Little Girls in Pretty Boxes The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters

Joan Ryan who wrote the 1995 book little girls in pretty boxes about the physical and psychological toll gymnastics takes on girls and young women. These girls are groomed from an incredibly young age to deny their own experience, your knee hurts, you're being lazy, you're hungry, no, you're fat and greedy. They are trained to doubt their own feelings and that's why this sexual abuse could happen to over 150 of them.

In fact a reporter named Joan Ryan had written a book called Little Girls and Pretty Boxes that had published not that many years before and that laid out in just excoriating detail what was taking place in gymnastics and figures skating both and the rampant sexual abuse and how the organizations were burying sexual and physical and emotional abuse with their athletes and nobody batted an eyelash.

there had been other reporters who had reported on abuse in gymnastics and it just never gained any traction but the indie star article did