Children have the right to participate in sport in a safe and enjoyable environment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. The International Safeguards for Children in Sport initiative declared 8 August to be Safer Sport Day, aiming to raise awareness of the need to make sport safe for children.
Keeping Children Safe 2020 Summit will take place between 5 and 9 October 2020.
Register today and join global child safeguarding practitioners, academics and experts to get immersed in the latest research. Find answers to challenges you face. Discover new resources and advice from child safeguarding experts, activists and professionals working to end child abuse around the world. And meet the people you'd like to network with.
The Sporting Chance Forum 2019 (SCF 2019) was convened on 21-22 November at the United Nations (UN) Palais des Nations in Geneva during the week that commemorated the 30th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). SCF 2019 continued the process begun in 2016 of building bridges between the worlds of sport and human rights, and supported the aims of the Centre for Sport and Human Rights.
Following the recent launch of the #SafeHome campaign, a joint initiative by FIFA, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Commission to support women and children at risk of domestic violence, FIFA representatives joined leading policy makers and youth ambassadors this week to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on child protection and safeguarding.
This article by Richard Bush "sets out the key aspects of the FIFA Guardians toolkit, providing some commentary on the document and some further steps that international governing bodies might see fit to take in respect of safeguarding and child protection. Specifically, it looks at:
The FA encourages the appropriate use of social media to help run your teams and leagues, communicate with players (via their parents/carers when under-16), and appoint referees, log results and much more.
Whatever way we communicate with children the safeguarding principles remain the same. Retaining boundaries is just as important online as it is offline.
If you have a role in football then always make sure communications to children are relevant to your role – focus on the football, don’t share personal info or comments.
Sport must be a safe, positive and enjoyable experience for all children, especially to achieve protection outcomes in sport for development projects.
This is a sample form to obtain permission from parents for their children to take part in activities and trips or media activities.
The template is part of the Child safeguarding toolkit for UEFA member associations.
To "keep children safe in sports" means to prevent and respond to any form by which the child can be negatively affected – emotionally, verbally or physically – during physical training or when they practice performance or recreational sports. Terre des hommes (Tdh) has launched in October 2019 a unique European project, aimed to promote child safeguarding policies in sports settings in Romania and Greece, as a means to protect and safeguard children.
The child safeguarding toolkit for European football has been developed by UEFA and Terre des hommes to help national associations take measures to protect and safeguard children from abuse and respond to any concerns. The toolkit recognises that many national associations have already introduced good policies, procedures and training, and builds on extensive consultation with national associations and experts.