An Empowering Climate as a Protective Factor against Sexual Violence in Sport?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
See attached document
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
We would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for their work on our manuscript. We appreciate the comments. Within our revision, we have addressed all of these comments. Below, you will find a detailed description about how we handled the different comments:
Reviewer 1:
Abstract :
Lines 19-20: « Results reveal that athletes who had experienced or observed interpersonal violence rate the empowering climate subfactors within their training group as lower, and the disempowering climate subfactors as higher.” = it is confusing because you started with sexual violence and said after “interpersonal violence”. I suggest to be more clear through the abstract on which “variables” you refer to (sexual violence only OR interpersonal in a large point of view, so not just sexual violence). It means that this could be addressed in the hole article or in the title?
Answer: Thank you for this indication. This was just a mistake in word use. As the article deals only with sexual violence, this should of course be worded as such in the abstract. We have changed the word.
Introduction
Could you add a reference to support please? : « An empowering motivational climate is (among other attributes) characterized by a distribution of power between coach and athletes, therefore it might be a protective factor against sexual and interpersonal violence in sport.” P.1 Lines 39-41
Answer: The respective reference was added.
P.2 lines 59-61: “In the German sample, 15.9% of all athletes experienced mild sexual violence, more than 10.2% experienced moderate sexual violence and 11.2% experienced a severe form of sexual violence (Ohlert et al., 2018).” : I suggest to give definitions or examples for the severity classification or refer to the work of Vertommen and colleagues (2016) for explanations.
Answer: The sentence seems to be problematic without further explanation, and as it is not crucial for understanding our further argumentation, it was decided to delete this sentence.
P.2, lines 82-84: “A second risk factor is the intentional physical and psychological isolation from the affected person’s social support network. Isolation leads to stronger dependencies from the offender. » : Please support with a reference. I suggest the work of Roberts et al. (2020) who identified this factor in their systematic review.
Answer: The respective reference was added.
P.3, lines 116-119: “Strongly task involving coach behaviors predict positive outcomes in youth athletes (Alvarez et al., 2012; Reinboth & Duda, 2006), while a motivational climate which is mainly ego-involving has a negative impact on youth athletes (Duda & Balaguer, 2007; Ntoumanis et al., 2012).”: I suggest here to give more details about those “positive” and “negative” impacts. It will help the reader understand what are exactly those impacts.
Answer: Some examples have been added.
P.4, lines 161-163: “The risk factor of physical and psychological isolation is prevented by coach behaviors that rather support social relatedness in an empowering climate.”: I don’t find this obvious that “isolation” could be “reduced” by empowering climate… I found this argument less strong… The argument around power imbalance is very strong however. I suggest to refine your argumentation or release this element?
Answer: A more detailed explanation of this factor was added for better understanding of this paragraph.
That brings me to a central question: why looking specifically at sexual violence and not to all forms of interpersonal violence in line with empowering climate?
Answer: Thank you for this comment. Of course, an empowering climate should be a protective factor against all forms of interpersonal violence. However, as we only focused on sexual violence within our study, our line of argumentation only included this form of interpersonal violence. Still, we have added some words acknowledging this fact.
P.4, lines 175-177: “The aim of the current study was thus to quantitatively examine the relationship between perceptions of an empowering climate within the team and athletes’ experiences of sexual violence.” I suggest to precise “athlete’s perceptions of…”
Answer: The sentence has been changed accordingly.
P.4, lines 177-184: why looking/considering “observed sexual violence” in your data collection? I feel that this could create “noise” in your analysis as this could not be the same impact, so impacts of an empowering climate on experiences of bystanders AND the impact on experiencing it.
Answer: We chose to include observations of sexual violence, because an empowering climate includes the whole group of athletes, but sexual violence (at least in more severe forms) in general affects only certain persons within a group. Thus, it was decided to include not only own experiences, but also observations of sexual violence in the own training group to complete the picture on group level. A respective explanation was included when stating the hypotheses.
P.4, lines 178-180. “(1) athletes who had observed or experienced at least one incident of sexual violence would report lower values of an empowering climate than athletes without sexual violence experiences” : Here you mean “without having observed or experienced…”? It looks like you didn’t considered both in your analysis. IDEM for objective #2.
Answer: Thanks for this corrections. We have changed the respective sentences accordingly.
Methodology
P.5, lines 206-207: “Internal consistency for the current sample was satisfying with Cronbach alpha values between .77 for controlling and autonomy supportive, and .86 for task involving.” : Why just presenting only the alphas of those 3 factors (on 5 presented earlier un the paragraph)? I suggest to add alphas of all factors.
Answer: We have added the respective values.
P.5, 243-249: “In order to test the first two hypotheses, participants were sorted into two groups according to their sexual violence experiences: the group wSV (“with sexual violence”) consisted of athletes who had reported at least one situation of sexual violence within their own training group. The other group, w/oSV (“without sexual violence”) consisted of those athletes who did not report any situation of sexual violence or who reported a situation of sexual violence outside their training group.” : This part is not clear… The group wSV include athletes who “observed” also SV? The beginning of the article leaves us with this impression, but this is not clear here.
Answer: The part has been rewritten to ensure a better understanding of our methodology.
And, the end of the sentence is not also clear. It means that you also collected data about sexual violence experienced outside sport? Maybe it could be important to specify this earlier in the article. And I feel it could be important to add justification about including outside sport vsex experiences in those analyses…
Answer: We did not include sexual violence experiences outside sport. The description seemed to be confusing so we shortened it a bit.
Results
P.6, lines 266-267: « In total, 58% of the participants reported having witnessed at least one form of interpersonal violence in sport in their previous life…”: Why presenting results about IV in general? I suggest to retrieve results regarding IV and concentrate only on sexual violence. It is in line with one of my previous comment… And I suggest strongly to rather report “observation”/witness of sexual violence (report frequency please).
Answer: That was a wording mistake again, sorry. The number refers to sexual violence observations. The sentence has been changed accordingly, also acknowledging the second part of the comment.
Table 1: I suggest to be cautious with the term “prevalence”. Does your sample is representative of this population? If not, I suggest to use “frequency”.
Answer: According to the definition of “prevalence”, this term does not imply representativity, but rather refers to the share of people within a predefined group who show a certain feature. As the term “frequency” refers to the actual number (not the share of people) with a certain feature (so the n, not the percentage), it was decided to leave this table as it is.
Table 1: If I understand well, you reported here all situations (observed or experienced) of SV (outside or inside sport context)? Why not just presenting sport-related SV, especially if the article is about associations between SV in sport and empowering climate (as stated in the title)?
Answer: Our results only refer to sexual violence experiences within the sport context. We have included “in sport” into several sentences in order to clarify this fact.
I suggest putting the results of the MANOVA in a table for each subgroup.
Answer: Thank you for the suggestion. As the results of the MANOVAs are not too complex and the second reviewer did not ask for a table, we decided against including a table.
P.8, lines 303-304: “When comparing those athletes who had made at least one experience of sexual violence…”: I suggest a reformulation for the part of the sentence saying “…who have made…”. It looks like those athletes commit SV…
Answer: We changed the wording in order to avoid misunderstandings.
Table 3: please add significance level in footnote of the table.
Answer: The significance levels have been added to the footnote.
Discussion
P.9, lines 363-366 : “This gives first hints that a stronger empowering climate might be a protective factor against sexual violence, but on the other hand implies that a stronger disempowering climate could be a risk factor for sexual violence.” : Here, I suggest to be more “modest” in the way to explain this… If I understand well, empowering/disempowering climate was measured in the basis of the last 4 weeks and SV was measure on the basis of their lifetime exposure. It means that SV experiences and/or observations did not necessarily happen in the same sport group because SV was lifetime answers. So, the interpretation that an empowering climate should act as a protective factor and disempowering climate as a risk factor is not clear. The analysis provided do not allow to “see” the direction of the associations. If you had measure SV during the last 4 weeks and climate in the same period of time, it could be easier to interpret like this maybe…In brief, I suggest to rework this part of the discussion to be more clear on this. This could also be noticed in the limitation section of the article (I saw it after at page 10, lines 410-412, so you mentioned it but I still perceived the need to address this in the beginning of the discussion section).
Answer: A sentence regarding caveats was added at the beginning of the discussion section, and the respective sentence was also slightly changed in order to make clear that this study is not really a proof for our idea.
Reviewer 2:
General
The topic is really important - an empowering environment should provide protection from sexual violence. But this paper seems to be about coach methodology not the broader systemic multi-factor organizational environment which has been proposed as a protective factor in the various researches cited.
Answer: Thank you for acknowledging the importance of the topic. It is correct, we did not attempt to measure the broader concept of empowerment, but rather the “empowering climate” as a way of coaching a sport team.
There are significant conceptual issues that need to be clarified and the language usage needs to be constrained to the specific constructs. The language used is not rigorous enough for a scholastic piece of writing. For example line 28 is too general and inaccurate. It should be more correct to say that the Nassar case has again brought to public attention the issue of sexual abuse in sport, which has been a focused topic of research since the early 90’s.
Answer: Thank you for this advice. We have changed the sentence accordingly.
Literature review
In the literature review on the subject of Sexual violence, the presentation needs to be more nuanced, defined and other researcher’s work needs to be contextualized better to avoid unintentional misleading or simplification.
Line 52-53 is not understandable, as the concepts are not defined.
Answer: We have added examples for the respective categories in order to ensure a better understanding.
Same for line 60-61 - “Mild” is a very inappropriate adjective to use when referring to sexual violence. Violence of any kind cannot be referred to as mild.
Answer: Indeed several studies use the term “mild” sexual violence (e.g., Vertommen et al., 2016; Ohlert et al., 2018), but in order to avoid misunderstandings we have deleted the respective sentence.
Same for 63-65 - the language is too mixed up and unclear. You need to decide your terms, define them and use them consistently. What do you mean by sexual violence? What do you mean by sexual abuse?
Answer: Thank you for this advice. We have clarified the definitions with giving examples and now only refer to those terms that we defined beforehand.
There are many more examples like the above e.g. line 86-87 - too broad - The issue of the impact of grooming, isolation and silencing does not necessarily prevent observation of bystanders. It prevents disclosure. (See Leahy et al various researches)
Answer: We have rectified the respective sentence.
Be careful of appearing to imply the qualitative research is weak ( line 91) requiring stronger empirical evidence. It is better to say that quantitative data can add to the research base (without denigrating the qualitative research done by others).
Answer: We have changed the respective sentence.
The aim is expressed clearly but again the language needs to be more precise.
Answer: We have clarified this passage.
Materials and methods
Procedure is presented clearly, and paragraph 2.3 can perhaps be shortened, and for example, there is no need to specify that you are using SPSS 27.
Answer: We have taken out the version number of SPSS, but we decided to leave paragraph 2.3 as is, because these considerations refer to the ethical procedure and are thus important to include.
In the results section there is a confusing reference to Judd, 2015 and some percentages in lines 269-271. I cannot understand this is. Is this part of the current results? Need to also define your terms here, eg what behaviors constitute “privacy violations”; “hands on? You must use precise definition which are well understood. “Hands on” is much too casual a term for a scholastic paper.
Answer: We have clarified this and now refer to the categories stated in the introduction.
Discussion
There are some interesting ideas in the Discussion, and the limitations are well described but the implications of these limitations should be clearly stated.
Answer: We have added a respective sentence.
The conceptual confusion for me is that it seems you are you talking about the types of coaching methodology in this study not the environment as a protective factor against sexual violence, as indicated by the title. Environment is a much broader concept in sport and , a protective environment would include all aspect of the sport organisation/culture, including having clear child protection policies; , codes of ethics;, recruitment strategies to assess risk; and ongoing training for both athletes and coaches and other support personnel regarding safeguarding issues.
Answer: We have clarified this issue by including a sentence in the introduction and one in the discussion section.
The high empowering/low disempowering finding could simply be explained by the idea that coaches who use a high empowering and low disempowering coaching style are less likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence in the first place. So it is not the climate per se but rather the coach himself/herself.
Answer: Thank you for this idea. It might be helpful to consider this for future research. However, as we also found connections with sexual violence by peer athletes, we assume there is more to this than personality.
Other sport research (Leahy, T., Pretty, G. & Tenenbaum, G. Perpetrator methodology as a predictor of traumatic symptomatology in a non-psychiatric sample of adults reporting sexual abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence,19(5),521-540.) has found that what could be considered as high empowerment coaching style combined with high disempowerment is a common perpetrator methodology in cases of sexual abuse in sport by coaches who hold a position of trust guardianship or authority over the victim.
Answer: Thank you for this advice. This clearly supports our findings, thus we have added the reference.
Answer: The manuscript was also given to a proofreading service and has been checked for grammar, language, and spelling mistakes.
We would like to thank both reviewers for their helpful comments. We perceive our manuscript to be more concise now and hope that the reviewers agree.
Reviewer 2 Report
General
The topic is really important - an empowering environment should provide protection from sexual violence. But this paper seems to be about coach methodology not the broader systemic multi-factor organizational environment which has been proposed as a protective factor in the various researches cited.
There are significant conceptual issues that need to be clarified and the language usage needs to be constrained to the specific constructs. The language used is not rigorous enough for a scholastic piece of writing. For example line 28 is too general and inaccurate. It should be more correct to say that the Nassar case has again brought to public attention the issue of sexual abuse in sport, which has been a focused topic of research since the early 90’s.
Literature review
In the literature review on the subject of Sexual violence, the presentation needs to be more nuanced, defined and other researcher’s work needs to be contextualized better to avoid unintentional misleading or simplification.
Line 52-53 is not understandable, as the concepts are not defined.
Same for line 60-61 - “Mild” is a very inappropriate adjective to use when referring to sexual violence. Violence of any kind cannot be referred to as mild.
Same for 63-65 - the language is too mixed up and unclear. You need to decide your terms, define them and use them consistently. What do you mean by sexual violence? What do you mean by sexual abuse?
There are many more examples like the above e.g. line 86-87 - too broad - The issue of the impact of grooming, isolation and silencing does not necessarily prevent observation of bystanders. It prevents disclosure. (See Leahy et al various researches)
Be careful of appearing to imply the qualitative research is weak ( line 91) requiring stronger empirical evidence. It is better to say that quantitative data can add to the research base (without denigrating the qualitative research done by others).
The literature review on the Duda work on empowering climate is much clearer.
The aim is expressed clearly but again the language needs to be more precise.
Materials and methods
Procedure is presented clearly, and paragraph 2.3 can perhaps be shortened, and for example, there is no need to specify that you are using SPSS 27.
In the results section there is a confusing reference to Judd, 2015 and some percentages in lines 269-271. I cannot understand this is. Is this part of the current results? Need to also define your terms here, eg what behaviors constitute “privacy violations”; “hands on? You must use precise definition which are well understood. “Hands on” is much too casual a term for a scholastic paper.
Discussion
There are some interesting ideas in the Discussion, and the limitations are well described but the implications of these limitations should be clearly stated.
The conceptual confusion for me is that it seems you are you talking about the types of coaching methodology in this study not the environment as a protective factor against sexual violence, as indicated by the title. Environment is a much broader concept in sport and , a protective environment would include all aspect of the sport organisation/culture, including having clear child protection policies; , codes of ethics;, recruitment strategies to assess risk; and ongoing training for both athletes and coaches and other support personnel regarding safeguarding issues.
The high empowering/low disempowering finding could simply be explained by the idea that coaches who use a high empowering and low disempowering coaching style are less likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence in the first place. So it is not the climate per se but rather the coach himself/herself.
Other sport research (Leahy, T., Pretty, G. & Tenenbaum, G. Perpetrator methodology as a predictor of traumatic symptomatology in a non-psychiatric sample of adults reporting sexual abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence,19(5),521-540.) has found that what could be considered as high empowerment coaching style combined with high disempowerment is a common perpetrator methodology in cases of sexual abuse in sport by coaches who hold a position of trust guardianship or authority over the victim.
Once the conceptual issues are clarified, I think this will be a very good research piece
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
We would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for their work on our manuscript. We appreciate the comments. Within our revision, we have addressed all of these comments. Below, you will find a detailed description about how we handled the different comments:
Reviewer 1:
Abstract :
Lines 19-20: « Results reveal that athletes who had experienced or observed interpersonal violence rate the empowering climate subfactors within their training group as lower, and the disempowering climate subfactors as higher.” = it is confusing because you started with sexual violence and said after “interpersonal violence”. I suggest to be more clear through the abstract on which “variables” you refer to (sexual violence only OR interpersonal in a large point of view, so not just sexual violence). It means that this could be addressed in the hole article or in the title?
Answer: Thank you for this indication. This was just a mistake in word use. As the article deals only with sexual violence, this should of course be worded as such in the abstract. We have changed the word.
Introduction
Could you add a reference to support please? : « An empowering motivational climate is (among other attributes) characterized by a distribution of power between coach and athletes, therefore it might be a protective factor against sexual and interpersonal violence in sport.” P.1 Lines 39-41
Answer: The respective reference was added.
P.2 lines 59-61: “In the German sample, 15.9% of all athletes experienced mild sexual violence, more than 10.2% experienced moderate sexual violence and 11.2% experienced a severe form of sexual violence (Ohlert et al., 2018).” : I suggest to give definitions or examples for the severity classification or refer to the work of Vertommen and colleagues (2016) for explanations.
Answer: The sentence seems to be problematic without further explanation, and as it is not crucial for understanding our further argumentation, it was decided to delete this sentence.
P.2, lines 82-84: “A second risk factor is the intentional physical and psychological isolation from the affected person’s social support network. Isolation leads to stronger dependencies from the offender. » : Please support with a reference. I suggest the work of Roberts et al. (2020) who identified this factor in their systematic review.
Answer: The respective reference was added.
P.3, lines 116-119: “Strongly task involving coach behaviors predict positive outcomes in youth athletes (Alvarez et al., 2012; Reinboth & Duda, 2006), while a motivational climate which is mainly ego-involving has a negative impact on youth athletes (Duda & Balaguer, 2007; Ntoumanis et al., 2012).”: I suggest here to give more details about those “positive” and “negative” impacts. It will help the reader understand what are exactly those impacts.
Answer: Some examples have been added.
P.4, lines 161-163: “The risk factor of physical and psychological isolation is prevented by coach behaviors that rather support social relatedness in an empowering climate.”: I don’t find this obvious that “isolation” could be “reduced” by empowering climate… I found this argument less strong… The argument around power imbalance is very strong however. I suggest to refine your argumentation or release this element?
Answer: A more detailed explanation of this factor was added for better understanding of this paragraph.
That brings me to a central question: why looking specifically at sexual violence and not to all forms of interpersonal violence in line with empowering climate?
Answer: Thank you for this comment. Of course, an empowering climate should be a protective factor against all forms of interpersonal violence. However, as we only focused on sexual violence within our study, our line of argumentation only included this form of interpersonal violence. Still, we have added some words acknowledging this fact.
P.4, lines 175-177: “The aim of the current study was thus to quantitatively examine the relationship between perceptions of an empowering climate within the team and athletes’ experiences of sexual violence.” I suggest to precise “athlete’s perceptions of…”
Answer: The sentence has been changed accordingly.
P.4, lines 177-184: why looking/considering “observed sexual violence” in your data collection? I feel that this could create “noise” in your analysis as this could not be the same impact, so impacts of an empowering climate on experiences of bystanders AND the impact on experiencing it.
Answer: We chose to include observations of sexual violence, because an empowering climate includes the whole group of athletes, but sexual violence (at least in more severe forms) in general affects only certain persons within a group. Thus, it was decided to include not only own experiences, but also observations of sexual violence in the own training group to complete the picture on group level. A respective explanation was included when stating the hypotheses.
P.4, lines 178-180. “(1) athletes who had observed or experienced at least one incident of sexual violence would report lower values of an empowering climate than athletes without sexual violence experiences” : Here you mean “without having observed or experienced…”? It looks like you didn’t considered both in your analysis. IDEM for objective #2.
Answer: Thanks for this corrections. We have changed the respective sentences accordingly.
Methodology
P.5, lines 206-207: “Internal consistency for the current sample was satisfying with Cronbach alpha values between .77 for controlling and autonomy supportive, and .86 for task involving.” : Why just presenting only the alphas of those 3 factors (on 5 presented earlier un the paragraph)? I suggest to add alphas of all factors.
Answer: We have added the respective values.
P.5, 243-249: “In order to test the first two hypotheses, participants were sorted into two groups according to their sexual violence experiences: the group wSV (“with sexual violence”) consisted of athletes who had reported at least one situation of sexual violence within their own training group. The other group, w/oSV (“without sexual violence”) consisted of those athletes who did not report any situation of sexual violence or who reported a situation of sexual violence outside their training group.” : This part is not clear… The group wSV include athletes who “observed” also SV? The beginning of the article leaves us with this impression, but this is not clear here.
Answer: The part has been rewritten to ensure a better understanding of our methodology.
And, the end of the sentence is not also clear. It means that you also collected data about sexual violence experienced outside sport? Maybe it could be important to specify this earlier in the article. And I feel it could be important to add justification about including outside sport vsex experiences in those analyses…
Answer: We did not include sexual violence experiences outside sport. The description seemed to be confusing so we shortened it a bit.
Results
P.6, lines 266-267: « In total, 58% of the participants reported having witnessed at least one form of interpersonal violence in sport in their previous life…”: Why presenting results about IV in general? I suggest to retrieve results regarding IV and concentrate only on sexual violence. It is in line with one of my previous comment… And I suggest strongly to rather report “observation”/witness of sexual violence (report frequency please).
Answer: That was a wording mistake again, sorry. The number refers to sexual violence observations. The sentence has been changed accordingly, also acknowledging the second part of the comment.
Table 1: I suggest to be cautious with the term “prevalence”. Does your sample is representative of this population? If not, I suggest to use “frequency”.
Answer: According to the definition of “prevalence”, this term does not imply representativity, but rather refers to the share of people within a predefined group who show a certain feature. As the term “frequency” refers to the actual number (not the share of people) with a certain feature (so the n, not the percentage), it was decided to leave this table as it is.
Table 1: If I understand well, you reported here all situations (observed or experienced) of SV (outside or inside sport context)? Why not just presenting sport-related SV, especially if the article is about associations between SV in sport and empowering climate (as stated in the title)?
Answer: Our results only refer to sexual violence experiences within the sport context. We have included “in sport” into several sentences in order to clarify this fact.
I suggest putting the results of the MANOVA in a table for each subgroup.
Answer: Thank you for the suggestion. As the results of the MANOVAs are not too complex and the second reviewer did not ask for a table, we decided against including a table.
P.8, lines 303-304: “When comparing those athletes who had made at least one experience of sexual violence…”: I suggest a reformulation for the part of the sentence saying “…who have made…”. It looks like those athletes commit SV…
Answer: We changed the wording in order to avoid misunderstandings.
Table 3: please add significance level in footnote of the table.
Answer: The significance levels have been added to the footnote.
Discussion
P.9, lines 363-366 : “This gives first hints that a stronger empowering climate might be a protective factor against sexual violence, but on the other hand implies that a stronger disempowering climate could be a risk factor for sexual violence.” : Here, I suggest to be more “modest” in the way to explain this… If I understand well, empowering/disempowering climate was measured in the basis of the last 4 weeks and SV was measure on the basis of their lifetime exposure. It means that SV experiences and/or observations did not necessarily happen in the same sport group because SV was lifetime answers. So, the interpretation that an empowering climate should act as a protective factor and disempowering climate as a risk factor is not clear. The analysis provided do not allow to “see” the direction of the associations. If you had measure SV during the last 4 weeks and climate in the same period of time, it could be easier to interpret like this maybe…In brief, I suggest to rework this part of the discussion to be more clear on this. This could also be noticed in the limitation section of the article (I saw it after at page 10, lines 410-412, so you mentioned it but I still perceived the need to address this in the beginning of the discussion section).
Answer: A sentence regarding caveats was added at the beginning of the discussion section, and the respective sentence was also slightly changed in order to make clear that this study is not really a proof for our idea.
Reviewer 2:
General
The topic is really important - an empowering environment should provide protection from sexual violence. But this paper seems to be about coach methodology not the broader systemic multi-factor organizational environment which has been proposed as a protective factor in the various researches cited.
Answer: Thank you for acknowledging the importance of the topic. It is correct, we did not attempt to measure the broader concept of empowerment, but rather the “empowering climate” as a way of coaching a sport team.
There are significant conceptual issues that need to be clarified and the language usage needs to be constrained to the specific constructs. The language used is not rigorous enough for a scholastic piece of writing. For example line 28 is too general and inaccurate. It should be more correct to say that the Nassar case has again brought to public attention the issue of sexual abuse in sport, which has been a focused topic of research since the early 90’s.
Answer: Thank you for this advice. We have changed the sentence accordingly.
Literature review
In the literature review on the subject of Sexual violence, the presentation needs to be more nuanced, defined and other researcher’s work needs to be contextualized better to avoid unintentional misleading or simplification.
Line 52-53 is not understandable, as the concepts are not defined.
Answer: We have added examples for the respective categories in order to ensure a better understanding.
Same for line 60-61 - “Mild” is a very inappropriate adjective to use when referring to sexual violence. Violence of any kind cannot be referred to as mild.
Answer: Indeed several studies use the term “mild” sexual violence (e.g., Vertommen et al., 2016; Ohlert et al., 2018), but in order to avoid misunderstandings we have deleted the respective sentence.
Same for 63-65 - the language is too mixed up and unclear. You need to decide your terms, define them and use them consistently. What do you mean by sexual violence? What do you mean by sexual abuse?
Answer: Thank you for this advice. We have clarified the definitions with giving examples and now only refer to those terms that we defined beforehand.
There are many more examples like the above e.g. line 86-87 - too broad - The issue of the impact of grooming, isolation and silencing does not necessarily prevent observation of bystanders. It prevents disclosure. (See Leahy et al various researches)
Answer: We have rectified the respective sentence.
Be careful of appearing to imply the qualitative research is weak ( line 91) requiring stronger empirical evidence. It is better to say that quantitative data can add to the research base (without denigrating the qualitative research done by others).
Answer: We have changed the respective sentence.
The aim is expressed clearly but again the language needs to be more precise.
Answer: We have clarified this passage.
Materials and methods
Procedure is presented clearly, and paragraph 2.3 can perhaps be shortened, and for example, there is no need to specify that you are using SPSS 27.
Answer: We have taken out the version number of SPSS, but we decided to leave paragraph 2.3 as is, because these considerations refer to the ethical procedure and are thus important to include.
In the results section there is a confusing reference to Judd, 2015 and some percentages in lines 269-271. I cannot understand this is. Is this part of the current results? Need to also define your terms here, eg what behaviors constitute “privacy violations”; “hands on? You must use precise definition which are well understood. “Hands on” is much too casual a term for a scholastic paper.
Answer: We have clarified this and now refer to the categories stated in the introduction.
Discussion
There are some interesting ideas in the Discussion, and the limitations are well described but the implications of these limitations should be clearly stated.
Answer: We have added a respective sentence.
The conceptual confusion for me is that it seems you are you talking about the types of coaching methodology in this study not the environment as a protective factor against sexual violence, as indicated by the title. Environment is a much broader concept in sport and , a protective environment would include all aspect of the sport organisation/culture, including having clear child protection policies; , codes of ethics;, recruitment strategies to assess risk; and ongoing training for both athletes and coaches and other support personnel regarding safeguarding issues.
Answer: We have clarified this issue by including a sentence in the introduction and one in the discussion section.
The high empowering/low disempowering finding could simply be explained by the idea that coaches who use a high empowering and low disempowering coaching style are less likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence in the first place. So it is not the climate per se but rather the coach himself/herself.
Answer: Thank you for this idea. It might be helpful to consider this for future research. However, as we also found connections with sexual violence by peer athletes, we assume there is more to this than personality.
Other sport research (Leahy, T., Pretty, G. & Tenenbaum, G. Perpetrator methodology as a predictor of traumatic symptomatology in a non-psychiatric sample of adults reporting sexual abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence,19(5),521-540.) has found that what could be considered as high empowerment coaching style combined with high disempowerment is a common perpetrator methodology in cases of sexual abuse in sport by coaches who hold a position of trust guardianship or authority over the victim.
Answer: Thank you for this advice. This clearly supports our findings, thus we have added the reference.
Answer: The manuscript was also given to a proofreading service and has been checked for grammar, language, and spelling mistakes.
We would like to thank both reviewers for their helpful comments. We perceive our manuscript to be more concise now and hope that the reviewers agree.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been reviewed and revised. If the other reviewer agrees, it can be published. MY only additional comment is on paragraph 1. The reference to the NAssar case seems journalistic. Also it is lacking in scholastic rigour to say that the topic of sexual violence has been " discussed" since the 90's. It is more correct to say (as I had written in my first review), that the topic of Sexual violence in sport has been a topic of focused research since the early 90's.Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you for reviewing our paper again and acknowledging the changes we made to the manuscript.
We have now modified the first sentence in order to point out the fact that sexual violence as a topic has been researched since the early nineties. However, we decided to leave the reference to the Nassar case, because it is common in sport science research to introduce a topic referring to a current phenomenon.
Best regards,
The authors
