Good use, non-use and misuse: safe sport reporting systems in context

Reporting systems constitute an essential part of today’s safe sport initiatives across the world. Informed by literature on reporting wrongdoings in organisational contexts and a political sociology approach to policy instrumentation, this article examines how abuse reporting systems are utilised in youth high-performance sport environments. Drawing from 51 interviews with both user and provider groups of South Korea’s reporting facilities, the results offer three main uses of the country’s safe sport reporting mechanisms: (1) ‘good use’ that relies on their communicative capacity to signal changing organisational culture; (2) ‘non-use’ that derives not only from the fear of reprisals, but from more subtle relational and situational concerns, such as teams’ dissolution; and (3) ‘misuse’ of the systems as a tool to advance individual agendas as opposed to protecting victims. The findings of this study not only provide evidence for both positive and perverse effects of safe sport reporting facilities per se, but also illuminate the importance of social and institutional conditions that can both enable and constrain this newly implemented policy measure for athlete safeguarding.