Safe Sport Allies

Safe Sport Allies is a partnership (Erasmus+ funding) between two sports organisations, four research institutes, an international child protection agency, a developer of safe sports practices and an organisation for and by victims from different European countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Cyprus and Romania). The different organisations have complementary backgrounds, traditions, experience and expertise in protection policies in and outside sport. The focus of the project is to address transgressive behaviour in local sports clubs by developing, implementing and testing bystander interventions tailored for athletes, trainers, parents and club administrators.

The objectives of the project are the following

• To develop a bystander intervention to improve children’s safety in grassroots sport clubs, including (1) an education programme for athletes, coaches and parents, and (2) a policy development and implementation trajectory for local sport managers. The intervention aims to increase knowledge and awareness of interpersonal violence in sport and stimulate positive attitudes and beliefs about prosocial bystanding by all stakeholders.
• To compose a test battery for monitoring and evaluating the sports club safety and the bystander culture, including a policy self-scan, children’s voices, coaches, parents and managers’ opinions and actions.
• To longitudinally measure the effectiveness of such intervention by analyzing quantitative and qualitative monitoring and evaluation data.
• To disseminate the findings, intervention protocol and policy roadmap in order to stimulate and support other European sport stakeholders in implementing effective prevention interventions

Prevalence rates of harassment and abuse in sport cannot be ignored and prevention measures are needed to tackle this. Although applaudable efforts are being made by several sport governing bodies and sport organisations, the journey of developing, implementing and evaluating sport safeguarding policies has only just started, and the evidence on effective prevention and response is urgently required but currently almost non-existent. The current project is one of the first to start building scientific evidence for preventive safeguarding strategies.