Gender Differences in Sports-Related Child Maltreatment: A Systematic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sports-related child maltreatment (CM) has emerged as a global issue in the past few decades. Despite evidence pointing to gender differences in how children experience and report CM, this literature remains fragmented and limited to sexual abuse in sports. This systematic review identified and synthesized available evidence on the prevalence, perpetrators, outcomes, and disclosures of various sports-related CM subtypes to determine whether these experiences differ across genders. Systematic searches were conducted using three databases (i.e., PsycInfo, MedLine, Scopus) for studies published between the earliest date of each database to May 2024. A total of 509 unique articles were returned, from which 22 met the inclusion criteria. The included studies examined children or adults who participated in organized sports before age 18 and compared a quantitative measure of sports-related CM across genders. Findings revealed higher rates of sports-related neglect, psychological, and sexual abuse reported by girls, and higher rates of sports-related physical abuse reported by boys. Gender differences were also observed in the common perpetrators and disclosure recipients, with boys reporting more peer-perpetrated violence and disclosures made to coaches, and girls reporting more coach-perpetrated violence and disclosures made to parents. Regardless, severe outcomes of sports-related CM and concerns of underreporting were shared across genders. Future research is needed to establish consistent measurement tools and to explore gender differences in the perceptions and barriers to disclosing all forms of sports-related CM. The need to develop formal reporting structures in sports is also highlighted for policymakers and practitioners.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".