In a podcast interview, we speak to abuse survivor Joanna Maranhão about safeguarding and about her own journey to become an advocate for victims of abuse in sport.

Joanna is a Brazilian Olympian who is now the coordinator of the Athletes Network for Safer Sports. As a professional swimmer, Joanna participated in four Olympic Games and won eight medals at the Pan American Games.

In our podcast, she describes how she became a victim of serious sexual abuse at the hands of her coach, aged just nine, and how it took her many years to shed her feelings of guilt and reveal what happened to her.

Joanna says she’s “lived the best and worst experiences of sport,” describing how she loved swimming and didn’t even mind having to get up at 4.30 in the morning to be in the pool for training at 5am.

However, this changed when a coach abused the trust she and her family had placed in him to severely sexually abuse her. She says: “Because I didn’t know about my rights, and because it is so hard for a nine-year-old to understand and verbalise that, I just kept it to myself.”

“There was a lot of confusion and blaming myself,” she says. It was only when she entered therapy as a professional swimmer and Olympian many years later that she felt able, for the first time, to confess what had happened to her.

Joanna has some great advice for other athletes who are being abused, or who suspect that a friend or team-mate is being abused, saying: “If you feel like the experience is uncomfortable for you, you have the right to speak up and say something” – albeit she acknowledges that this can be hard.

She also sends a message to sports governing bodies, saying: “We need to make sure that we protect survivors, but we need to make sure that we protect whistleblowers as well.”

After revealing her own history of abuse, Joanna led a campaign to expand Brazil’s statutes of limitation to allow survivors of child sexual abuse more time to report and seek justice, succeeding in establishing a new law, which bears her name (the Joanna Maranhão Law).

To listen to the podcast click here