When Safety Becomes a System
What #WeRideTogether Understands About Power, Sport, and Practical Governance
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“W.T.F. — Wait, That’s Fair?, campaign
Sports are supposed to teach courage. They teach discipline, commitment, teamwork, endurance, and the ordinary dignity of showing up again after disappointment. At their best, sports give young people a place to test themselves in public and discover that effort can become skill. That is also why abuse in sports is so devastating.
Harm does not usually arrive wearing the obvious costume of danger. It arrives through trust, private attention, special treatment, and the slow blurring of boundaries that everyone around the athlete has been trained not to question. In many athletic environments, intensity is treated as commitment, sacrifice as proof of seriousness, and obedience as the price of advancement. That is what makes the #WeRideTogether campaign so important.
Image goes to “Not Just A Ride Home” video. We all have a role to play in keeping athletic environments safe and healthy for everyone.
#WeRideTogether is not simply another awareness campaign. It is a smartly executed cultural intervention and, more importantly, a governance intervention. Founded by Carrie Kehring after her own family’s experience with grooming and abuse in sport, the campaign began in the equestrian world and has grown into a broader effort to prevent sexual misconduct across youth, amateur, and professional athletics. Its work is emotionally direct but practically disciplined: it does not ask survivors to carry the entire burden of change. It asks athletic communities to become more literate, more accountable, and less willing to mistake silence for safety.
That distinction matters because many campaigns ask individuals, often those with the least leverage, to care. #WeRideTogether asks systems, the ones with the most resources and the greatest capacity for change, to act. Its public service announcements, including the Out of Bounds series and “W.T.F. — Wait, That’s Fair?,” are powerful because they avoid the two traps that often weaken public messaging around sexual misconduct. They do not sensationalize trauma, nor do they soften it into vague inspiration. Instead, they use metaphor, emotional clarity, and survivor-centered storytelling to show the absurdity of victim-blaming and the loneliness of navigating institutions that often demand impossible forms of proof.
What Makes the Campaign Distinct
The campaign does not begin with the question institutions often prefer: Why didn’t she say something sooner? It begins with the harder question: What made the truth so difficult to say, hear, document, believe, and act upon? That is the governance question, and it is what makes the campaign more than a communications effort. It does not confuse visibility with responsibility.
Survivor stories matter. Awareness matters. Public recognition matters. But awareness alone can become another form of institutional theater if nothing changes afterward. The signal becomes visible, but structurally stranded. Everyone may know something is wrong, but no one knows who is responsible, what threshold requires action, what documentation matters, who protects the athlete, or how the organization learns. Visibility is not the same as governance.
That is where #WeRideTogether’s tools matter. The campaign does not simply tell people to care. It provides athletic communities with diagrams, pledges, reporting guides, hiring practices, educational materials, and language for recognizing unhealthy dynamics before they become easier to deny than to interrupt. Governance is often misunderstood as a binder on a shelf, but practical governance is the set of conditions that determines what happens after someone notices harm.
This matters because grooming is not simply a series of bad acts. It is a relational process that often works by creating confusion, dependency, secrecy, gratitude, fear, and loyalty. A young athlete may not know whether a coach’s attention is care, favoritism, control, or danger. By the time the behavior is clearly abusive, the athlete may already feel implicated in a dynamic they did not choose. Research on sexual violence in sport has emphasized that the same closeness that can support athletic development can also become dangerous when power, dependency, isolation, and boundary ambiguity go unexamined (Gaedicke et al., 2021; Parent & Demers, 2011).
This is why the campaign’s C.A.R.D. Diagrams and other resources are so useful. They help athletes, parents, coaches, and bystanders—all the actors in the system—distinguish between healthy and unhealthy coach-athlete relationship dynamics before harm becomes easier to deny than interrupt. A comment that felt off, a boundary that seemed blurry, a pattern of private attention, a child who seemed withdrawn, or a coach whose behavior everyone excused because they “got results” may all be early signals. Naming is not the whole solution, but without naming, there is no intervention.
Why the Female Perspective Matters
This is especially clear from a female perspective. Women are not inherently more moral, more caring, or more attuned to harm; that would be too simple, and it would place yet another burden on women to serve as the conscience of broken systems. The female perspective is unique because many women are trained early to read power relationally. They learn to notice the room, track tone and proximity, assess reputation and dependency, and recognize that danger is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is incremental. Sometimes it sounds like praise. Sometimes it comes through the person everyone else admires.
Women often learn that the official story and the lived experience are not the same thing. That knowledge is not softness. It is pattern recognition (which is actually a hard skill). In governance work, pattern recognition is everything. Feminist scholars have long argued that knowledge is situated, not detached from power. The point is not that women automatically see more clearly. The point is that people positioned closer to harm often perceive institutional realities that official systems are designed not to notice.
Miranda Fricker calls this an epistemic injustice: the wrong done when someone’s capacity as a knower is discounted because of who they are, how they speak, or what kind of experience they bring. Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint makes the same point institutionally: complaints often reveal the very structures that institutions work hardest to preserve. A female-centered analysis notices how institutions convert discomfort into ambiguity. It notices how survivors are asked to be precise while institutions remain vague, how reputation becomes a shield, how loyalty becomes a test, and how “not ruining someone’s future” is so often invoked only after someone else’s future has already been altered.
It also notices the labor of making harm legible. Survivors are often asked to provide data, testimony, a timeline, emotional restraint, credibility, patience, and public courage. Then institutions call that process accountability. It is not enough. Practical governance means the burden cannot remain on the person with the least power.
From Survivor Story to Institutional Knowledge
This is where #WeRideTogether’s approach becomes especially compelling. The campaign does not only amplify survivor voices; it asks what institutions must learn from them. It does not only expose abuse; it identifies the conditions that allow abuse to be misread, minimized, or normalized. It not only tells people to report; it also helps communities understand what reporting actually involves, why it is difficult, and what other forms of support may be needed.
From a data and governance perspective, this is significant because #WeRideTogether is turning lived experience into usable institutional knowledge. Its peer-reviewed research, informed by survivor stories from adult female athlete-survivors, identifies recurring failures in athletic communities: a lack of understanding of power imbalances, a failure to capture the nuances of sporting communities, and shortcomings in prevention education (McClain et al., 2026). In other words, survivor testimony is not treated as emotional residue. It is treated as evidence.
Institutional betrayal theory helps explain why this matters. When organizations fail to prevent harm, mishandle reports, protect reputation over people, or retaliate against those who come forward, they compound the original trauma (Smith & Freyd, 2014). This is the failure #WeRideTogether is trying to interrupt: not only the abuse itself, but the institutional pattern that makes abuse easier to miss, harder to report, and more painful to survive.
Observation Must Create Obligation
This is the bridge from awareness to governance. Once a pattern is seen, someone must be responsible for response. Once a boundary risk is named, someone must have the authority and duty to act. Once survivor knowledge is gathered, it must not be converted into empathy content and left there. It must shape training, hiring, escalation, reporting, review, and repair. Observation must create obligation.
That is what practical governance looks like. It is not glamorous, and it is not always viral. It is often procedural, repetitive, and deeply human. But it is how values become real. Care ethicist Joan Tronto argues that care is not merely a feeling but a practice involving attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, 1993). That framing is useful here because #WeRideTogether’s work shows care becoming operational: a diagram, a pledge, a hiring practice, a reporting guide, a research agenda, a safer room, a better question, and a shared obligation.
Why This Matters for Emerging Technology
This is also the lesson emerging technology leaders need to learn. Too much AI governance still treats harm as a compliance issue after systems are already designed, and too many responsible technology conversations abstract away the social relationships in which harm actually occurs. Scholars of sociotechnical systems have warned against this abstraction problem: technical systems fail when they separate formal design from the social worlds they reorganize (Selbst et al., 2019). Feminist approaches to data and design make a similar argument: power is not an externality. It is part of the system (Costanza-Chock, 2020; D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020).
That is why my forthcoming book, Gender, Power, and Emerging Technology: Governing the Default, begins from a different premise. The question is not only whether a system is fair, efficient, or compliant. The question is which default it governs by. Does it make harm easier to name or easier to bury? Does it distribute responsibility or concentrate vulnerability? Does it treat lived experience as noise or as evidence? Does it protect the institution’s story, or does it protect the people inside the institution?
In technology, as in sport, harm often hides behind systems that claim neutrality. A platform says it merely facilitates connection. An algorithm says it merely ranks content. A reporting portal says it merely collects complaints. But systems are never “merely” anything. They decide what counts as evidence, which harms are easy to report, who must carry the cognitive and emotional labor of translation, and whether care is operationalized or left to individual goodwill.
#WeRideTogether offers a different model. It starts with the survivor, but it does not stop there. It moves from story to study, from emotion to education, from awareness to tools, from stigma to shared language, and from individual disclosure to institutional responsibility. That is why it is successful, distinct, and impactful. The campaign understands that the goal is not only to help survivors speak more bravely into unsafe systems. The goal is to build systems where harm is harder to hide, easier to name, and less likely to be protected by silence, confusion, or institutional self-interest.
That is the work of safer sport. It is also the work of gender-aware governance. And it is the work all institutions now face as power becomes more automated, more relational, more datafied, and more difficult to see. The future of governance will not be defined by who has the most polished values statement. It will be defined by who has built the courage, structure, and humility to act when the truth first becomes visible.
Hi, I’m Christine. 👋
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