Exploring Coaches' Responses to Interpersonal Violence in Sport: Recognition, Severity Perception, and Likelihood of Reporting.

Coaches play a critical role in safeguarding athletes from interpersonal violence (IV), yet their ability to recognize, evaluate, and address such incidents remains understudied. This study explored coaches' accuracy in recognizing violent and ambiguous scenarios, their perception of severity, and their likelihood of reporting these incidents, as well as the psychological factors influencing coaches' responses. A sample of 145 performance sport coaches (21% female, Mage = 48.97, SD = 11.02) completed an online survey featuring sport-related vignettes and psychometric scales, namely the Perceived Instrumental Effects of Violence in Sport (PIEVS) scale, the Collective Motal Attitudes in Sport (KMES) scale and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Findings revealed that coaches failed to recognize nearly 30% of violent scenarios, with notable difficulties in recognizing neglect, and correctly classified only 45% of ambiguous cases. Misclassified violent scenarios received lower ratings for both severity and likelihood of reporting, with effect sizes differing by type of violence. For ambiguous scenarios, misclassification tended to increase severity and reporting for psychological and neglect cases but showed a robust effect only for the sexual vignette, highlighting that ambiguity is not interpreted uniformly. Small but significant correlations emerged between PIEVS scores and recognition accuracy in violent scenarios (ρ = -.177, p = .033), as well as severity ratings for ambiguous scenarios (ρ = -.258, p = .007). KMES scores showed a small positive correlation with severity ratings in violent scenarios (ρ = .203, p = .014). Overall, these results highlight the challenges coaches face in recognizing and addressing IV in sport and point to a limited understanding of the factors that shape their responses. There is a clear need for targeted, context-sensitive educational interventions to strengthen coaches' safeguarding practices, with particular attention to less visible forms of violence such as neglect.