PAGE 38
IN SEARCH OF A SAFER PLAYING FIELD AND GENDER JUSTICE IN SPORT DR PAYOSHNI MITRA Dr Payoshni Mitra is a scholar and advocate with more than a decade-long experience of working closely with women athletes with high testosterone and/or DSD from the Global South. Her work focuses on the mental and physical harm caused by the regulations and testing of such athletes. She teaches Sport Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London.
Growing up in Calcutta (now Kolkata), in the 1980s, like most other girls from middleclass families in the city, I was sent to a traditional Indian dance school in addition to going to a school for education. My dance teacher’s husband (whom I knew also as a colleague of my father) sexually abused me one day when I was waiting to meet my dance teacher at their house. No one was around and I was told my dance teacher was taking a bath. I was just nine years old.
This one incident had a huge impact on how my life would take shape. I didn’t talk about the incident to anyone until I was 18. But I decided I wouldn’t go back to the dance school ever again. I told my parents I was not interested in dance and wanted to pursue sport. My parents could not understand why I suddenly changed my mind. However, they found a badminton-coaching centre for me. That’s how and why I entered the field of sport: in search of a safe space. What I saw in sports was far from what I expected. The arena of high performance sport was considerably more complex than I had thought. Verbal, mental, physical and sexual abuse and other forms of discrimination were widespread in competitive sporting culture. And sports’ hierarchical structure made it even more difficult for young athletes to complain and resist such discrimination. Often, athletes were not aware of their rights, or they were too fearful of their coaches and officials. Having been coached by an abusive person, I dropped out for a couple of years until I went to the university where I represented and captained the badminton team. Throughout my journey as an athlete, I noticed how the women’s team was treated as second grade - almost as an afterthought once the men’s teams’ needs were served. It was because of my experience as an athlete that I decided to pursue doctoral research on gender issues in sport in the context of India. Later, I started working as an athletes’ rights activist, trying to support young athletes faced with institutionalised discrimination, like in the case of Annet Negesa.
HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDER | VOLUME 29: ISSUE 2 – AUGUST 2020
