Take the New Safe4Athletes Survey

by Irvin Muchnick

Katherine Starr’s Safe4Athletes is asking athletes (or parents of minor athletes) to complete a new survey designed to isolate the forms of abuse that are most prevalent in particular sports.

The reason this exercise is so important is something I’ve learned from investigating USA Swimming: Sports sexual abuse does not neatly correspond with general forms of child molestation and pedophilia found in the world at large. Every activity has a unique power dynamic, and indeed every individual sport has its own algorithm — based on athletic peak and development, combined with the role and leverage of coaches.

The Safe4Athletes survey hopes to gather enough data to help make informed statements about all these distinctions. Here’s the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/safe4athletes