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.

Similarities between the sports environment and other complex sociocultural contexts (non-exhaustive list). (1) Similar to a community-based peer group, peer pressure in sport can feel inevitable and hypnotic at times; (2) similar to an educational setting such as a classroom, learning, skill acquisition, hierarchy and personal development have primacy in the sports environment; (3) similar to a religious institution, the devotion and emotion of sport can reach levels of fervour; (4) similar to a family household, parental-type and sibling-type roles naturally occur in training groups; (5) similar to a military unit, camaraderie and a sense of country/team above …