The research thesis included 52 female swimmers, namely 30 female juniors (born in 2002 and 2001) and 22 female seniors (born in 1997 and older) engaged in competitive swimming at national, international, European, and world level. In the graduation thesis, we examined the relationship among female athletes and coach in swimming, whether there exist psychological and physical abuses and sexual harassment of young female athletes, how often female swimmers experience these type of violence, reaction of female swimmers to these types of violence, awareness of female swimmers of violence in sport, and which category of female swimmers is more prone to the coach’s violence.
All the data were obtained on the basis of descriptive research method. We used a questionnaire as a measuring instrument, which consists of closed-type questions and is divided into 6 parts. The obtained data were analysed with IBM SPSS 20 statistical program (SPSS Inc., ZDA) and Microsoft Excel (Microsoft, Washington, ZDA).
The results of the survey revealed that female swimmers of the senior category have better interpersonal relationships with coach. However, female swimmers of junior category are more satisfied with coach, since the majority of them would not replace the coach. During trainings, psychological as well as physical abuses occur in both categories, but there were no statistically significant differences detected among the categories. The results of the analysis of this survey also revealed that female swimmers continue with trainings and competitions despite injury and pain, but based on the analysis we did not detect statistically significant differences among the categories. There is no sexual harassment of the female swimmers in senior as well as junior category. The response to the violence types revealed that female swimmers of junior category most often try to disregard the experienced psychological violence, whereas female swimmers of the senior category most often tell the coach that this is not the right way. Junior athletes as well as senior athletes can distinguish among the coach’s methods of work and psychological and physical violence, and can distinguish between affection and sexual harassment. However, the results of the analysis revealed that both categories of male and female swimmers are not sufficiently aware of the presence of sexual violence in sport.
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