Everyone deserves to feel safe and comfortable playing the sport they love.
The #MeToo movement and recent media attention on abuse in sport has highlighted the need for all sporting organizations to pay attention to creating a safe space for their players. There have been many instances over the past few years of coaches acting inappropriately with athletes, causing them feel uncomfortable playing their sport and reflecting badly on the sporting organization. These incidents have happened at the national, provincial and local level of sport. At the local level, often community sport organizations have not received information on how to deal with safe sport issues which can cause serious harm to their athletes and other staff members.
To help promote Safe Sport for All, the Federal Government announced funding in March 2019 to the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada (SDRCC) to launch two initiatives to address the issues of harassment, abuse and discrimination in Canadian sport. The first was an investigations unit run by the SDRCC to provide an independent service for federally funded national sport organizations, multisport service organizations and Canadian sport centres and institutes to investigate harassment, abuse and discrimination complaints. The second was the Canadian Sport Helpline, which is a nation toll-free confidential helpline for harassment, abuse and discrimination that gives victims and witnesses of incidents a safe space to report their concerns. The helpline provides callers with advice about next steps to take as well as directs them to the most appropriate national and local services and resources available to them including the police, child protection services, existing provincial/territorial helplines or any other relevant services.
Although the Federal Government has put these services in place to help combat misconduct in the sporting world there is still more that needs to be done at the organizational level to ensure sport is safe for all. While the resources outlined above have been developed nationally to address safe-sport issues, there is no guarantee that they are reaching community sport organizations effectively. Safe sport begins with a culture shift and a commitment from the sporting organization to intentionally live its values. This includes promoting safe sport by creating internal policy, systems, processes, and strategies to elevate sport and nurture a thriving sport community.
The Ottawa Sport Council (OSC) is focused on helping Ottawa community sport organizations develop safe sport environments. To do so, the OSC has launched the development of a standardized Safe-Sport Toolkit to increase program safety and inclusiveness and ensure safe sport resources reach the community level. The goal of the toolkit is to provide member organizations user-friendly resources to identify and mitigate risk, engage participants, and create conditions for safe, fun and welcoming sport experiences. The first step is to work collaboratively with our stakeholders to engage in a Safe Sport Implementation Strategy. This will then be customized into a toolkit and piloted by Ottawa community sport organizations in 2021/2022.
If you are interested in learning more about the Safe Sport Toolkit and/or being one of the participating pilot sport organizations, please contact us.
The Ottawa Sport Council is very appreciative of the support it has received from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to support this project.