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Interpersonal violence against athletes in sport can be insidious, systemic and normalised. As such, studying interpersonal violence can be methodologically and ethically challenging for Sports and Exercise Medicine (SEM) scientists and other athlete-facing researchers.1 We argue that a specialised approach is needed: one that is athlete-centred, trauma-informed, human-rights-based and ethics-based, accountable to the complexities of sport (figure 1) and balances the potential benefits of screening, study recruitment and population-level prevalence data, against the ethical obligation to provide safety-net environments and therapeutic resources once interpersonal violence is identified.2 Here we present the need to think through the role and impact of research methodology in harm-prevention and healing among affected sportspeople at the heart of interpersonal violence research.
Footnotes
Twitter @YetsaTuakli
Correction notice This article has been corrected since it published Online First. The third affiliation has been amended.
Contributors YAT-W and NRG conceived of the initial idea and developed early drafts. KF and JGM advanced key concepts and contributed to later drafts. All authors approved of the final submission.
Funding Jelena G MacLeod is supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) Training Program Grant T32MH018268-38. No other authors are supported.
Competing interests YAT-W is an Associate Editor with the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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