Some countries are now beginning to employ protection policies in the context of sports to safeguard children from abuse.
In the UK, for example, state funding for sports governing bodies is now linked to a set of 11 national standards for safeguarding children. The Child Protection in Sport Unit (CPSU) [1] is responsible for supporting and monitoring the implementation of these standards as they are ‘rolled out' across sports in the UK.
Principally this has resulted in the production and implementation of child protection policies within sports governing bodies largely dealing with adult responsibility for best practices when working with children and dealing with child protection issues. The CPSU's ultimate aim is to safeguard children through encouraging cultural change.
Organized sports: designed to build boys into menPolicy development is undoubtedly an important tool for fostering cultural change. However, there are reasons to be sceptical about the extent to which current child protection or safeguarding policies can affect real change in youth sports.
Organized sport originated in its contemporary form in the nineteenth century English public school system. The British Empire required strong, masculine leaders and it was widely believed that sport was possessed of character-building experiences that would forge such men. From its beginnings, then, sport was very much about making men, a tool by which the upper-classes could reproduce their elite position.
Whilst sport opportunities are now widely available in the developed world, the notion that sport is a virtuous system that is intrinsically good for kids persists. Of course, sport is only what we make of it - a football field is just grass and fresh air unless we fill it with people who understand something of the history of that social space and who bring a myriad of values, dispositions, beliefs and attitudes to that space. In one sense the spectrum of such values is as broad as the number of people in it, but in another, we might say that the values of our wider cultures are reflected, or even magnified, in our sports environments.
Sports: last bastian of male privilege?
Social scientists, as well as many sports participants, fans and parents of children involved in sport, have been increasingly concerned with the way that sport has become dominated by corporate business and commercial media interests. In addition, researchers have argued that, true to its patriarchal origins, as wider society makes steps towards gender equality, sport is being cultivated as a last outpost of male privilege and ‘backlash' against feminism. Many social scientists have written on this topic, but all too rarely have these issues been considered in the context of childhood.
The ‘new social studies of childhood' has argued for over a decade that children are not simply objects to be moulded or incomplete beings, but citizens in their own right. Such thinking, highly critical of psychology-based, developmental models of childhood (where children are evaluated according to prescribed age-related stages and their ability to negotiate these successfully), is dominant within sport.
This relatively new approach sees childhood as a ‘social construct' and has accompanied such groundbreaking developments as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) . In this model children are perceived to have specific rights, particularly, to have a voice and to participate in decisions that affect them - the notion of listening to children has never before been so prominent in academic and political discussions of children's spaces. Readers of these pages will not need to be told that this presents something of a challenge for organized children's sports and many adults that populate them.
Indeed, it may be argued that within adult-organized children's sports, a ‘discourse of control' dominates - that is to say that children are expected to do as they are told and not question the authority of adults, especially those endowed with the endorsement of a governing body (i.e. coaching qualifications). Of course, what many parents know is that such ‘badges' say little about a person's ability to create a positive learning environment or treat children with dignity. All too often, such badges symbolize an allegiance to the sport (or to personal advancement) rather than the welfare of children.
Children seen as commodities?
Our society (UK and USA) has been labelled as ‘late-capitalist', where capitalism has taken on a new, more voracious form - everything is a commodity, children are not excluded, neither those working in sweatshops in developing nations in support of our (‘Western') consumer lifestyles, or our own children who just want to ‘play ball' but find themselves thrust into intensely competitive situations that often takes little account of their well-being and places overwhelming emphasis on winning, and encourages them to do so. The ‘commodification of childhood' perhaps finds a comfortable home in the sub-world of sport, where winning really is everything (at least according to the voices, images and organizations that children are drilled to listen to) and the objective (and principle attraction) is always conquest, often physical.
Child Protection Policies Essential
Centrally supported policies to protect/safeguard children in sport are essential. Their value lies in their potential to foster cultural change (principally by ‘stick' rather than ‘carrot'). However, given the forces of patriarchy and commercialism stacked up against those who believe in a different version of physical activity than that currently on offer to our children within the discourse of ‘sport', their ability to deliver change that will truly transform childhood physical activity seems somewhat limited. Such forces are often ready to accept child protection policies to weed out the deviant few (as long as they are not too inconvenient). But of course, the suggestion here is that if we are really serious about tackling childhood abuse, policy development is only the first step in a long process of radical change - a process that many forces dominant within sport might perceive that they have a vested interest in resisting. The role for those adults who are prepared to put the interests of children first will clearly be a vital one in this struggle and explicitly acknowledging and advocating children's rights will be a key aspect of it.
Links:
[1] http://www.thecpsu.org.uk/Scripts/content/Default.asp
[2] mailto:hartillm@edgehill.ac.uk
[3] https://momsteam.com/health-safety/sexual-abuse-of-boys-in-sports-does-the-sports-culture-itself-play-a-role