internationally recognised for her interdisciplinary research on women's

sport and media.

Kim's research has been published in top-ranking academic journals.

She's the Associate Editor of the Sociology of Sport Journal and sits on the Editorial

Board of Communication and Sport Journal.

Dr. Caelan McCrane is a digital ethnographic researcher interested in gender, technology

and everything.

She's currently a Research Fellow at Deakin University and RMIT University.

At Deakin, she has led research into gendered online harassment in sport.

This is an incredible piece of research and I hope you enjoy listening to more of some

findings and what the next steps are from here to resolve what is a really, really big

issue in Australian women's sport.

Dr. Kim and Dr. Caelan, welcome to the Female Athlete Project.

Thanks for having us.

It's going to be great to have a chat and we might start with you, Caelan.

Can you give us a bit of a background about your experience and how you've come to the

point of working on such incredible research?

That's a really good question.

So my background is in the investigation of gendered online harassment and harm directed

towards women in the public eye.

So previously I worked on projects looking at the harassment of women in the media and

women in politics.

And the third part of that was working on...

Women in sport.

So this is the kind of the third part of that kind of trifecta of work that I've been doing

for several years.

And this comes out of some work that I was doing.

All of that work was at Gender Equity Victoria.

So it's got this real sort of feminist focus on highlighting the harms, but also thinking

about it from a workplace health and safety perspective.

So what are the solutions?

What are the ways that we can make things better rather than just pointing out?

What the really negative things are?

And for you, Kim, can you give us a bit of an insight into your background?

Well, I'm a sports sociologist.

So I've been working in the women in sport space for maybe 20 years.

And one of the key research streams that I've been looking at more recently is how women

athletes have been using social media, particularly with the rise of social media.

And so part of that...

And part of that is also looking at the kind of responses to their social media engagement

and profiles.

And so identifying that along with social media being potentially really useful to give

women athletes visibility in ways that they don't get in the mainstream media, that also

comes with particular negative effects.

And so when Caitlin contacted me to say, do you want to pony up and do this research together?

I was really...

I was really excited at the opportunity to actually develop this in a much more sustained

way, looking at a much broader athlete cohort, that being Australian sportswomen.

And can you give us a bit of a rundown, Caitlin, about this research?

It's very much a landmark piece of research.

And when I heard the topic, I just was immediately so looking forward to discussing it because

it's such a key topic that impacts so many female athletes.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I think you helped us with the recruitment for this as well, actually.

I think you shared the call for participants on your Instagram.

No problem.

Which is super helpful.

So essentially, this project is an anonymous survey with a handful, maybe about seven,

I think it's seven, semi-structured interviews.

So the survey was really about hearing from athletes in a way that was really about safety

primarily, and about making sure that they were to be able to do the research that they

There was nothing identifiable that we could get from the data, but it was giving women

athletes a space to talk about what was happening because I just had this hunch.

I just had this hunch that I was like, well, because I'm an athlete as well.

I do a lot of ultramarathon running.

Not a lot.

I do some ultramarathon running.

Some is impressive in itself.

And I noticed it, like the athletes that I knew, you know, like I could see it happening

in front of me in a way that, you know, it was kind of it was it was this sort of different

thing to say people in the media where they're perhaps tasked with presenting a particular

perspective or even women in politics where they there is this kind of adversarial kind

of way of doing things that I think, yes, you're competing in sports.

There is a lot of there is a lot of that sort of adversarial stuff as well.

But it was so vitriolic, the stuff that I was sort of seeing happen to other people that

I was like, there's something really significant about this and that women's sport is so massively

underfunded.

It's massively under-resourced.

So what we found in this study that is really significant is that it's not just your AFLW

players and NRLW players who are copping heaps of abuse.

It's like show.

Jumping, cheerleading, like the sort of really sort of women dominated, perhaps sports or

areas where there's maybe a bit more gender equity in the in the ways that athletes are

able to compete or what have you.

That's where we're seeing abuse as well as where we're seeing harassment, where we're

seeing harm.

And we changed our language from thinking about harassment and abuse to harm to really

capture the.

Range of different experiences, so just talking about harassment and abuse doesn't quite cover

the things that are still really emotionally harmful that can't be chalked up to abusive

content.

So one of the problems with sort of thinking about and we can get to this later as well

in terms of thinking about recommendations and change is that some of what people are

talking about happening to them can't be detected by things like detect and delete.

They're things that can't be taken down through the e-safety commissioners adult cyber abuse

scheme.

They may not even necessarily be recognized by social media platforms as being harmful,

but they're still having this impact.

So what do we do about them?

What do we do about the things that are making it feel overwhelming and hard in an already

overwhelming and hard environment for a lot of women?

So that's kind of.

That was sort of the background.

Yeah.

And what we were doing with this with this research.

And so I think that the the people who've come forward and talked through the survey

and in interviews about their experiences are so they're so bright you first of all,

but they're also so indicative, like I think you said, of a much broader problem, a much

broader cultural problem that we have with female athletes as a concept.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I think it's interesting what you touched on around that it's not necessarily the sports

that were previously male dominated.

I thought that was quite an interesting piece when I was reading that did prior studies

almost indicate that they thought it was worse just in male dominated sports, but yours has

almost shown that that's not the case.

I don't know that's something that's arisen out of Kim can speak to whether that's something

that has come out of previous studies, whether that with a sort of the male domination.

Yeah.

Of a particular.

But that was something that we've seen in something like, say, media and politics, which

are two areas of previous research that they have been historically very, very male dominated

generally.

And so my suspicion when I was doing this research was I was like, I reckon we'll get

more from, you know, these these particular athletes.

And then it was like, oh, no, it's just everywhere.

It's across the board.

It's not necessarily maybe a future research project would be looking at whether it was

worse in those sort of traditionally male dominated sports.

But that's not something that we've seen.

And I think what it does is it tries to that result kind of breaks down the idea of there

being a hierarchy that like, well, there's the male dominated sports and they get all

the resources and attention and time and what have you.

And then there's sort of all the other sports it kind of it kind of dissolves, I think,

some of that hierarchy that can start to exist around.

And I think it's really important to think about that.

And I think it's really important to think about the challenge of what sports are worth

while paying attention to and what athletes are worthwhile paying attention to.

Kim, I'd love to go into a bit more detail.

There was four key topics covered in the report and you touched on earlier the way that female

athletes are using social media.

Can you can you share a little bit about what those patterns look like?

Yeah, sure.

I guess the first thing to acknowledge is that social media use is not a choice.

It actually is mandatory.

Whether that is by the clubs or sporting organisation themselves, there's a requirement

for athletes to have some sort of presence.

And in that regard, online spaces become workspaces.

And so we need to think about this as a workplace issue.

Also for athletes, as you would well know, Chloe and Caitlin has mentioned, women's sport

tends to be dreadfully underfunded.

So social media is a place where women can obtain visibility and then with the hope of

sponsorships or some sort of remuneration to even just participate in their sport and

not be at a financial loss.

So it becomes an important place, but also for sharing their achievements and having

that broader visibility that the media, the mainstream media doesn't give them.

So in that respect, we found that the majority of athletes have more than one account,

and that actually requires a fair bit of work from them, that they are actually trying to

raise their profile on top of training schedules, paid work.

And so recognizing that this is actually an active part of their athlete identity and

athlete work.

And so I think that's important to acknowledge that that's social media uses, in some ways,

can be necessary.

And then, yeah, we can cover themes like, you know, where do, where do you and you know,

do you want to see.

Yeah.

I'd essentially say it is kind of socially mandated but also organisationally mandated, and we need to recognise that.

And so in a way, those arguments around, well, women, if they don't like what they see online, should just get off the internet,

I find that that puts women in an impossible situation because it further marginalises and invisibilises them.

And so they are having to contend with abuse and hostility, feeling discomfort and also, yes, the kinds of having to carry this essentially on their own.

And so we're seeing that certain platforms tend to, athletes are reporting that they're tending to experience abuse more on certain platforms than others.

They tend to be the more sort of visual centric platform.

So that also tells us something about the requirements.

That women represent their bodies, that this is a sort of form of social or cultural currency for women.

But when they do, they're often policed and punished.

So platforms like Instagram, we find that we've lots of users on that.

But Facebook also, and I think, I'm trying to think what the other most popular platform was.

A lot of them also experienced harm on Twitter.

That was a big place.

And even though that's not as visually orientated.

That tends to be a bit more of a sort of cesspit for, for, I guess, permissible kind of, you know, abuse.

And so that was a forum where women tended to also experience quite high levels of hatred online.

It's so validating, I think, is how it feels.

Hearing.

Hearing the fact that it's actually your workplace and you should, there should be things put in place to make you feel safe in your workplace.

And I know I don't feel safe a lot of the time in these social media spaces.

And to recognize that, like, I couldn't get endorsements and ambassadorships without social media, as you touched on it, is almost a compulsory part of what I need to do in my job.

And so just to even hear that said out loud, like, you should feel safe in your workplace.

And that is part of your workplace is such a key topic to address.

Yeah.

And I think if we frame it that way, then there is a requirement.

Then I think that sports organizations and governing bodies recognize this as a place where safeguarding needs to happen.

And it also, I think.

Forces us also to think about how these kinds of organizations.

Organizations can lobby platforms and work with social media providers to help eradicate some of these kinds of harms, which I think, you know, are impacting their athletes.

And also more broadly, I think, sending messages about the devaluing of women more broadly in society, but also women's athleticism and achievements as sporting players and employees.

You've touched on some of the key platforms.

What are some of the types of online harm that these athletes are experiencing and the prevalence of it?

Caitlin, we might come to you for this one.

Oh, absolutely.

Happy to talk about the kinds of harassment.

So the most commonly experienced kind of online harm we found was personal insults.

We looked at things like personal.

Yeah.

I've talked about personal insults.

We asked people, so we had a few different things.

So the most common was personal insults.

We also looked at things.

We looked at a range of different kinds of harm.

We talked about, we asked people about hate speech, which 62% of people said they'd experienced hate speech, 60% purposeful attempts to embarrass 50% harassment and 39% sexual harassment.

So that was things like unwanted, unwanted, sexualized comments on Instagram.

Yeah.

And comments about the fits of uniforms, the body shapes.

Yeah.

All sorts of things around the body were really, were really big themes that came out of our, of our analysis.

The other thing that I think it's important to touch on is the kind of intersectional nature of a lot of these harms.

So when people talked about experiencing harassment or abuse or hatred or harm, not just in relation to gender identity.

Yeah.

Also in relation to things like sexuality and race in particular.

So one in four athletes experience gendered and homophobic abuse and one in five experience gendered and racialized abuse.

So we can see that the impact and we also know that the impacts of those things are not evenly distributed either.

So while there's sort of we found that there was a number of people who said that they felt that their the impact on their athletic performance and their economic opportunities were sort of they were significant.

But we saw that when it got to well-being, when you combined race and gender and sexuality and gender, the impact on well-being was much, much higher than when.

Than it than when it had been just based on gender.

So that tells us that, you know, people from marginalized communities are copying so much more emotionally damaging abuse because it is in often this stuff is happening when people are on their own.

They're at home. They might be kind of just trying to kill time.

They might be trying to think about something else.

They might just be trying to have, I don't know, a little brain break from.

Being in the world when you look at social media and then to be confronted with something that's so I mean, this stuff is really violent, especially when it's in intersectionally abusive.

It's particularly violent.

So to be to be confronted by that, I think, is a real indictment on the way that, like Kim said, the way that we value women in society and in sport, but also in the way that workplaces treat this kind of abuse and this kind of harassment.

And harm as kind of par for the course as something that you should expect that if you're a woman in the public eye, if you're a woman playing sport, if you're a woman basically doing anything that you should expect that there will be some pushback and it will be related to the things that are most sensitive about who you are.

So whether that's your gender or your race or your sexuality or a combination of all of those things that those things.

It's all up for public consumption and public comment.

It's scary.

Yeah, it is really scary.

It is.

Kim, can you touch on what the reporting process looks like at the moment and when people do put their hand up and say, this is what's happened to me, what actually happens from there?

Different sports organisations will have different supports and reporting options in place.

The eSafety Commission does provide recommendations on how athletes might report harms.

And so there certainly is a pathway, a reporting pathway there.

However, what our athletes, the athletes who took part in this survey were telling us was even if they did report, so whether it was through eSafety or if they're,

if their sports organisation had an integrity unit, that was another place where they could report or perhaps even reporting it to someone like a coach or a welfare officer in the hope that they would then be able to sort of escalate it or bring it to the right channels was that very little was done.

So they would be, have to be quite vulnerable in coming forward in the first place because.

Because when you do, you can often be labelled as a troublemaker or it's all in your head or toughen up princess or all of those kinds of things, which really put the onus on the individual to just manage it.

So coming forward in that kind of environment, I think is a very vulnerable and brave thing to do.

And then to see little action to change things can feel enormously frustrating.

And so.

A lack of accountability around what is occurring, I think, is a key piece here.

We did, however, have some respondents say, for instance, that they worked with the police and felt that their mechanisms for accountability and reporting and explaining the process at every step was very helpful.

So that tells us something.

We also had respondents identify that sometimes they didn't feel safe reporting for those very reasons I've explained, because they feared retribution in some way.

That they would be targeted by a coach or the club would see them as a troublemaker and that might impact their capacity to participate or put them in poor standing.

But also for particularly for participants from culturally and racially marginalised backgrounds, reporting to authorities has historically not been very safe for them, particularly in a culture where brown bodies are policed and scrutinised.

So they feared further surveillance.

So they feared further surveillance or judgement for doing that.

And so often those formal reporting mechanisms aren't safe for women athletes of colour or queer women.

And so there are several kinds of blockers, I think, that were impacting the reporting experience for different types of women athletes.

And I think we can tell from what you've touched on, it's not good enough where it sits, right?

Like the reporting pathways are not up to.

And when people do report it, as you've said, it's not the way that it's handled does not necessarily make the athlete feel safe and validated.

So there's some recommendations as part of this research that you've come away with.

So the four are about advancing understanding, improving reporting, developing supports and fostering safety.

Kaylin, can you touch on the piece about advancing understanding as a recommendation?

Yeah, absolutely.

So the way that we've thought about this comes out of.

The work I've done in the other two contexts in terms of media and politics, talking about a whole of organisation approach, that this isn't something that just as the responsibility of the integrity unit or the athletes or the coach or the wellbeing officer, it's everybody, everybody takes responsibility in the organisation for responding to acknowledging and seeing that this is an issue that affects a whole range of people in a whole range of different ways.

That it isn't just the really violent, abusive content that is getting to people.

It's also like the call coming from inside the house.

You know, it's things like being excluded from things, feeling like you're having your limit, your opportunities limited because you're not either taken seriously or you're not, you're not, you're just not considered as being part of a club.

You're not considered as being part of that kind of community.

You're seen as being maybe external to it or something.

And so that whole of organisation approach about advancing understanding means seeing the sort of the range of ways that this is being doled out to people, basically, that there's it doesn't look like just what you think it looks like.

It actually looks like a whole range of different things that impact different people in different ways.

And so a whole of organisation approach involves everybody taking responsibility for addressing gender.

And it kind of rests on like strengthening the organisational understanding about what that online harm looks like.

So you're not, so you're looking at, you're looking at the range, you're looking at the different forms that that can take and expanding the organisational focus so it doesn't just fall on athletes to have to come forward with incidents or to have to make reports.

It can be somebody saying, you know.

I, I noticed that this happened and that is kind of happening.

Those informal chats are happening, but if it's only if that's the only thing that is happening, that's just not good enough because there will be a whole range of people in those rooms who, for whatever reason, can't talk about what's happening to them.

And so it's up to the institution and it's that sort of duty of care of the organisation to take care of their employees, to take care of their athletes.

Because not all of these places are professional.

They're professionalised, for instance, so they may not be getting paid.

So it's kind of a quasi workplace in some ways.

Yeah.

So it's this kind of there is a duty of care and that goes well beyond just when athletes are competing.

It also is things it also is when they're when they're not when they're not kind of in the club, when they're not in the on the field.

It's it's outside of that that it sort of expands that focus a little bit a lot, I'd say.

There's some information included around what future research should look like.

And there was a line that I just it resonated with me a lot about assessing the impacts of witnessing on those engaged with women's sport in digital settings.

And I spoke to you both off earlier about the fact that I've experienced this as the online harm as a female athlete myself, but also in running the female athlete project and my team who are involved in that.

It feels so.

Relentless so often and it's at times exhausting and I haven't necessarily had interactions with an individual person that I've potentially blocked and it's been a really relentless approach from one person.

Sometimes I just get so overwhelmed by the volume and I almost don't even have the capacity and resources to go through and delete and block.

And I've put the keywords in to try and prevent certain comments and messages, but it's just saying that.

It's it does it takes a really big toll.

And so I think it's interesting and I might come to you on this one, Kim, about what future research in this space could look like to look at it more broadly, not just the athletes, but women involved in coaching, leadership, officiating.

Officiating, I'm sure, is a really key area of this discussion, too.

I wrote my master's thesis on that so I can talk.

OK, well, we're going to get Caitlin just said, I don't know if you could hear that in the microphone that she wrote her master's thesis in this.

So please.

This is what I wrote about when I did my master's thesis about like an embarrassing number of years ago.

And I looked at the effects of witnessing anti-feminist harassment on like ordinary women online.

And it was about the way that it was affecting them and all of the things that you just said, exhausted, no resources, overwhelming.

That was it's a trauma response.

Like we are being constantly traumatized by these little devices in our pockets.

And the expectation is that we just have to keep going.

And there is there is much more significant reform, I think, that needs to happen.

But the the fact is that this is something that we've seen.

This isn't kind of this isn't new information, really.

This is actually something that we've been seeing for almost well over a decade in terms of the impacts.

Of witnessing online abuse isn't just about experiencing.

It's also what it's also what happens when you're when you're observing it.

And so future research, I think, would be it would be interesting to look at the the impacts.

But I also think that there's a huge amount that can be done in terms of thinking about the.

The different parts of the organization that might have perspectives, things that they might be able to do differently.

And so I'm going to throw to Kim now to talk about that.

Yeah, I think your your point about how deep does this problem go when we're talking about women in sport?

It just goes so far beyond athletes.

So our study was was limited to elite and professional athletes in Australia.

But if you are a woman who works in the sport media, if you are a woman who is a coach, if you're a woman who holds a leadership role.

You will be subject to this kind of vitriol because you have in some ways transcended or moved in beyond what is expected of you, which is, you know, to take up space in what has traditionally been a male space.

And that is troubling for a lot of people.

And they want to let you know that you don't belong.

So for me, you know, I think the bigger piece here.

Is that we need to think seriously about how these kinds of social media interactions that.

A hostile towards women are actually ways of shutting down women's voices in public spaces.

We found that our respondents after experiencing online harassment, some would step away from social media or they'd take a break or they would shut down.

Accounts, they had to find strategies to deal with precisely what you're talking about, the overwhelm and the hatred and essentially or they would just not say anything that they felt could be controversial.

So, again, it's really about surveilling and policing women's voices and particularly in sport.

When you are a woman who was being harassed and one of our respondents talked about this as a queer woman, she felt she couldn't just be a bystander to people who were saying homophobic.

Things she said, I have to speak out.

It's actually my duty, even though it comes at a cost to me, because if I'm silent, then I say this is allowable.

And what was frustrating for her is that the response from her club was say nothing, do nothing.

And so women athletes get stuck in this bind where their voices are silenced on social media and they are expected just to let it happen because the the kind of, I guess, the education.

Is try not to provoke, try to minimise conflict, try to be just be a nice, compliant woman and and, you know, and so and so we reproduce the status quo, don't we?

And so these are, I guess, some of the more complex things which we found our athletes were coming, you know, coming across and having to grapple with.

Yeah. Wow.

It's it's a lot to process.

Yeah. Wow.

It's a lot to process, isn't it?

Because it's just it is sadly it's so prevalent.

One of the things that we that we found was that the stuff that was really getting to women were things like people sending them direct messages.

So you're not seeing that in the public eye, but it's really corrosive because it's and things like guys asking them for dates or even interrogating them about, you know, their times or.

You know, their performance figures and they felt like, who are you?

You don't know me.

Who are you to demand demand my attention?

Yeah.

So that felt like a real breach and that kind of stuff impacts their well-being and things like being misrepresented by their own clubs on social media.

So that, again, you don't know where do you go with that?

You know, that sort of doesn't fall under the banner of online cyber hate.

Yeah.

But it's a form of, you know, that it's.

It's these these digital channels are harming women's feelings of well-being.

Yeah.

And I guess the other key thing is the fact that, you know, the stats around the impact, like the percentages of women that are saying this is actually impacting my performance as an athlete and the percentage that are saying this is impacting my sponsorship and economic opportunities and the broad well-being like that blows my mind.

Yeah.

It's actually that, you know, that it's that.

Damaging.

One of the key findings from the project was just the significant impact that this online harm was having on athletes.

The figures were really eye opening.

We were finding that gendered online harm was having really notable impacts on athletes individual well-being.

And we had 85 percent of athletes saying that it affected their well-being.

So coming at witnessing and experiencing this harm was actually harmful to them.

But I think also surprisingly, and I think this is one that might draw the attention of sports clubs, is that 71 percent were saying that it actually has an impact on their athletic performance.

So on what's happening on field.

So, again, I think if we ignore this, what we're doing is undermining all the good work to get athletes to peak condition.

And you can do that through, you know, training and nutrition and this and that.

But if we're not looking after them in these online spaces, it's going to have an impact.

And 81 percent said that it was actually affecting their employment, sponsorship and economic opportunities.

So these are huge numbers.

I think that we can't ignore those kinds of those figures and what women are telling and the impact that the athletes are telling us this is having on them.

That 71 percent that you touched on is.

It's such an interesting thing.

I've kind of chatted about it before, but not in a lot of detail.

This feeling of as a female athlete.

And I think that statistic confirms that I'm not alone in feeling like this, that I when I perform and play, if I were to make a mistake, that it's almost representing the whole of women's sport or the whole of women's football.

And that it opens up this doorway for criticism that saying that, oh, women shouldn't be playing football.

Look at that mistake she just made.

Look at that goal she just missed that a man would have made easily.

Yeah.

It's it really does impact what's happening on the field because you're aware of the kinds of vitriol that's going to come from it.

And that's a really hard place to be where you feel, again, you're being scrutinized and scrutinized and surveilled.

And, you know, there's been arguments that men to experience this kind of scrutiny.

But we need to understand that within the context of women's sport, where women are seen as less than.

Yeah.

Whose athleticism and skill is always under question.

It's going to land so differently and it's so much harder to brush it off.

And as you said, Chloe, you feel responsible.

You actually feel like you are letting the whole of womankind down if you actually make a mistake, which is just what humans do and athletes do all the time.

Yeah.

So the weight of it carries really differently.

And I think we need to recognize that rather than simply say there's an equivalence between men and women experiencing that because there's not.

Thank you so much, both of you, for your time in coming to discuss this.

And not only that, but for your time to investigate this area further.

I know just while you were both talking, I was thinking a lot about a lot of my teammates who I imagine we all experience very similar things and don't often discuss it.

We all know that it happens, but it's just this mountain that seems too big to climb and something that doesn't feel like it has solutions.

So I think it's.

Such incredible work.

So thank you both so much for your contribution in this space.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening.

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