Child labour in high performance and professional sport: The struggle for children’s rights

ABSTRACT

Children’s right to play and leisure has historically and currently been violated by the many demands of adults. This is now evident in the widespread structuring of the time of middle-class children in programmed activities, including sports. In a contribution to this special issue on leisure, citizenship and human rights the paper begins with an overview of how participation in sports became so work-like for many children. This is followed by an examination of the struggle to define such work as child labour. And the paper concludes with a consideration of how it may be possible to transform sport, protecting participants under the framework of children’s and labour rights – nurturing children accomplished in sport without exploiting or abusing them.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s rights
• child labour
• high performance sport
• professional sport

Acknowledgement

Would like to thank the Centre for Sport and Human Rights who funded part of the research for this project; and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments have helped to make this a better paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 UN Conventions are the equivalent of treaties. They are ‘written legal agreements between countries and the UN. They describe the human rights people have, and what the country has to do make sure that people’s rights are supported’ (https://oursite.wwda.org.au/your-rights/un-conventions).

2 The ‘arms race’ analogy characterises countries attempting to outspend each other in developing athletes to win more international medals and championships in sport.

3 UNESCO’s Declaration on Sport developed into the 1978 International Charter of Physical Education and Sport (now the 2015 International Charter of Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport).

4 The focus in this early part of the paper is on Olympic sports, but a reviewer reminded me that, in professional team sports (e.g., ice hockey, soccer) in the 1960s a ruthless system of training and competition existed on age-class teams owned and/or sponsored by professional teams (cf., Kidd and Macfarlane 1972).

5 See, for example, Dennis and Grix (2012, Chapter 3); Hite (2012); and Pfister (2003). Hite (2012, 1) noted that: ‘Children were expected to be no less than Superheldchen (little super heroes) in the service of their State … a model of youth talent-development … ultimately adopted by Western nations and continues to facilitate the systematic abuse of child athletes today.’

6 For example, American scholar, John MacAloon (1989) referred to the Canadian sport system, when these changes were made, as ‘the Big Red Machine’. The Soviet sport system had been described in that way, but MacAloon used it with reference to the Canadian team colours and the emerging similarities between Canadian and Soviet sport systems.

7 Ulrich (1976) carried out one of the first surveys of young high-performance athletes (235 athletes in more than 10 sports in the FRG) showing that the system of early specialization and intensive training and competition was well established in the early-1970s.

8 The exception here is the USA; while a major player in the ‘global sporting arms race’, funding derives more from corporate and private sources than from the federal government.

9 Beamish and Borowy (1988) found that the contracts of Canadian national team athletes met all of the legal criteria in Canada for a labour contract; government lawyers rejected that interpretation, citing the autonomy of sport.

10 The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2020) reported no existing mechanism to assure compliance with human rights by the International Olympic Committee and the International [Sport] Federations. That report was affirmed by World Athletics identifying itself as ‘a private body exercising private (contractual) powers … [and] not subject to human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the European Convention on Human Rights’ (IAAF, 2019).