Here is a question that Australian sports administrators should be made to answer in public: if a young woman reports sexual harassment to her sporting organisation and is told, in effect, to get used to it, what exactly is the point of having a policy at all?
That is not a rhetorical abstraction. It is the lived experience of multiple elite female athletes who participated in the ABC's Elite Athletes in Australian Women's Sport survey, published this week. The accounts are specific, credible, and deeply troubling. They describe a pattern not of isolated failures but of institutional indifference.
Kareema Wakim was in her mid-teens when she made her first national senior team for moguls skiing. The overseas trip that followed should have been a career highlight. Instead, she was sexually harassed by an older male teammate. She eventually reported it to her coach but was left to process the aftermath largely on her own, caught between guilt at having spoken up and the creeping sense that the system had no clear path forward for her.
"I kind of felt guilty," Wakim, now 19, told ABC Sport. "I feel like, in that moment, I just regretted reporting it. And I don't think that's really how it should be."
She is not alone. Another athlete described being emotionally abused and harassed by a male teammate for years, with her coach dismissing her complaints to protect a favoured squad member. A third reported being raped by a national team head coach, enduring a months-long investigation she described as "horrifying" and "degrading", only to see him handed a one-year coaching ban after the organisation, in her words, covered it up.
The Research Confirms What Athletes Already Know
These individual accounts are given added weight by formal academic research. La Trobe University, the University of Sydney, and Victoria University recently released findings from a study on gender-based violence against women in sport, covering physical, sexual, and psychological harm. Researchers interviewed 27 women and gender-diverse people, spanning grassroots to elite levels.
Associate Professor Kirsty Forsdike from La Trobe's Rural Health School said clear themes emerged. Policies were opaque. Reporting pathways were confusing. And when athletes did come forward, the responses ranged from dismissal to outright denial.
"People might start to do something and then nothing happens, or they get told, 'There's nothing we can do,'" Dr Forsdike said. "Or they get told, 'Don't worry about it. That's just what happens.'"
One anonymous participant described submitting a case to a sporting organisation three separate times: the first ignored, the second deemed outside their remit, the third simply not their job. "And I remember thinking, 'Who the f*** has the job of sorting this out for me?'"
Lilee Lunney, a 26-year-old national-level rowing cox who spends considerable time around predominantly male coaching staff, described a culture of sexual commentary about female rowers that she says has gone largely unchecked. She can name around five male coaches who have made sexualised remarks about the women she trains alongside.
"What's the point?" she told ABC Sport. "Because the people I'm reporting it to are their mates that they rowed with, and nothing's going to happen if I say anything."
The Accountability Gap
The fundamental question is structural. Sport Integrity Australia (SIA) oversees anti-doping, match-fixing, child safeguarding, and discrimination. It does not have a specific remit covering gender-based violence against adults, and its investigative powers extend only to sports that have signed up to the National Integrity Framework.
SIA's director of safeguarding, Lisa Purves, acknowledged the limitations but pointed to the agency's support role. "Whilst we don't directly deal with the investigation for some matters, we absolutely build the capability of sports and support them in managing it," she said. The agency can connect organisations with relevant agencies and ensure appropriate support is in place for athletes. That is a reasonable answer, so far as it goes. The problem is that it describes a facilitation function, not an enforcement one. When a sporting body decides an allegation is not its problem, SIA's soft-power toolkit may simply not be enough.
The Counter-Argument Deserves Serious Consideration
Before leaping to calls for a new federal regulator or mandatory reporting obligations, it is worth acknowledging the genuine complexity here. Australian sport is extraordinarily diverse, encompassing tens of thousands of clubs, codes, and governing bodies, most of them volunteer-run. Imposing heavy compliance frameworks on a suburban football club or a regional swimming association carries real costs and risks crowding out the very people who keep community sport alive.
Purves and Dr Forsdike both point to cultural change as the necessary foundation. Enforcement without culture change, they argue, simply pushes bad behaviour underground. Dr Forsdike's research team has developed a publicly available Safe to Speak, Bound to Act toolkit for sports leaders, designed as a starting point for understanding and responding to gender-based violence. The approach is practical rather than punitive, and that balance matters. Purves cited the Box Hill North Football Club as an example of how even seemingly minor attitudes, such as sharing offensive images of women, feed into a broader culture that tolerates harm.
"It's the whole culture of sport that needs to change in relation to how it sees women," she said. "The sports need to lead the way before we can go straight to the enforcement and investigation side."
Strip away the talking points and what remains is a genuine trade-off: between the speed and clarity that formal enforcement would bring, and the depth of cultural change that only sustained education and leadership can produce. Both are necessary. The evidence from this survey and the La Trobe research suggests that culture-first approaches alone are not sufficient when organisations are actively protecting perpetrators and dismissing victims. Some form of independent accountability mechanism, with real authority over all sporting bodies regardless of framework membership, deserves serious policy consideration.
Kareema Wakim put it simply: education and awareness are the biggest tools available, but those tools only work if the people in positions of power are willing to use them. Right now, too many of them are not. Voters, fans, and parents who send their children into elite sport deserve better than a system where the answer to "who sorts this out for me?" is, effectively, nobody.
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence or domestic abuse, contact the 1800 Respect National Helpline on 1800 737 732, or Lifeline on 13 11 14. Young people can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800.