Imagining sport in Lithuania: young athletes’ views on safe sport

Abstract

Sports organisations have a moral and legal duty of care to deliver sport in a safe environment and to promote the welfare of athletes. This right to what has become known as ‘safe sport’ is now firmly established on the global policy agenda. Simultaneously, there is growing understanding of the need to engage with athletes, including those who are children and young people, and involve them in safe sport developments and research to ensure initiatives are effective and (child-) athlete-centred. However, to date most developments and research in this area have excluded athletes. The project presented here, in which researchers delivered a series of workshops on safe sport topics to current youth high-performance athletes in Lithuania, aimed to explore youth athletes’ views on the safe sport issues they consider most relevant to sport in their nation. Using a qualitative case study approach, data were generated through focus group interviews with 17 Lithuanian undergraduate student-athletes (average age 22) from sport-related degrees. Analysis identified doping, overtraining, emotional/psychological abuse, and corruption as the issues the young athletes consider most pertinent to their sporting lives. The project highlights the importance of working with current youth athletes to understand the issues they consider important to their experience to better enable sport policymakers and educators to develop relevant and meaningful safe sport training.

Keywords:

• Safe sport
• (child/youth) athlete ‘voice(s)’
• athlete rights
• athlete participation
• Lithuania

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Rūtenis Paulauskas for his work in recruitment of participants and assistance in organising the workshops and also Edge Hill University for funding the project upon which this paper is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These terms are often used interchangeably, however there are distinctions, namely that emotional abuse causes impairment to the emotions and to emotional life and development, whereas psychological abuse has impacts beyond only the emotions, such as to cognitive function, memory etc. (O’Hagan, 1995).

2 An exception is the Norwegian Olympic Committee and Confederation for Sports’ policy of integrating young athletes’ perspectives into policymaking and practice, which began in the 1990s. It was created out of concern that young people were leaving sport due to increasing levels of adult control (see, Holmen Waldahl & Skille, 2016). The policy’s focus was not safe sport specifically, however, and little is known about it as there are no publications in English.

3 Defined as under-represented groups comprising “Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, women, People with (dis)abilities, and LGBTQ people” (Gurgis et al., 2022a).

4 The European Network Against Racism (2022) defines Afrophobia as racism “that refers to any act of violence and discrimination including racist speech, fuelled by historical abuses and negative stereotyping, and leading to the exclusion and dehumanisation of people of African decent”.