Safe Sport Storyline #12
Key Lessons for Safeguarding Officers, Insights from the Global Thematic Report on Sport Trafficking, and more Resources and News
Key lessons learnt and tips for designated safeguarding leads and officers
By Samuel Gordon, Global Membership Manager at Keeping Children Safe
Today I finished facilitating Keeping Children Safe's newly relaunched Focal Point training. I wanted to share just some of the key lessons learnt and tips for child safeguarding focal points, designated safeguarding leads, or safeguarding officers.
1️⃣ Understand your organisations contact with and impact on children, both online and in-person. The best way to ensure you have the appropriate prevention and response policies and procedures in place.
2️⃣ Map the risks involved in your operations, programmes, activities and partnerships. Essential for creating and implementing the necessary mitigation strategies.
3️⃣ Ensure your organisation has a robust child safeguarding policy, a code of conduct, and clear communications guidelines.
4️⃣ Develop implementation plans that will help ensure everything you commit to doing in your safeguarding policy is actually being implemented across the entire organisation.
5️⃣ Help all staff and associates understand safeguarding and provide them with the necessary training and support where required. Safeguarding is everyones responsibility and everyone needs to be able to perform their role.
6️⃣ Foster a culture of safeguarding at your organisation. Creating a top-down culture where the most senior people are passionate and committed to safeguarding leads to organisations entire approaches changing .
These are just some of the things we covered but please visit our learning platform to discover more about our different child safeguarding training.
Keeping Children Safe is an independent global body that helps organisations protect children from abuse. Established in 2001 by a group of major humanitarian relief and development charities in response to the growing realisation that children were being subjected to exploitation and abuse by aid and development workers in emergency camps in West Africa and within their own organisations. Over two decades Keeping Children Safe have helped prevent child abuse in organisations across all sectors impacting more than 65 million children worldwide.
NotInOurGame: Insights from the Global Thematic Report on Sport Trafficking (Session 2)
Last Friday, South Africa’s counter-trafficking network, the National Freedom Network (NFN), partnered with Mission 89 combine to deliver an online titled “Not In Our Game.”
The NFN was formed in 2011, with the aim to connect all the various counter-trafficking organisations with one another as well as with other role players across the movement. Mission 89, a research, education, and advocacy organization fighting the exploitation of young athletes, was established in 2017.
Mission 89, in partnership with Loughborough University and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association UK branch (CPA UK), released at the end of 2024, the first-ever comprehensive Global Thematic Report on Sport Trafficking, presenting a rigorous academic and policy-oriented analysis of human trafficking within the global sports ecosystem.
The “Not In Our Game” webinar was focused on the Global Thematic Report and featured speakers from sport in Africa talking about efforts to safeguard children in sport and especially tackling the challenge of trafficking through sport.
It was reassuring to learn from Dr Decius Chipande, Head of the African Union’s Specialized Office for the Sustainable Development of Sport, that safeguarding in sport including addressing the trafficking of young people is a priority in their work. Mr Omar Amr, Safeguarding Lead for the Confederation of African Football, also highlighted how football on the continent is working to promote safeguarding in football and that trafficking is a concern that needs to be addressed through their network of Member Association safeguarding officers.
Also on the webinar was Ashleigh Plumptre, Mission 89 Ambassador, and a professional footballer who plays as a centre-back for Saudi Premier League club Al-Ittihad and the Nigeria women's national team. Formerly an England youth international, she made her senior Nigeria debut in February 2022 and represented the nation at the 2023 World Cup. Ashleigh brought a player’s perspective to the discussion and highlighted the challenges for women in the game of football.
The webinar was skilfully moderated by Monique Emser, Senior Lecturer from the University of KwaZulu Natal who stated “It was such an honour and privilege to contribute to this impactful project with Mission 89, and present critical insights from our Global Thematic Report on Sport Trafficking through these webinars.
By shedding light on the systemic vulnerabilities that enable human trafficking in sports, we hope to raise awareness of this often overlooked, emerging form of exploitation. The webinars underscored the pressing need for decisive, targeted measures to safeguard at-risk individuals and uphold human dignity across the global sports community.”
You can access the Global Thematic Report on Sport Trafficking here
RESOURCES
Building European Safe Sport Together Toolkit
The project Building European Safe Sport Together (BESST) is funded by the Erasmus+ programme from the European Commission. BESST developed a unified definition for the foundation of a harassment and abuse-free European sports environment. With strong partners delivering academic research, a continent-wide network of organisations for dissemination, legal and project management, events delivery and sports organisations, the project has a full circle range of professionals with four key deliveries that effectively raise the maturity of the European sports on its safeguarding readiness.
One of the four key deliverables is an excellent education and awareness toolkit filled with great resources. These include myth busters, posters, information pages, videos, social media tools and much, much more.
The resources can be found here
Women Win: Learning Playground Safe Spaces
The Learning Playground is the place where Women Win shares the insights gathered in the last 15 years thanks to the collaborative work that we do with our partners in all regions. All this knowledge is now offered open source with the objective to further the work of everyone that is looking to advance girls’ and women’s rights.
One of the sections looks at safeguarding and is called Safe Spaces. Here you will find resources including video, pdf policy and practice resources and a neat interactive learning game.
The resources can be found here
Giving young people a voice in safeguarding
Sports clubs and organisations should listen to young people when creating the safeguarding policies to protect them. When young athletes share their ideas, policies can become clearer and more effective. That’s the advice of three young leaders in Wales, who at a recent event in front of Safeguarding Leads explained why their voices matter.
This resources can be found here
NEWS
Zambia’s Barbra Banda targeted by fan ‘hate speech‘
Captain of the Zambia National Team, Barbra Banda, was the target fan hate speech during a recent National Women's Soccer League (NSWL) in the United States. Banda, who plays for the Orlando Pride was subjected to the ‘hateful language’ during her club’s match versus NJ/NY Gotham FC.
In a joint statement Gotham FC, Orlando Pride, and the NWSL stated “This behavior is unacceptable and has no place in our league or in our stadiums.” Banda is widely considered one of the top women's players in the world
Read the full story here
Sport Integrity Australia forecasts evolving threats in build-up to Brisbane 2032 Olympics
Recently appointed Sport Integrity Australia chief executive Sarah Benson says the nature of threats to fair play will evolve leading into the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
Last year, Sport Integrity Australia managed more than 250 child safeguarding or discrimination complaints across more than 50 sports and in the six months to February this year, child safeguarding accounted for 100 per cent of complaints investigated by them.
Read the article here
USOPC fires coach, director over abuse
The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee has dismissed coach Gary Colliander and director Eileen Carey following a journalistic investigation that revealed mistreatment suffered by former biathlete Grace Boutot, who had been training at the Maine Winter Sports Center since she was 15.
The USOPC on Wednesday confirmed the sacking of the duo following allegations of sexual abuse reported by the Associated Press (AP) last December. According to Boutot's testimony, the psychological damage was so severe that she attempted to take her own life in 2010.
Read the article here
U.S. Center for SafeSport knew of allegations against former cop before hiring him as investigator
People at the U.S. Center for SafeSport knew a former police officer was the subject of an internal investigation at his former job but hired him anyway, according to details released Wednesday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is looking into the matter.
Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter this week to the center’s CEO, Ju’Riese Colon, asking more questions about why the organization hired Jason Krasley as an investigator even though it had knowledge of his potential legal trouble.
Read the article here