With the 2024 Paris Olympics and the 35th anniversary of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) approaching, researchers from the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE) are renewing calls to protect the rights of child athletes in sport.
In a follow up to their recent article in The Conversation, Adjunct Lecturer Marcus Mazzucco and Professor Emeritus Peter Donnelly have co-authored a policy brief (part of a Centre for Sport Policy Studies (CSPS) series of policy briefs), which has been submitted across Canada to ministers of sport and other relevant stakeholders in the areas of sport and child protection, arguing for children to be given protected status in sport.
“In most areas of society, children have protected status that safeguards their health and well-being,” says Donnelly. “However, in sport, children are often denied such protection, due to the autonomy of sport organizations and the belief that sport has certain inherent characteristics that set it apart from other social institutions.
“For example, while minimum age limits exist in occupational health and safety legislation to protect children from work associated with physical and mental harms, many sports do not have sufficient minimum age limits to protect child athletes from the physical and mental harms associated with competing at the elite level.
“Similarly, children have certain rights in the criminal and quasi-criminal justice systems that reflect their dependency and reduced maturity and protect them from disproportionate sanctions; yet, in sport, child athletes are subject to anti- doping rules that, historically, have treated them as harshly as adult athletes.
“Finally, in the case of investigations of maltreatment, children are granted certain participatory and protection rights when they report maltreatment to law enforcement; however, the same rights do not exist for child athletes when they report maltreatment to sport organizations.”
Donnelly and Mazzucco say the troubles experienced by children in sport are systemic, and the sooner that children are removed from the autonomy of sport organizations and receive the same protections as children in other institutions, the more likely sport is to improve overall.
As a starting point for making children a protected class in Canadian sport, Mazzucco and Donnelly propose several options to better protect child athletes from maltreatment through greater intervention by federal, provincial and territorial governments, and independent regulators at the federal, provincial and territorial levels with legislative powers to manage complaints about maltreatment.
These options include:
- Ensuring the operations of the Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC) are exclusively financed by the federal government, without financial contributions from sport organizations that use OSIC’s complaint management services.
- Giving OSIC coercive powers granted by legislation to carry out its mandate, instead of relying on contractual powers.
- Creating a shared cost program between the federal, provincial and territorial governments to address safe sport issues at all levels of Canadian sport, similar to the “Canada Health Transfer” and the “Canada Social Transfer” that are used to provide federal financial support to provincial and territorial governments for their health insurance and social assistance programs.
“Creating a protected class for children in sport requires a disruption to the autonomy of sport organizations,” says Donnelly. “This brief goes beyond that to outline the steps required to rebuild a better way forward.”
To learn more about the options, read the policy brief available on the CSPS website.