Change the Routine: Understanding the AHRC Report

The spotlight has firmly been on gymnastics in Australia following the Australian Human Rights Commission’s independent investigation into the systemic cultural issues in the sport. Alison Quigley, a former gymnast and advocate for change, outlines how Australia got to where it is today and takes us through some of the recommendations from the Change the Routine report.

When a bespectacled man in a navy prison suit stood before Judge Aquilina on January 25 in 2018 to face a jail term that would condemn him to a life behind bars, no one could have predicted how many voices would be set free from that day forth. To outsiders, the Nassar story appeared like a disturbing apparition, a horrific account of a rogue operator who’d finessed his way through three decades of offending without being caught. But as the more complex dimensions of the story unfolded, through televised talk-back shows showcasing survivors’ stories, we soon all learned that brave survivors had been speaking out about Nassar’s abusive practices well before he had been convicted. The real trouble had been with the authorities, who had failed to listen. Even in cases where they had listened and acted, their moves had been blocked by those higher up the chain of command. The Nassar story hooked us in because it engaged in universally compelling themes: ideological warfare between East Bloc countries and the West, innocence lost, a win-at-all costs mentality, women silenced, secrets among the cabal, dogged journalism, a quest for the truth, betrayals revealed.

It was 2018. Had Australia promulgated a win-at-all costs mentality? Was there any evidence we had?

In response to Nassar’s conviction, our peak body, Gymnastics Australia (GA), adopted a National Child Safety Commitment Statement, employed its first child safe officer, and approached Bravehearts to help reshape its policies. Running alongside this, journalist Lily Mayers, in an ABC article dated April 24, 2018, quoted GA’s CEO Kitty Chiller as saying the sport does not have an existing problem with child abuse. “There’s never been any evidence or complaints that anyone’s been unhappy within the Gymnastics Australia environment.”

Pundits who had been in the sport long enough to remember the 1995 Hayden Opie report might have taken issue with that assertion, but sticklers would point out that Opie had only investigated practices at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), outside GA’s purview.

By October of 2018, ABC journalist Peter Lusted had filed a story about generalised gymnastics abuse – physical, verbal and emotional – arising from practices at Victoria’s National Centre of Excellence (NCE). In this article, a former GA Board member accused GA of sweeping the issue under the carpet to protect its reputation. GA responded with a three-cornered approach: a media release saying the investigation had been concluded without any disciplinary action, a statement from Bravehearts commending GA for leading the way in these issues, and a letter of reassurance from the majority of parents associated with the NCE, saying the centre was a safe and happy environment for children.

At regular intervals GA announced improvements to policies, some of which had already been mandated by our nation’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. For a four-year period, starting in 2013, the Australian government had undertaken to conduct the world’s largest investigation into institutional responses to historical child sex offending. As part of this $380 million investment, the government had held private and confidential sittings whereby survivors contributed their testimonies of trauma. The Royal Commission’s terms of reference were broad enough to include sporting institutions. By the end of 2017, the Commission had secured the testimony of over 400 survivors from a variety of sports such as as swimming, surf lifesaving, cricket, football and tennis. Despite gymnastics being flagged in the final report as the fourth most popular organised activity for children aged up to 14, it was not flagged as a sport meriting singular attention. Ten survivors testified the various ways their gymnastics coaches had abused them. A simple audit of newspaper reports shows at least fourteen sexual offenders – all later convicted – had been operating in gymnastics clubs across Australia for decades. How did these facts reconcile with Chiller’s declaration there had been no abuse in the sport?

When the pandemic struck and the Olympics were cancelled, Netflix released Athlete A. For those attuned to watching the Olympics at this time of year, the documentary stood in lieu. Suddenly, in the month that followed, a cohort of retired athletes flooded social media sites with their own stories of child abuse. The deluge was so significant that GA declared it would commission an inquiry and turned to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) for help. 

The AHRC drew up the terms of reference for a September 2020 launch. Rather than investigating complaints on a case-by-case basis – an approach that previously been adopted, arguably with little success – the AHRC would investigate systemic issues and culture in the sport. Public confidence in the process was bolstered with the announcement the review would be overseen by Kate Jenkins, the AHRC’s sex discrimination commissioner who had previously led a national inquiry into sexual harassment in Australian workplaces. The AHRC launched an impressive publicity campaign, made provision for anonymous contributions, and facilitated different ways for people to tell their stories – in hard copy, through an online portal, or by engaging in semi-structured interviews. Although a survey was also sent out to all registered gymnastics clubs to ascertain the extent of complaints between the period of 2015 to 2019, the report did not delineate its outcomes, short circuiting an opportunity to begin mapping abuse statistics.

The AHRC undertook 47 semi-structured interviews with 57 participants and received 138 written submissions from current and former athletes and their families, staff, coaches, officials and administrators. Although almost 200 people contributed, the report does not indicate how many characterised themselves as survivors. Interestingly, similar overall participation rates were reported in America, with the Deborah Daniels review, and in New Zealand, with the David Howman report.

When the long-awaited AHRC review was released, it listed twelve recommendations for reform. The reforms centred on five findings. While these findings proved surprising to outsiders, for those who’d been involved in the sport over many decades, they were heartbreakingly predictable.

#1: Current coaching practices create a risk of abuse and harm to athletes. Additionally, hiring practices for coaching staff lack accountability and there are inconsistent policies and systems to regulate their behaviour. 

The first three recommendations for reform take coaching as their focus. Athlete testimony flagged authoritarian coaching styles and highlighted how discipline was used as a justification for abuse. The AHRC implored gymnastics governance to review the way coaches approach the sport. Rather than ‘educating’ coaches, it directs GA to upskill them in a more holistic way so that athletes’ needs are more thoroughly protected. The AHRC encouraged outside bodies to provide input into coaching development programs and launch a coach mentoring scheme. In a bid to prevent malfeasant coaches from avoiding scrutiny, the AHRC recommended GA introduce a sport-wide coach register. Maintaining accurate details of prior coaching employment would be a condition of club registration and accreditation.

Whilst the review is to be commended for making this suggestion, issues still remain. For coaches who are new to the system, the register is likely to be accurate. But it is arguably more problematic to verify references when coaches have come from overseas clubs or trail a long work history behind them. Simply asking coaches to supply details of their work history encourages malfeasant operators to underreport.

An extra layer of accountability could be added if the review stipulated the register information be made available to the public. In this way, athletes, parents and former associates could function as informal auditors, ensuring the register is more accurate. Whilst the AHRC may have considered and rejected this approach on the grounds of privacy, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where the privacy needs of individual coaches trump the benefits of external oversight. In a sport where ninety-one per cent of the participants are under twelve years old, the safety of children must always be paramount in the tension between privacy and transparency.

#2. There is insufficient focus on understanding and preventing the full range of behaviours that can constitute child abuse and neglect in gymnastics.

 This finding prompted the AHRC’s fourth recommendation, which calls on the industry to broaden its understanding of child abuse and neglect. Whereas the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses took child sex abuse as its focus, the AHRC examined all forms of abuse and called on GA to provide more training materials to address the knowledge gap. The AHRC also recommended training should be done collaboratively between all gymnastics clubs and associations under GA’s jurisdiction to enable consistency in messaging. 

Consistency in messaging is a recurring issue in Australian gymnastics, since our organisational structures are based on the federation model. The report points out that the federation model leads to complications including duplication and inconsistency of policies and procedures, along with challenges to the management of complaints.

What the report does not mention is how this challenge is further compounded by clubs that operate outside of GA’s jurisdictional reach. Across a number of states, high-performance institutes have operated outside of GA’s governance system and its Member Protection policies. Much media focus has recently gone to the West Australian Institute of Sport (WAIS), and its high-performance gymnastics program that operated from 1988 to 2016. The report did not discuss the complex interplay between GA and these institutes. As it stands, aggrieved former athletes of WAIS who had suffered generalised abuse had to strenuously lobby for representation in drafting a Memorandum of Understanding between WAIS and Australia’s new national complaints body, Sport Integrity Australia (SIA). Those same aggrieved athletes also had to strenuously lobby for their voices to be heard in WAIS’s own upcoming review of abusive practices. Legal hurdles of this nature are exhausting for survivors and the lobbying process leaves them exposed to the risk of re-traumatisation. Going forward, this jurisdictional issue is vital to address so as to avoid confusion, prevent re-traumatisation and give justice to all gymnasts, not just to those whose clubs had been affiliated under GA’s system.

#3. A focus on ‘winning-at-all costs’ and an acceptance of negative and abuse coaching behaviours has resulted in the silencing of the athlete voice and an increased risk of abuse and harm with significant short and long-term impacts to gymnasts.

Attached to this finding are three recommendations that revolve around athlete empowerment – the suggestion of youth advisory councils at state, territory and national levels; two-yearly surveys of all athletes to ‘check in’ on welfare-related issues; and the provision of regular physical and mental health assessments. The report also gives emphasis to the importance of surveys in capturing health and welfare statistics. Surveys are one of the surest tools to measure improvements or decelerations in specific fields of study. Understandably, further work needs to be done on ways to encourage participation.

 Tethered to this is recommendation six, which mandates formal acknowledgement and apology to all traumatised members of the gymnastics community. The media has devoted significant attention to the issue of apologies, reporting how they ring hollow until they are specific and delineate where governance failed. In being explicit about the errors it committed, governance demonstrates its commitment to transparency, a key factor in restoring trust. The AHRC mentioned transparency in the context of successful governance but one immediate way to help restore trust is to declare the importance of it in a stand-alone format alongside the child safety one.

#4. There is an ongoing focus in gymnastics on the ‘ideal body’, especially for young female athletes. This, in addition to inappropriate and harmful weight management and body shaming practices, can result in the development of eating disorders and disordered eating which continue long after the athlete has left the sport.

 Recommendations seven and eight mandate providing support for athletes’ welfare along with a requirement that GA develop protocols for responding to disclosures and signs of eating disorders. Whilst the review outlined where professional assistance might come from, questions still remain as to how these measures would be funded.  

#5. Gymnastics at all levels has not appropriately and adequately addressed complaints of abuse and harm and are not effectively safeguarding children and young people. Contributing factors include a lack of internal expertise and resources and complicated governance structures.  

This finding feeds into the central question of how athletes report abuse when the system potentially requires them to disclose their trauma to the same people who are enabling or perpetuating it. Conflicts of interest abound in minority sports, and especially in smaller communities, where the pool of available experts is limited. Existing systems in gymnastics allow clubs to investigate their own matters and decide whether a complaint proceeds or stalls. This system of management is characterised as self-regulating. When self-regulating bodies are not monitored or audited, they can easily be corrupted. Self-regulation in sport is a question of global concern and one which requires significant expertise and resources to resolve.

When the Royal Commission examined sporting institutional practices in Australia it found self-regulation had failed to keep our children safe, with sex offenders exploiting its weaknesses. It called on each state and territory to introduce legislation to create a ‘failure to report’ offence targeted at child sex abuse. State and territory governments promptly enacted this legislation and GA followed up by altering its policies. However, even GA's most recent policies outlining the complaints processes confer wide powers of discretion on clubs and state associations to decide whether to escalate or sideline a complaint. The Royal Commission only addressed this issue in the broadest of terms, but the AHRC, in its specific review of this gymnastics policy, has flagged the need for immediate reform.

Recommendation nine outlines a revolutionary new external process of complaints handling. It calls on GA to almost entirely step away from investigating its own complaints and refer them to a new statutory body, Sport Integrity Australia (SIA). Set up last July, this body will independently investigate and handle complaints for any sporting organisation that opts in, including those related to child safeguarding. Further, the government has created a new National Sports Tribunal capable of adjudicating on child safeguarding matters. 

Will these new bodies be adequately resourced to meet the potential onslaught? Time will tell, but so too will measurable outcomes. At the very least, the gymnastics community deserves to know the number of gymnastics-focussed complaints SIA is managing, the nature of those disputes and the outcomes. Transparency of complaints processes and outcomes is a clear expectation of gymnastics stakeholders. If complaints matters were publicly advertised and accessible, this in itself would act as a powerful deterrent to potential perpetrators. This approach demonstrates transparency, which engenders trust, essential for healing a traumatised community.

Recommendation ten relates to the interim processes for complaint handling, and Recommendation eleven mandates the SIA to expand their current telephone service to include child safeguarding matters. The report also says the SIA service “will also provide athletes and other relevant individuals with information regarding opportunities for investigation and redress.”

Redress and compensation, although commonly regarded as synonymous, address different client needs and engage very different legal processes. Redress is a means by which former athletes can recover money in recognition of the institution’s errors in its ways, a gesture to acknowledge that it is sorry. Australia’s Royal Commission has been operating its redress scheme since 2018 and is open until 2028. Limitations include the fact it is only available to survivors of sex abuse and is to those whose sporting organisations have signed up. Gymnastics Australia has not joined the scheme for reasons not canvassed in the AHRC review.

Compensation – a monetary sum arrived at through the hearing of individual cases in Australian’s civil litigation system – was also not canvassed as an issue in the review. On this point, however, it is worth mentioning the work of Donaldson lawyers, a law firm that previously engaged with Australian Defence Force survivors of abuse. Donaldson is currently assisting some survivors of abuse in gymnastics with a variety of supports in line with its philosophy of adopting a non-adversarial, holistic approach.

Recommendation twelve mandates GA to align its current governance with Sport Australia’s governance principles, namely: effective partnerships and collaboration; robust engagement and participation; consistency and accessibility; and accountability and transparency. This author argues that without a strong and explicit commitment to transparency the opportunity to restore public trust in the sport will be lost.

Recommendation twelve mandates the Board operations remain at arm’s length in relation to child safeguarding issues. The arms-length approach is vital considering the Board’s conflicting loyalties: to protect the organisation’s reputation from harm but also to protect children against harm. The AHRC commendably calls on the GA Board to revise its engagement with child safety matters so the same kind of conflict does not occur.

 Sub-recommendations include athlete representation on GA’s Board, and delivering consistent training to Member Protection Information Officers (MPIOs). MPIOs are entrusted with the task of raising awareness of child protection issues in local clubs. Under existing policy arrangements, MPIOs can be a first-contact point for complainants, and, as such, shoulder significant responsibilities.

The New Zealand report has argued that the expectations on people who assume these roles, particularly in a volunteer capacity, are onerously high and that there is currently insufficient scaffolding to support MPIOs to carry out their work. The New Zealand report highlights the practical challenges of training so many people for these roles. Although the AHRC report raises the same concerns, the practical hurdles are not highlighted to the same degree. Online resources will be distributed to all levels of clubs, but the report did not flag the need for an external auditor to assess how effectively MPIOs are operating. It also did not flag how vital it is that external auditors check how well GA’s child protection policies are working. Gymnastics is a high-risk sport dominated by children, making external audits vital.

Further to this finding, under the system outlined in GA’s most recent policies, the CEO of each state body can decide whether to escalate a complaint or not. The AHRC report criticises this system since it immediately confers too much discretion on CEOs who have a vested interest in preserving the good reputation of their organisation. However, regardless of whether the dispute is handled through internal or external mechanisms, GA has instituted a national flagging system, outlined in its national policies. Complaints of sufficient gravitas are flagged on a national database so all clubs are alerted to the individual’s behaviour.

It is argued, however, that there are still issues surrounding GA’s flagging system, including the fact that GA does not publish the outcomes of investigations. Whilst remarks of a defamatory nature need to be avoided, the effects can be mitigated by redactions. Publishing the results of hearings is analogous to the way Australia’s legal system operates, whereby individual cases can be accessed through the court registry or in published law reports. In this way the principle of transparency is honoured, the public is kept informed of important cases, and the judiciary is held to account for its decisions.

When the Whyte review is released in Britain, the Australian gymnastics community will be keen to examine its recommendations for reform. Will the Whyte review raise issues missed in our report? Are these issues worth considering for Australian athletes? To what degree should the outcomes of all reports be collated for future reference?

 Arguably the next best step is to collaborate on ideas for systemic reforms to avoid duplication and costs. Now, more than ever, athletes need to know the eyes of the world are on our peak bodies and that our next generation of gymnasts will be more thoroughly protected.