Culturally framing ‘safe sport’: on political mobilisation against abuse in Zambian sport

ABSTRACT

Formalisation of safeguarding in sport occurs in increasingly diverse contexts to address abuse of athletes and promote ‘safe sport’. Moreover, safeguarding policies are occasionally integrated in transnational Sport for Development (SfD) partnerships as a condition for funding. In this article, we draw from social movement theory to explore political mobilisation against abuse in Zambian sport associations that have a Norwegian SfD partner. Using the concept of ‘cultural framing’, we examine how safe sport is captured, presented and understood by coaches and sport leaders involved in Zambian sport. The analysis shows that there was considerable support for formalised safeguarding, even though ambivalence was expressed regarding the extent of abuse in sport. With motivation grounded in resonance with sport priorities and humanistic values, safeguarding seemingly equipped the sport associations with a practicable formula for confronting a morally evocative problem. Coupled with a strong network of local mobilising actors championing this cause and a conducive political climate for connecting sport with broader social responsibilities, we suggest that this cultural framing facilitated political mobilisation against abuse in Zambian sport. Lastly, we outline some implications of our findings for safeguarding in sport and for the politicisation of sport issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Safe sport
• cultural framing
• social movement theory
• safeguarding
• abuse
• sport for development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is to say that many sport organizations at the international and national level have safeguarding policies, not to make a claim that safeguarding has succeeded in political mobilization everywhere. Also, the state of implementation still varies considerably across different contexts and sport associations (Lang and Hartill 2014).

2. To clarify, in this article, ‘safe sport’ refers to the desired outcome whilst ‘safeguarding’ denotes formalised organizational strategies to achieve safe sport.

3. Benford and Snow (2000) speak of ‘collective action frames’ in the context of social movements. In this article, however, we follow Seippel et al. (2018) in using the term ‘cultural frames’ to denote interpretative frames that are not necessarily related to social movements.

4. Africa Region 5 is comprised of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe (www.auscregion5.org.bw).

5. In the context of this article, ‘NIF’ refers to their international sport for development department, funded partly by NIF centrally and partly by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

6. The Norwegian Social Science Data Service is Norway’s official entity for approving social science research projects according to ethical standards (http://www.nsd.uib.no/index.html).