While many organizations in modern society, notably educational organizations, have created ethical guidelines as a matter of course, sports federations and associations have not necessarily followed suit. This paper examines the need for them to do so. Most specifically, it considers an instance of alleged sexual harassment by an official of the Japan Clay Target Shooting Association (JCTSA) at the National Sports Festival in Kumamoto in 1999. In the incident, the official was treated in newspaper coverage as a guilty party before the facts of the case had been confirmed, though the JCTSA fact-finding committee subsequently came to the conclusion that they could not substantiate the claim that the official had sexually harassed the alleged victims. The official subsequently sued both Kumamoto Prefecture and the town in which the Sports Festival had been held, and an apology from each of the defendants resulted in an out-of-court settlement of the civil action. Despite this outcome, however, the JCTSA Board of Directors resigned en masse. It was only then that a JCTSA ethics committee was formed and that ethical guidelines were created. If a policy for the creation of an ethical environment had been brought to fruition before the occurrence of the incident, the JCTSA might have been better able to protect the accused official, and the directors might not have felt the need to resign. The incident illustrates the fact that, for sports federations and associations, the creation of an ethical environment would help not only to protect potential victims of violence or sexual harassment but also to protect the rights of accused persons and the integrity of the organizations themselves. Finally, this study suggests that it would have overall benefits for Japan's sports industry as a whole.

抄録全体を表示