New educational materials on how to protect children from all types of abuse in sport were launched on Friday at our Safe Sport Allies conference. These will soon be available free of charge, online and physically, for use by sports professionals to encourage dialogue with children.
At the conference, the unanimous conclusion was that safeguarding needs to be promoted at all levels in Romania: coaches, performance athletes, sports schools, representatives of sports federations of Handball, Football, Artistic Gymnastics, representatives of the authorities - Ministry of Sport, Ministry of Education, Romanian Olympic Sports Committee and ANPDCA - all "committed" to contribute to this approach.
Paul Bercea, Consultant and International Trainer in Safeguarding, challenged two great performance sportswomen -Narcisa Lecușanu and Andreea Răducan- to talk about safety and balance in the coach-child-parents relationship and how this is reconciled with the pressure to succeed... Both Narcisa Lecușanu, a member of the Executive Committee of the International Handball Federation, and Andreea Răducan, a world-class gymnast, stressed that unconditional support from home has counted for a lot.
Safe Sport Allies aims to combat psychological, physical and sexual violence and proactively protect children in sport by developing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating an intervention that will enable athletes, parents, coaches and managers to respond appropriately to child abuse in sport. If any witness to violence intervenes, it will increase the awareness, knowledge, skills and capacity of all those in youth sports clubs to challenge harmful social norms and behaviours and promote positive and healthy ones. By changing the behaviour of these actors, this project also provides a sound methodology for child protection interventions in sport organisations.
Safe Sport Allies, co-funded by the European Union's Erasmus + Programme, is a project whose partners are Thomas More (BE), Center Ethicsin Sport (BE), Mulier Institute (NL), De Stilte Verbroken (NL), Athletic Club Foundation (ES), Finnish Olympic Committee (FIN), Terre des hommes Romania and Cyprus Sport Organisation (CY).
