Influencing Policy and Legislation
Drawing on six years of G4CI casework and advocacy and on insight, testimony, discussion and collaboration involving hundreds of survivors and athlete-advocates, our research identifies a significant recognition gap around forms of abuse in gymnastics. For example, policies identify individual harmful practices without safeguarding systems successfully recognising abuse when those practices combine into a cumulative pattern. G4CI continues to encounter cases in which serious physical and psychological harm is supported by detailed evidence but minimised as a result of conceptual frameworks that fragment experiences.
Our research aims to fill that gap through co-production of knowledge with key stakeholders and in so doing, influence policy, legislation and practice at grassroots and elite levels.
The evidence base for abuse in sport is not missing. The evidence is consistently being missed.
Survivor-led Research
Over the past six years, around the world, survivors and athletes have challenged the sport to confront its past. Their testimony has exposed not only individual experiences of harm, but the cultures, structures and systems that allowed that harm to happen.
Central to our work is the belief that survivor experience is expertise. Survivors are not simply witnesses to what went wrong, or people whose stories should be heard. They hold unique knowledge about how systems operate, where they fail, how harm becomes normalised and what needs to change. That expertise should have a meaningful place alongside professional, institutional and academic knowledge in providing research and designing solutions to shape the future of the sport.
#SEETHEABUSE: Modernising Safeguarding in Gymnastics
Discover our latest abuse in gymnastics research project, developed in co-production with survivors, academics, human rights groups and other key stakeholders.
The G4CI Power Map forensically examines the financial structures that underpin FIG, now known as World Gymnastics - to understand the imbalanced power structures that exist within the sport. World Gymnastics operates a complex and opaque system, and this map allows us to shine a light on what is really happening inside the international governing body - to show how much safeguarding is valued (or not) by decision makers in the sport.
Power Map Research Project
