‘Brazilian Sports Needs Cultural Shift To Tackle Athlete Abuse’

“Here is the thing – when I reached the final I was still denying that I had been abused – I knew it was there but it was the memory that I pushed away,” says Joanna Maranhão. “You know it is there but you don’t deal with that, you don’t want to deal with it. That is the most frustrating thing about my athletic career. Once I had to face it, it became really hard to remain at the elite level, but I was living my dream. The Olympic Games were amazing, the swimming pool is my favorite place to be.”

Aged seventeen, Maranhão finished fifth in that final, the 400-metre individual medley in swimming at Athens 2004. She went on to compete in three more Olympic Games, but in 2008 she revealed that she had been sexually molested at the age of nine by her then-coach. It moved the Brazilian senate to amend the penal code establishing a 20-year statute of limitations for sexual abuse of children and adolescents from the date of the victim’s eighteenth birthday. The bill became known as ‘Lei Joanna Maranhão’.

Today, Maranhão, 35, works and lives with her husband Luciano Correa, two-time Olympian, and son Caetano, an energetic toddler with a soft spot for Spiderman, in Potsdam, Germany. The pair form a power couple in Brazilian sports, but the abuse Maranhão suffered reshaped her life. She often combats bouts of unfathomable depression and agony. Minutes before defending her master’s thesis ‘Prevalence of Interpersonal Violence against Elite Athletes in Brazil’, she passed out.

“When I am triggered, my body just shuts down and that is something I have been dealing with my entire life, so lots of therapy, going back and forth on anti-depressives and understanding that there is a stigma ‘oh you are depressive’,” explains Maranhão. “People usually carry a stigma. I do not carry this stigma anymore: I am proud to say that every single day I am learning how to deal with the consequences of an experience I did not choose to go through. There are good and bad days. It’s about knowing your limits.”

She conducted anonymous surveys of 1043 Brazilian elite athletes and concluded in her dissertation that 93% of participants had suffered interpersonal violence before the age of 18. Breaking that number down, young athletes dreaming big find themselves in a brutal environment in Brazil: 89% of young athletes said that they had suffered psychological mistreatment, 58% sexual violence and 49% physical violence. Young male athletes, her research found, were often victimized, with a high incidence of attempted rape or rape. “Why is this important?” asks Maranhão. “Male athletes usually do not report. Athletes usually do not report, male athletes even less so. For obvious reasons as we live in a misogynist society, women are more vulnerable, but those serious abuses of attempted rape and rape of boys are frequent, usually by a male coach.”

Her findings on the vulnerability of young male athletes confirm other, earlier studies. A 2021 study by Edge Hill University with surveys of 10,000 persons in both elite and recreational sports in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom found that one-fifth of respondents reported at least one experience of ‘contact sexual violence’ (CSV) before the age of 18. The report stated that “26% of men and 14% of women reported at least one experience of CSV inside sport before age 18. With the exception of Austria, men were significantly more likely to have experienced CSV inside sport.”

To Maranhão, who pursued her master’s at KU Leuven in Belgium, it is clear that Europe is lightyears ahead of Brazil in the education, prevention and sanctioning of athlete abuse. She experiences this on a daily basis in discussions with her husband, a staff member of Germany’s national judo team. When Correa first arrived in Potsdam, he had to sign a code of conduct and a code of ethics to guarantee behavioral standards while coaching. Today, when Correa needs to touch an athlete to demonstrate an exercise or movement, he will first ask whether he is allowed to do so.

“This is different from what we were taught but this is what we have to do, this is how we create boundaries,” says Maranhão. “If we are aiming for this cultural shift, we need more, we need people with the mindset that things are not acceptable. What is acceptable? There are do’s and don’ts, yet there are things that are particular to sports.”

Even if Germany and Flanders have thorough reporting systems, cases often slip through the net. But there is no comparison with Maranhão’s native country. In Brazil, such standards only apply to the national teams. To mitigate the problem, glaring gaps at the state, municipal and local levels must be addressed. The pace of change, however, is slow, too slow, according to Maranhão. Brazil counts a single safeguarding officer.

At the recent swimming world championships in Budapest, Hungary, Maranhão, a commentator for Brazilian network SporTV, noticed that some of her old coaches were still on the national team. In the backroom staff, there was not a single woman. It was downright confronting. Maranhão also sits on the independent ethics council of Brazil’s national olympic committee. When cases are reported, volunteers – five of them – sift through their files. The entire process is dragged out and the institutional flaws are obvious.

“We deal with a case, take out the bad apple – you got the abuser – and things just keep going, while this is a systemic problem, not just in Brazil but everywhere in the world,” concludes Maranhão. “We are so far behind on acknowledging the problem. Punishing the perpetrators is not going to send the message, not alone. Having a code of conduct is good for the image, but we need to start from the margins, with the most vulnerable athletes – non-white, disabled and LGBT. Once we start englobing and protecting them, we will, as a consequence, protect sports as a whole.”