Featured Blog Article by Sophie Zoltowski, SSI Intern and Masters Degree Student.
Sport has often been celebrated and promoted as the ultimate cure to distress, used to build spaces for teamwork, resilience, friendship, perseverance and joy. These spaces can fail to address a darker reality, in which high-profile abuse cases expose a painful truth: sport can act as a unique vessel for interpersonal violence to hide. Whilst the global pandemic exacerbated concerns for the protection of human rights in sport, child protection literature shows that children can find it increasingly difficult to recognise and explain their experiences of interpersonal violence. Responsibility lies with adults working in sport to raise awareness and provide information about support for children.
International treaties such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child mandate that young people be protected, however athletic environments have been slow to adapt in response. The 2017 Safeguarding Toolkit from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has encouraged the adoption of safeguarding practices, requiring National Olympic Committees (NOC’s) and member International Federations (Ifs) to create new policies, whilst the European Union and the Council of Europe have more recently created protection programmes to increase protection efficiency in sports systems. Global progress nevertheless remains fragmented. To bridge these gaps, SSI looks to move the international sporting community away from patchy compliance checklists towards a concrete global safeguarding framework so that young athletes never have to choose between their safety and their dreams.
The 5 ‘Rs’ of the Reporting Journey
To address systematic failures, Safe Sport International (SSI) supported a two-phase emergent study to develop the 5 ‘Rs’ framework alongside the Centre for Sport and Human Rights. This model (Tuakli-Wosornu et al. 2023) maps the reporting journey and identifies the cultural, organisational, and relational barriers that SSI targets through its global advocacy and training:
Readiness: The first stage of the reporting journey, concerned with how a sports organisation is prepared to engage and acknowledge that neglect and physical, psychological and sexual abuse happens in sport. A lack of awareness represents a barrier that prevents someone from beginning their reporting journey in sport. Themes that might affect readiness include fear or discomfort, reputational risks, a misguided belief in the purity of sport, or an inability to interpret abuse.
Recognition: To report an incident, stakeholders must be able to recognise harmful behaviours. In sport, recognition must include taking a firm step aside from deep-rooted norms such as ‘pain is gain’ that assume violence is a part of competitive culture. Problems may be dismissed due to ignorance and the assumption that issues only arise in other sports teams or communities.
Reporting and Disclosure: Research highlights that most child protection violations are neither disclosed nor reported. Understanding the limitations of reporting systems is key to improve protecting factors.The idea of trust is used to explain young people’s lack of willingness to come forward about abuse. Other considerations include a lack of terminology, awareness, intimidation, stigma, high personal or professional costs and a fear of retaliation. When children do speak out, they often turn to family or friends outside athletic systems.
Response: When a report is made, the onus of proof can weigh heavily against the victim, who may feel unsupported by federations as they are deemed lying until proven otherwise. The passage of time can provoke questions about recall accuracy. Sport bodies often lack the internal expertise or ability to appropriately handle disclosures.
Remedy: The final stage of the journey is the outcome, which requires justice, healing, institutional learning and accountability. Instead, whistleblowers have faced exclusion, survivors have suffered re-traumatisation, and systematic gaps permit banned coaches to migrate to other sports or jurisdictions.
Invisible Barriers to Action
SSI’s research into why enablers stay silent and children hide trauma points directly to steep power imbalances and rigid social hierarchies. If abuse is perpetrated by coaches or sports figures with positions of importance, young athletes can find themselves in a ‘devil’s dilemma’: risking their entire athletic career, hopes and dreams to expose the abuser who controls their sporting future. Several athlete respondents have reported that their passion for sport withered their abuse experiences.
Furthermore, perpetrators of abuse in sport systematically groom not only the child, but their parents as well. Families that invest significant financial resources and emotional capital into a child’s success can transform, unwillingly, into enablers. This can involve engaging in a painful cost-benefit analysis that delays reporting to avoid missing key sports milestones or events such as a major championship. One report from the Sheldon Review (2021) stated that a deeper relationship with parents results in greater harm suffered by the child. Young players have often minimised their abuse, hidden their suffering for decades, or even felt privileged to be singled out by a coach, highlighting the intense psychological manipulation at play.
Flipping the Script: Designing from the margins in
Data shows that abuse does not target all athletes equally: individuals with disabilities, those from ethnic minorities, and LGBTQ+ youth are significantly more likely to experience interpersonal violence in sport. Institutional safeguarding systems have traditionally operated from a top-down approach, entailing processes that implement policies for mainstream populations, later adapted for minority groups.
Recent studies therefore argue that sports systems should ‘flip the script’ and design from the margins in; by creating protective frameworks that can effectively support the most vulnerable athletes first, we can naturally build a safer, more efficient system for future sports youth across all populations.
The Path Forward: Three Structural Changes
To move from fragmented policies to systematic safety, the sports sector should implement three structural changes:
Establish a global safety net environment: Sport needs an independent global safeguarding organisation, one with principles and standards that can be adapted regionally to respect cultural contexts, without jeopardising human rights. The Reporting Journey and Influencing Factors (the 5Rs) can therefore be used to support projects based on children, sport and safeguarding.
Bring safeguarding to unregulated environments: High-risk, unmonitored sectors need better protection through aggressive targeting methods. eSports, as an example, is a rapidly growing, lucrative environment that lacks a strong, established safeguarding system. Young players spend long hours in isolation, driven by financial contracts and gifts, without a central oversight of protection.
Build multi-sector bridges: Governing bodies should work with with specific child focused partner agencies and organisations so that safeguarding is an integral part of a holistic view of children’s rights. This might entail sports organisations working with the Convention on the Rights of the Child Committee (CRC) to enhance mandates for child protection violations disclosures.
The Core Mission of Safe Sport International
Ultimately, child protection lies in the responsibility of the sport and sporting environment, not the child’s. At Safe Sport International, we prioritise building on athlete-centred frameworks that view young people as people first, and performers second, shifting priorities from winning medals to preserving wellbeing and enjoyment in sport.