A feature blog by Aisha Nazia, Projects & Resources Lead at Safe Sport International
Amplifying youth perspectives to shape safer sporting futures
At every level of sport, from grassroots pitches to elite performance pathways, young people give their time, bodies, and ambitions to the games they love. Yet when it comes to safeguarding, policy, and decision-making, their voices are too often missing.
The Hearing the Voices of Young People in Sport project was created to change that.
Led by Safe Sport International (SSI) in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, and funded by the Ingeborg Gross Stiftung, this international research initiative places young athletes aged 16–18 at the centre of safeguarding conversations recognising them not simply as individuals to be protected, but as rights-holders with insight, agency, and lived expertise.
This project responds to a long-standing gap in sport governance: while safeguarding frameworks exist for children and adults, the transition phase between childhood and adulthood, particularly for athletes moving into elite or high-performance environments, remains under-examined, under-regulated, and under-heard.
Why youth voices matter in safeguarding
Safeguarding in sport has advanced significantly over the past decade. High-profile cases, survivor advocacy, and global research have rightly pushed protection, prevention, and accountability to the forefront of sport policy. However, evidence consistently shows that young athletes especially those on talent or elite pathways face heightened risks.
They operate in environments characterised by:
- Intense performance pressure
- Adult-dominated power structures
- Public visibility and scrutiny
- Physical and emotional vulnerability
- Increasing autonomy without corresponding support
Despite this, safeguarding systems are often adult-centric, prioritising institutional processes over young people’s lived realities. The result is a disconnect between policy and experience.
This project is grounded in Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which affirms young people’s right to be heard in matters that affect them. Rather than treating participation as a tick-box exercise, the project embeds youth voice structurally and meaningfully from research design through to dissemination
A rights-based, participatory research approach
What makes this project distinctive is how it is being carried out. Young people are not merely respondents. They are collaborators.
An International Youth Advisory Panel (IYAP), made up of young athletes aged 16–18 from different countries, sports, genders, and performance levels was established to guide the project.
The panel reflects the reality that there is no single youth sport experience. Members come from grassroots, club, state, national and community-based sport systems across regions such as Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, bringing perspectives shaped by culture, access, opportunity, and lived experience. Together, they played a critical role in identifying priority issues, shaping the survey design, and ensuring the research remained grounded in what truly matters to young athletes.
Youth Advisory Panel Members
Mariam Monnapula
Lesotho | Football & Athletics
Mariam is a club-level footballer based in Maseru, playing as a right full-back and right winger for Kick4Life Juniors Women FC. She also competes in sprint athletics, specialising in the 100 metres. Her experience reflects the realities of balancing multi-sport participation and access to opportunities for young women in sport.
Jean Kingsley Manon
Mauritius | Athletics (Long Distance)
Jean is a long-distance runner training within a sports club environment in Triolet. Competing in the U18 category, he trains twice a week and represents the pathway of young athletes navigating structured training alongside education.
Jannathulfirdous Mohd Rafik
India | Football
Based in Mumbai, Jannathulfirdous plays football at state level. Her perspective brings insight into competitive youth sport within highly populated urban contexts, including access, progression, and pressure within state-level systems.
Izul Hamid
Indonesia | Football, Futsal & Badminton
Izul is a multi-sport athlete from Jakarta with experience in futsal, badminton, and football. Currently focused on football, he is preparing for participation linked to the Street Child World Cup. His contribution highlights the intersection of sport, social context, and opportunity for young people from community-based and development-focused programmes.
Kishi Folarin
Canada | Basketball
Kishi is a basketball player from Winnipeg with experience in both junior varsity and provincial-level competition. Her journey reflects the transition through school-based sport into higher-level representative pathways within a structured system.
Josaia Raikoso
England / Fiji | Football
Josaia currently plays football with Boston United in England, a club competing in the national league system. He has also represented Fiji in the OFC U16 qualifiers in 2024. His experience bridges domestic league football and international youth representation.
Their role has been to:
- Identify the issues that matter most to young athletes
- Shape the language and framing of research questions
- Ensure tools are age-appropriate, relevant, and safe
- Challenge adult assumptions about youth sport experiences
The advisory panel’s lived experiences, ranging from balancing education and training to financial barriers, mental health pressures, coaching relationships, injury management, and future uncertainty, directly informed the ten core concern areas that underpin the project’s global survey.
This participatory model reflects a broader shift in safeguarding: from viewing young people solely as vulnerable, to recognising them as experts in their own lives.
What has been done so far
Since its launch, the project has progressed through several critical phases:
Phase 0: Project Conceptualisation, Research Foundations & Early Insights
The project was initially conceptualised through collaboration between Neal Anderson (COO, Safe Sport International) and Dr Seamus Byrne (Manchester Metropolitan University), building on a shared recognition of the critical gap in safeguarding for athletes aged 16–18 during the transition from childhood to adulthood.
This early phase was further strengthened through exploratory research by SSI Intern Matt Klysh, whose work examined the importance of embedding youth voices within sport systems. His contribution helped shape the direction and intent of the project, particularly in framing young people not only as participants but as key contributors to safeguarding solutions.
Read Matt’s blog:
This foundational phase ensured that the project was grounded in:
- A clear rights-based approach
- Existing research and practice gaps
- The need for meaningful youth engagement, not tokenistic consultation
Phase 1: Academic partnership and ethical foundations
Building on the initial conceptualisation phase, the research is led academically by Dr Seamus Byrne, Reader in Law at Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University, a recognised expert in children’s rights and sport governance.
Ethical approval has been secured through the University’s Faculty of Business and Law Research Ethics and Governance Committee, ensuring that the project meets rigorous standards of confidentiality, consent, and participant safety.
Phase 2: Youth-led priority setting
Through structured consultations with the International Youth Advisory Panel, ten core areas of concern were identified. These now form the backbone of the public survey and include:
- Physical demands and training load
- Education–sport balance
- Mental health and emotional wellbeing
- Coaching relationships and power dynamics
- Social life and isolation
- Financial barriers
- Transport and access
- Nutrition and food security
- Injury, recovery, and pressure to return
- Future uncertainty and progression challenges
These themes reflect real-world pressures, not abstract policy debates.
Phase 3: Global Youth Survey – Listening at Scale
Building on the priorities identified by the International Youth Advisory Panel (IYAP), the research team developed and delivered a global online survey hosted on Manchester Metropolitan University’s research platform.
The survey was designed to be anonymous, voluntary, confidential, and trauma-informed, enabling young athletes to share their experiences safely and honestly. Guided by the principle that young people should be active contributors to research that affects them, the survey balanced structured questions with opportunities for open-ended responses, ensuring that participants could provide both measurable data and personal insights.
Young athletes aged 16-18, from any sport, at any level, anywhere in the world, were invited to take part. The survey was conducted between January and March 2026 and received responses from 92 children and young people aged 16–18 years from 16 countries, representing a diverse range of sporting disciplines and participation pathways.
The purpose of the study was twofold:
- To enhance child participation in sport-related research, ensuring that young people have meaningful opportunities to influence the questions, priorities, and solutions that affect them.
- To better understand and support the transition to elite sport for 16–18-year-olds, a critical period during which young athletes often experience increased performance expectations, changing support structures, and significant personal, educational, and social pressures.
The global reach of the survey enabled the project to capture perspectives from both the Global North and Global South, as well as from athletes participating in both well-resourced and under-resourced sporting systems, helping to address a long-standing gap in safeguarding and athlete welfare research.
This phase marks a critical step in translating youth-led insights into global evidence, ensuring that the voices of young athletes are captured at scale and across contexts.
Phase 4: Analysis, Findings, and Recommendations
Following completion of the global survey, the project entered an evidence-generation and knowledge-sharing phase. Working collaboratively, the research team analysed the survey findings and identified key themes, challenges, and opportunities relating to the transition into elite and high-performance sport.
The findings informed the development of two sets of recommendations:
- Recommendations for Including Children and Young People in Sport Research and Governance
- Recommendations for Supporting Young Athletes in Elite Sport Pathways
These recommendations aim to strengthen youth participation, improve athlete well-being, and encourage sport organisations, researchers, and policymakers to adopt more rights-based, youth-centred approaches. Together, these outputs will support the application of the International Safeguards for Children in Sport and the International Safeguards for Adults in Sport in a way that reflects real developmental stages, not arbitrary age thresholds.
The findings and recommendations were presented at the Safe Sport International Global Conference 2026, held from 25–27 May 2026 at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. The presentation highlighted both the research findings and the participatory methodology used throughout the project, demonstrating how meaningful youth engagement can contribute to stronger safeguarding, governance, and athlete welfare outcomes.
The presentation recording is available through Safe Sport Connect, SSI’s global community platform. Organisations, researchers, and practitioners interested in learning more about the findings or exploring opportunities for collaboration are encouraged to contact Safe Sport International directly for further information.
The role of the Ingeborg Gross Stiftung
This work has been made possible through the support of the Ingeborg Gross Stiftung, whose funding reflects a shared commitment to:
- Children’s rights
- Ethical sport
- Evidence-based safeguarding
- Amplifying under-represented voices
Their support enables SSI to invest time, expertise, and care into a project that prioritises depth over speed and integrity over visibility ensuring young people are engaged responsibly and meaningfully.
A shared responsibility
At its heart, Hearing the Voices of Young People in Sport is a reminder of something simple but profound:
Safeguarding cannot be done to young people.
It must be done with them.
By listening carefully and acting responsibly we move closer to a sporting world where every young person can pursue excellence without fear, without harm, and without being unheard.
This project is one step toward that future.
Take part
If you are a young athlete aged 16–18, your experiences matter.
If you are a coach, organisation, or policymaker, your responsibility is to listen.
Together, we can help make everyone, everywhere, safe in sport.
Join the conversation at Safe Sport Connect