“A wave of revelations is rolling towards football - and I think: sport in the broader sense.
In my opinion, the number of unreported cases is frighteningly high. ”That was said a few days ago by Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, General Secretary of the FIFPRO football players' union.
His organization has submitted a report that leaves no doubt as to how much the milieu of the most popular sport in the world invites the abuse of football players.
The most recent cases in Australia, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Venezuela, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Iceland, Afghanistan and Canada demonstrate the global extent of sexual violence in football. The imbalance of power in the game often opens up a free field for the perpetrators. Football is a stepping stone out of poverty, especially for boys. Girls and women, especially where there are no professional structures, are promised money or playing time - in exchange for sexual favors.
Even in professional, rich sports sociotopes, perpetrators remain undetected, unnamed and undisturbed for years.
The global culture of silence is not only inherent in football for a long time, as the abuse of the Chicago Blackhawks in the NHL ten years ago shows.
A large number of the reactions there shows what the FIFPRO report also complains about: With today's structures, they cannot be adequately explained.
Perpetrators and confidants continue to work
On the contrary: measures by the associations are too often intended to minimize their own reputational damage.
They prevent victims from speaking up and threaten to retraumatize them, should they take the courage to speak about their suffering, while the perpetrators and confidants have long been working elsewhere.
So there is a lot to suggest that not only the incalculable number of victims are silent on cases from the past, but that people are also being abused in professional and amateur clubs today, including in Germany. The now published interim report by the Universities of Ulm and Wuppertal on Germany's largest study on sexual violence in sport shows: the more professional the athlete, the more likely they are to experience violence.
Part of the lack of knowledge about the dimensions of the problem, which FIFPRO also lamented, is the idea of being able to ensure that there will be no more abuse in sport.
The sport will continue to attract abusers.
But anyone who does not create structures that enable independent clarification, give the victims security and encourage them to speak, is complicit.
The future governing parties in the Bundestag have
spoken
out in favor of setting up a center for
safe sport
, as athletes Germany demands and the German Olympic Sports Confederation has so far refused.
The same applies here: Every day counts.