Why dehumanisation is key to understanding abuse in sports

I couldn’t believe what I was watching. A 17-year-old child, who had fallen face first onto the badminton court was now convulsing. After forty seconds, there was still no one attending to his motionless body. No reassuring hand on his shoulder, no gentle voice comforting him. 

I heard myself yelling at my computer screen, “Somebody help him! He’s not faking, he’s not faking.” 

This wasn’t the first time I had uttered those words with urgency. It took me right back to age fifteen, when my friend “Jane” dislocated her knee doing a simple (for her) gymnastics skill. She remained silently wrapped around the balance beam holding her leg for 15 minutes before the coach was persuaded to check in with her. 

For the young badminton prodigy, Zhang Zhi Jie, the outcome was far more devastating.

The Youtube channel 'This Is Badminton' put together a review of the events contributing to Zhang Zhi Jie's death on a badminton court.

The video replay of Zhang’s collapse calls into our consciousness the power of sport to make us forget our humanity in favour of obeying its rules. Rules that many safe sport advocates would argue are not written with athletes’ best interests in mind. 

Precious lifesaving minutes were wasted, because the Badminton World Federation rules dictated that only an official could give the okay for anyone to enter the field of play. Tragically, the boy died of cardiac arrest. 

A culture of cruelty in a big money operation

The glaring reality is we can diminish the humanity of an athlete suffering right in front of us, because society has trained us to commodify athletes based on their performance and entertainment value. Sport is a big money operation. Researchers at Global Sports Insights estimate the value of the sports industry world-wide to be more than 2.5 trillion US dollars.

While sports stakeholders profess to value athletes, it's fair to question whether they are prioritising athletes' instrumental worth - such as winning medals, generating funding and attracting viewership - or their intrinsic value as human beings.

Perhaps it was the perfect storm of a global pandemic, on the heels of the Me Too movement, but if the past five years are any indication, athletes around the world are claiming their value. Fuelled by remarkable courage and candour, thousands of sport participants have taken to social media to share their experiences of maltreatment in service of creating safer, better sport for future generations.

With uncanny similarities, athletes disclosed the shame, regret, fear, and hurt their harmful sport experiences caused them. It echoed what I already knew to be true as the guardian of countless painful secrets told to me by parents and athletes in my community. 

“Coach told me I was a waste of talent.”
“She said I looked like a potbelly pig. I was nine years old.”
“He said I was like a broken toy.”
“They said I was as useless as garbage.”

The non-human comparisons don’t end there. In gymnastics, a particularly toxic sport, child abuse is normalised as a coaching method necessary to “produce elite athletes”. 

As a result, a culture of cruelty prevails in many countries. Particularly in aesthetically judged sports (but not only), child athletes as young as seven years old are instructed to mask all emotion with a smile while enduring yelling, screaming, forcible over stretching, training while injured, humiliation, isolation, and name calling (“stupid cow”, “fat pig”, “ugly black monkey”). 

They are perpetually at the mercy of their coach and shamed into silence if they dare speak out. The result is a powerlessness that leaves children hurt, angry and vulnerable to further abuse and exploitation. 

As a microcosm of broader society, sport mirrors the best and worst of how human beings treat each other. 

The autonomous, self-policing nature of sport means it is governed by norms that would be unacceptable in any other walk of life. From young children to professional athletes, thousands have expressed publicly that sport became a vehicle of harm. 

It broke them physically, psychologically and spiritually. They felt pushed to their limits trying to satisfy demanding coaches, parents, fans and institutional agendas. Many quit sports with chronic, debilitating injuries and fragile mental health from the suffering they endured. 

And for what? National pride? Entertainment value? Bolstering their club’s reputation with a podium finish?

The power of the words 'lived experience' and 'dehumanisation'

For decades, athletes have been excluded from positions of influence that could improve sport culture. Like countless others before me, I tried to make change from the inside by taking on board positions, chairing safe sport committees, facilitating leadership workshops, and working one on one with coaches to expand their inter-personal toolkits. 

It wasn’t enough. Only in hindsight would I realise how wrong I was to promise my husband that gymnastics would be safe within “a couple years”. 

Despite collective efforts, abuse in sport remains insufficiently acknowledged as the credible health threat it is. Governments and mega wealth generators like the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, all the way down to regional governing bodies and clubs have failed to eradicate abuse, despite the economic and human costs of doing nothing. 

I remember the first time I heard the term “lived experience”. It liberated me from shameful aspects of my sporting journey. The language lent usefulness, credibility, and even expert status to the knowledge I had acquired growing up in a toxic sport.  

I had another experience with resonant language during a radio interview on the renowned Canadian morning show, CBC Radio’s The Current. 

Across Canada a crisis of abuse, racism and discrimination had surfaced with courageous athletes, academics and allies working tirelessly to reveal the truth. We assumed our government would act quickly to eradicate maltreatment the moment it was exposed. We were wrong. 

After more than two years, the sport minister finally announced a commission to review the sports system, rather than the constitutionally robust national inquiry we had been calling for. She told us this was best for us. Then she went silent. 

During the radio interview, while conveying the distressing impact of the government’s delayed and diluted response, the word “dehumanising” just popped out of my mouth.

This was no small accusation to levy against the Federal Sport Minister for the government’s role in the crisis. Nonetheless, naming the ‘slow burn’ of this institutional betrayal helped me frame what I was experiencing. 

I had begun to feel like a specimen; usefully on display to expose the problems in sport, privately consulted too many times to count, but kept away from the tables where actual solutions were procured. Yet again, the same sports stakeholders who built the existing system or those they influenced, would decide what was best for us, without us … despite their conflicts of interest as recipients of government funding. 

Were survivors ‘too delicate’ or too difficult to collaborate with? Not expert enough about abuse despite having lived it? Perhaps those benefitting from the status quo feared they would lose power, prestige and funding if survivors became the architects of a new sport system?

This was the lens through which I watched the heartbreaking video of Zhang Zhi Jie’s final moments on June 30, 2024. I couldn’t help but wonder what young Zhang hoped his death would teach us about valuing the lives of athletes and children above politics, rules or medals? Would he feel that his humanity was honoured above all else during those crucial few minutes following his collapse?

What dehumanisation looks like in sport

Language matters and we in sport have been reluctant to call out horrendous behaviour for what it is. Language shapes and guides how we perceive our lives and the people in it.

Dehumanisation is a term rightly reserved for the worst cases of oppression and genocide. Yet, elements of the dehumanising process can be seen throughout sport. Blatant silencing and moral injury caused by systemic abuse, racism, misogyny, power imbalances and discrimination have devastated many lives, while the myth of sport as inherently good has been upheld.  

With the word ‘dehumanising’ stuck in my mind, I took a deep dive into the research to better understand the concept. What I read hit me like a ton of bricks. 

For a foundational understanding of dehumanisation, I consulted the work of Dr. Adrienne de Ruiter, an ethicist, political philosopher and theorist at the University of Humanistic Studies in the Netherlands. 

She contends dehumanisation is a process, practice or act during which aspects of another’s humanity is “denied, undermined or otherwise negatively affected”. 

Historically, it has been used as a tool of oppression to achieve a target’s submission to cruel deeds and ensure ongoing dominance for the perpetrator. This includes referring to individuals or a group as animals, degrading them, villainising them, denying their voice and negating their right to make moral claims on those who have harmed them. 

Children forced to crawl around a floor mat oinking like pigs because they ‘weighed too much’, while coaches ignored their pleas and laughed at their tears, seemed to fit Dr. de Ruiter’s description of dehumanising. 

By likening people to creatures considered vile, dirty or dangerous, practices of dehumanisation weaken the moral restraints which prevent us from mistreating our fellow human beings. Imagine the junior coaches and younger athletes watching these tactics play out as a normal way to train high performance athletes. And we wonder how the cycle of abuse continues. 

Dr. de Ruiter points not only to observable actions, but also the silencing. 

"Human beings share a discursive moral community through which they can make moral appeals on each other,” she writes.

In other words, perpetrators refuse to recognise that those targeted have a right to challenge poor treatment. In the context of sports, club owners methodically and systematically obstruct athletes from speaking up about injustices using non-disclosure agreements, athlete contracts, fear and retaliation. 

Dehumanisation attempts to motivate children by denigrating them 

The work of Dr. David Livingston Smith, a foremost expert in dehumanisation with multiple books to his credit, further piqued my interest. Dr. Livingston Smith’s work includes thresholds marking dehumanisation that perhaps my examples couldn’t measure up to. 

Part of me secretly hoped this scholar would tell me that my thinking was absurd. He didn’t.

As I recounted the story of Zhang’s death to Dr. Livingston Smith, he listened without the filter of someone raised in sport. I often use the reaction of non-athletes as a gauge for what “regular people” deem acceptable treatment for themselves and their children. 

Because sadly, I discovered in the most regrettable way that my decades in elite sport have indoctrinated me into having too much tolerance for coaching tactics with devastating outcomes. 

Dr. Livingston Smith’s shocked reaction confirmed my horror with how the badminton tragedy was handled. 

“It lacks basic human decency…when someone is not just suffering, but obviously in considerable danger and to not do anything because it contravenes the rules of the event? It’s horrible, unthinkably exploitative,” he remarked with obvious disgust and anguish rising in his voice.

Livingston Smith continued, “It’s like there wasn’t a suffering child convulsing on the floor. The reaction of observers suggests judgement was cast that the athlete was just not up to doing what was expected for the greater glory of the organisation or the competition.” 

The message was clear, this young person didn’t matter. Or, mattered less than a rule in a book.

Our conversation continued down a dark path, lamenting the treatment of athletes in comparison to livestock, obedient pets, and circus animals. I felt my eyes well up with tears and my throat constrict as his assessment hit close to home.

“Let’s be honest”, Dr. Smith remarked quietly, “foundational in these sport examples is nothing less than attempts to motivate children by denigrating them. By harming them psychologically and physically. It’s textbook exploitation, not dissimilar to the extensive obedience training dogs undergo. They are performing pets. Except, I fear, animal welfare is perhaps more well developed than athlete welfare.” 

BINGO.

I recalled an article by Daniel Storey, iNews’ chief football writer, where he noted, “We expect our footballers to sit somewhere between performing circus animals and robots. They are there for our entertainment and amusement…”

Athletes are a means to an end, but at what costs?

I think as adults, we know, that while circuses can be fun entertainment for spectators, the reality for the animals is often very different. Animal trainers use harsh, if not abusive tactics, to get the animals to comply. Whips, tight collars, muzzles, and the threat of starvation are used to motivate animals to perform tricks. Basically … fear and punishment.

Admittedly, I’ve never seen a collar on a gymnast, but I have seen forced over-stretching that led to injury, broken limbs after being screamed at to perform a trick, torn skin from extreme repetition of a punishment, concussion protocols not followed despite obvious head trauma, coaches humiliating children for food choices and confiscating snacks from parent-packed suitcases, and athletes driven to self-harm in the face of repeated attacks on their self-worth.

That’s just the damage one can see. Like circus animals who can’t tell you what’s happening to them, neither can children.

I paused to allow a wave of nausea to ripple through me. This is not how I wanted to think about my life as an athlete or worse, what I let my daughter be exposed to. But if I look away now, if I choose to ignore these warning signs, aren’t I part of the problem? Won’t I be a co-conspirator in failing to stop child abuse now that I know better? The answers weigh heavily.

For Dr. Livingston Smith, motivating children by demeaning them is unforgivable. He warns that “when we become accepting of violations against human nature and against the human spirit, we enable the dehumanisation process to play out.”

It's almost unthinkable that in 2024 we require governance to ensure athletes and children are not treated in a dehumanising way. Does it really need to be written in a policy that safeguarding someone’s life should always be the mightiest rule on the field of play?

I told my children that participating in sport would be good for them and fun. I assured them it was the key to a healthy, well-rounded life with all the social, health, and opportunity benefits a person could want. I regret not knowing about the vast, dark underside of sport, where the human rights of athletes and children are violated by the very people and systems they are told to trust. 

However, just follow the money. It’s no secret that athletes are a means to an end for many. But we must ask ourselves, at what cost?

As eye-opening, gut-wrenching revelations continue to surface, exposing corruption, scandal and a common lack of humanity with which athletes are treated, there is good news. 

A global community of change-makers is uniting, fuelled by their shared love of sport and respect for everyone’s human rights. Hopefully more fans, coaches, parents and clubs will join the effort and push hard for the moment of reckoning sport needs to clean up its act.