Surfing faces a cultural reckoning as women’s voices grow louder over sexual abuse allegations | Lucy Small

When news broke last week that a surfer had been provisionally suspended from international competition, after what the International Surfing Association (ISA) described as “recent reports of serious allegations of abuse within the surfing community,” the response online was unprecedented in the world of surfing.

While investigations into those allegations are ongoing, the story prompted a deluge of comments detailing other alleged experiences of sexual misconduct and assault in surf industry settings, ranging from corporate brand houses in Hawaii to organised surf trips. While horrifying, for women who have existed in this subculture across the decades, those broader stories are sadly no surprise.

In 2019, as I stood in a bar in New York City at the afterparty of a World Surf League (WSL) Longboard Tour contest, I took stock of my surroundings. It was after midnight and the bar was packed with competitors who had just wrapped an event on a windy North Atlantic Ocean earlier that day. From the women’s side of the tour, teenagers gathered; nearby, other competitors and event staff, many well into their 40s, were dotted across the room. Alcohol flowed freely; the event was private, so there was no one checking IDs. In fact, surfers themselves could be found behind the bar pouring drinks. I reflected on the moment: who was tasked with keeping these young women safe while in a setting like this? And if something were to happen, how would we report it, and to whom?

Over the years, the stories between women working and competing in the industry have accumulated in private. Ranging from sexual harassment to assault, none of these stories ever ended in accountability. When I raised this issue with Surfing NSW a few years ago, I was told the process for something that happened at a Surfing NSW event would be to make the complaint to the event director, and it would then be passed on to the state body’s CEO. At the time, Surfing NSW said they had never received any such complaint. It’s not difficult to understand why.

In the WSL context, while I have competed in sanctioned events for more than a decade, I have never received any information about how to report an incident of sexual abuse to the WSL, or how that report would be treated. And in a male-dominated industry that is tight-knit and insular, where the same people move from institution to institution, where work is often contract to contract, and sponsorship decisions and other opportunities are relationship-based, trying to act against these ranks in search of accountability carries potentially career-ending risk.

Without any clear independent reporting mechanism or track record of taking these reports seriously, these institutions create a culture of silence that protects the accused and buries the stories of women who may have faced sexual violence while competing or working at surfing events.

What was most surprising about the recent allegations that prompted a statement from the ISA was not that they are being made, but that there has actually been a response. A surfer has been suspended, pending investigation, in a culture that had previously glorified a lifestyle where women’s bodies were sacrificed in favour of surfing talent.

Australian surfer Nat Young, who was the 1966 world champion and is credited with being one of the pioneers of the shortboard revolution of the 1970s, described a disturbing scene in the opening chapter of his memoir Nat’s Nat and That’s That. Young writes in the book published in 1998 that a friend “had strategically positioned the girl so that she was lying on her back with her head facing away from the youthful group of lechers and so was able to give the nod over her shoulder”. He adds that when the friend “slipped out”, another “slipped in”, then a third person and Young “had our turn in the same manner”.

“The Grunter”, as Young describes the girl in the book, “was really into group sex and we all greeted her with open flies every time we saw her getting off her school bus”. “The scene was starting to get a bit out of hand, the line getting longer and longer as friends and acquaintances from other beaches joined in,” he writes.

Young’s account is not the only one of its kind that exists in the pages of surfing’s magazines and memoirs that have been published over the years, serving as a tool to not just validate and normalise such experiences but laud them, weaving them into the central fabric of the industry.

Now it appears that wind has started to blow under the cladding that has kept this conversation confined to the private spaces of women, spoken in secret for fear of professional or social reprisal. For the first time since I joined the surfing community, I have seen the rumours written down, albeit so far in comment sections and Instagram posts. But will this be a reckoning beyond a passing moment of outrage? Will it lead to actual reform of the structures that have maintained this culture?

• Lucy Small is a professional surfer, journalist and film-maker from Sydney, with a special interest in women’s sport