Offside: An International Comparison of Group Sexual Assault in Competitive Young Men’s Ice Hockey
Abstract
Athlete-perpetrated sexual violence within hockey has historically been concealed and rarely acknowledged within academic literature and public discourse in Canada and internationally. To analyze group-sexual assault cases in young men’s hockey in Canada and the United States at the high-school, intercollegiate, and junior level, this study utilized an unobtrusive case-study approach, revealing the relative prevalence in which group sexual assaults occur, the common characteristics of these cases, and how institutions such as hockey organizations and the criminal justice system have responded to this form of gender-based violence. Two primary sources of unobtrusive data were used within this study, including: 1) documentation accessed through the online legal document repositories vLex, CanLii, and WorldLii, and 2) documentation accessed through online media article archives Access Word News, Google News, and Canadian Newsstream. In total, 30 cases, including 20 in Canada and 10 in the United States, were analyzed. Through the analysis of 30 cases of group sexual assault, there were seven key findings, including: 1) accused players are rarely held accountable, 2) Canadian Junior hockey players are disproportionately represented in reports of athlete-perpetrated group sexual assault, 3) accused players often receive support from their coaches, team management, and the community, while victims often do not, 4) Canadian and American hockey organizations respond comparatively differently when players are accused of sexual assault, 5) disciplinary responses were lower among Canadian Junior hockey cases, compared to American cases, 6) in many cases, players who faced charges of sexual assault could advance their careers to higher professional playing levels (such as the National Hockey League), and 7) with increased media attention, public outcry, and disciplinary responses more recently, a significant shift in tolerance and responses to these incidents has occurred over time.Collections
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