Sports Equity Lab

Sport has unmatched transformative power to elevate humanity. Designed to draw those on the margins of society in to participate equally, sport challenges us to engage one another in full dignity, honesty, and respect, and to try to achieve our highest standards of performance, individual and collective. But there is another side. As countless media stories have revealed, harmful behaviors—disability-, race-, and gender-based discrimination, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse—are rife in sport. Our lab ethically applies rigorous science to study and systematically dismantle these ills. Co-designing our work with athletes, we anchor research methods in recognized human-rights-based principles. By keeping ‘non-traditional’ athlete groups, e.g., athletes with disabilities from lower-resourced settings, at the forefront, we give a voice to the most vulnerable athlete groups on modern-day playing fields, while offering solutions that are more universally relevant across diverse sport environments. A small but mighty global team, we champion sport safeguarding around the world, on small and large platforms. Committed and passionate, our team’s greatest pain points come from the inevitable capacity limitations associated with chronic volunteerism. By enabling us to hire our first members of staff, the Elevate Prize will help bolster productivity, reach, and impact.

Growing up, there wasn’t a sport I wouldn’t try nor a science fair I wouldn’t enter. My twin passions have always been sports and science—but my greatest love is sports. Through college and beyond, I continued training in track and field. After Harvard Medical School, during residency, I fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a professional athlete, competing internationally in the women’s long jump for my native Ghana. As I rose in the ranks, I was hurt and disillusioned when I experienced abuse at the hands of my mostly male coaches. Then, when I saw how atrociously my disabled teammates were treated, I’d had enough. I vowed to act. That’s why I started Sports Equity Lab (SELY). 

SELY is an independent, athlete-centred and -driven research lab that frames key questions in athlete safeguarding to build the evidence base for safety and inclusion in sport. Combing traditional scientific and trauma-informed methods with modern multi-media technology to achieve global reach, we generate empirical data that drive behavior, culture, and policy change for well- and lower-resourced sport settings. Given sports’ inherent salience in society, we believe that equity in sports can inspire the same in society—fair sports, fair world.

Yetsa Tuakli-Wosornu

Abuse is now a recognized risk of sport participation. Indeed, the 2019 23rd annual Play The Game conference identified athlete abuse as the greatest threat to modern sport. To end this scourge, the evidence-base must grow, and research, policy and programming must be aligned. SELY works to accomplish these goals. Our research and others’ have uncovered organizational-, and individual-level drivers of maltreatment, including institutional complicity and ‘no-pain-no-gain’ cultural norms. Psychological power imbalance, real or perceived, lies at the core of all abuse, and the full range of harmful behaviors in sport include psychological, physical, and sexual harassment and abuse, disability-, race-, and gender-based discrimination, neglect, peer aggression, hazing, bullying, and more.

Prevalence estimates are concerning: 75% of sportive British youth experience psychological abuse, between 19-92% of Canadian elite athletes experience sexual harms, and global Para athletes have between 2-4 times increased risk. Current data are mostly concerned with sexual violations, and emerge from elite, higher-income, non-disabled athlete-groups. 

Our work identifies three deliverables: generate empirical sport safeguarding data; use these data to outline and integrate systems, structures, policies, and processes that enable sport inclusion and safety; co-develop projects representing globally-balanced interests of athletes with disabilities and other vulnerabilities.

We start at the margins and work in. Placing marginalized athletes (e.g. Para, cultural minority, socioeconomically disadvantaged, child, LGBT, gender non-binary and/or girl child) at the center, we ‘flip the script’ on tradition. 

The argument here is that if an approach works with those rendered most powerless by systems of oppression and privilege, then it is more likely to work with other, less-vulnerable groups. This reverses top-down strategies where solutions are designed among mainstream populations before being adapted for those on the fringes. 

Additionally, we apply cross-disciplinary quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods research models that are globally balanced (our Athletes’ Rights analysis queried athletes from 72 countries and 39 unique sports), actively  anchor research questions and methods in recognized human-rights principles, and implement accessible community-based programs that improve athletes’ lives. A qualitative study revealed Para athletes in emerging markets suffer psychological harm through subtle manifestations of ableism, including inaccessible built sporting environments. These data inspired our partnership with architects in Ghana and Carnegie Mellon University to  build a Paralympic Learning and Training Center just outside Ghana’s capital city. 

Translating science into real-life community- and person-level impact is just as important to us as the rigor of our experimental designs.

At its root, sport is a beacon of equity and inclusion. Outside sport, there are positive indicators signifying the extent to which modern society is increasingly ready to respect these principles. Examples include the #MeToo, #TimesUp, and Black Lives Matter movements, or the way people with disabilities are engaged in their societies (including public signage). These influences set the societal backdrop against which our work unfolds—and indeed, increase the potential for its effectiveness. By working across sectors and global contexts, SELY uses sport and play to show rather than tell how equity and inclusion ‘get done.’ 

Our two 2021 flagship community-engagement projects include a virtual mobile gaming experience, ‘ELITE.’ This project uses Global South Paralympic athletes as central protagonist coaches, creating meaningful, collaborative, competitive contact between users and athletes, building empathy and changing perceptions. Available for mobile and tablet devices, as pop-up installations, as VR-at-home, and community deployment packages, this project can reach millions globally, connect with health data by putting users in touch with their physical bodies, and allow no-disabled persons to learn from Para athlete champion coaches. 

Sport can illuminate a path to higher levels of equity and inclusion—the time is now, the world is ready.