Speaker
Description
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in Sweden has been ratified (1989), included in sports policy (2009) and become an official Swedish law (2020). Sweden is one of the world’s most sporting nations in relation to its geography and population and children’s rights should be protected in sports in order to be a safe field of education and socialization for the children. However, several examples of abuse, lack of participation, normalizing injuries and generally events characterized by lack of rights-based perspective have been reported in Swedish and international research. The purpose of this paper was to shed light on those different kinds of violations of children’s rights in sports. More specifically, this conceptual paper highlighted an uncertainty about how children’s rights are viewed by people in sports as well as the fact that a violation of children’s rights is often open to interpretation because of the existence of several “grey areas”. Furthermore, this paper pointed out that when researchers try to explain why coaches violate children’s rights, they focus on the “winning at all costs” culture, the culture of silence and the player-coach relationship. This leaves out other important reasons such as: 1) sociocultural pressures that coaches undergo, 2) coaches’ education and 3) the nature of UNCRC. This paper ends with the author arguing for the reasons of why it is important to investigate those three factors and shaping research questions that will be used for the author’s PhD thesis.
