Advancing children’s rights in sport: coaching, childhood agency and the participatory agenda

ABSTRACT

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child makes clear that children have the right to protection from violence and the right to be heard. There have been many developments in sports organisations’ approaches to protecting children in recent years. The same cannot be said of advancing children’s right to be heard. I argue this is due to how children are constructed, which is influenced by developmentalist conceptualisations of childhood. Applying ideas from the “new” sociology of childhood to a sporting context for the first time, I argue these dominant understandings lead to constructions of children as vulnerable and incompetent. This inadvertently foments protectionism and precludes adults from seeing children as rights bearers. To address this, a participatory model – Hart’s ladder of participation – is suggested as a way coaches and other sport stakeholders can more effectively involve children in sport and help them fully realise their legal rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s rights
• developmentalism
• athlete “voice”
• violence and abuse in sport
• youth coaching

Introduction: human rights in sport

Recent years have seen an unprecedented number of athletes speak out publicly on a range of human rights issues from racism and homophobia to sexual, physical, and emotional abuse by coaches, and athletes’ rights to peaceful protest at the Olympics¹ (Church & Klosok, 2020; Rumsby, 2020). In addition, in 2020 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recommended strengthening athletes’ rights as a key agenda item for the next five years (International Olympic Committee, 2020b). In sum, it has been a significant time for developments in human rights in sport. Yet despite these developments, human rights are not a new concept for sport. As long ago as 1974, US sports journalist Martin Ralbovsky argued athletes’ human rights were being violated and denounced the “dehumanising” culture of youth sport and “dictator” coaches (Ralbovsky, 1974). Ralbovsky’s concerns were largely ignored at the time. While critical scholars of sport began investigating abuse and exploitation in sport in the mid-1980s – namely gender discrimination (Hall, 1985; White & Brackenridge, 1985) and the financial exploitation of college athletes (Leonard, 1986) – these and other examples of the “dark side” of sport were not considered from the perspective of human rights until more recently. There have been little in the way of developments from within sport until recently either; more than 60 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (UN General Assembly, 1948), sports authorities have been at best slow and at worst recalcitrant to integrate human rights into sport (David, 2005; Lang, 2021).

The principles of human rights emanate from the UDHR, which comprises 30 articles detailing an individual’s basic human rights and freedoms. The UDHR constitutes jus cogens – fundamental principles of international law from which no state may deviate (Haleem, 2019). Article 25(2) of the UDHR notes that, “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance”. This decision to single out children (and mothers) as in some way different from other individuals and, thus, warranting special safeguards is a consequence of long-standing ideas about children’s vulnerability. This prompted the creation of a series of international instruments specifically for children: the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, (League of Nations, 1924), the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly, 1959), and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (UN General Assembly, 1989). This construction of children as vulnerable continues to dominate Western thinking and has significant – and predominantly negative – consequences for children’s treatment. For the first time in the sports literature, here I apply social constructionist ideas from the “new” sociology of childhood (Prout & James, 1997) to explain children’s marginalised position in sport. I argue that dominant constructions of children as innocent and vulnerable, which largely result from developmentalist conceptualisations of childhood, preclude adults from seeing children as rights bearers, distance children from their rights, and increase children’s vulnerability to abuse. Moreover, I highlight how alternative conceptualisations of childhood offer the potential to counter children’s low status and encourage more effective actualisation of children’s rights in sport, which would in turn better protect them and promote their welfare. First, I discuss the UNCRC and its implications for sport.

Children’s rights in sport

The UNCRC is a legally binding instrument comprising 42 substantive articles (54 articles in total) that outline the economic, social, and cultural rights of all children. It defines children as below age 18 unless the age of majority is earlier within signatories’ domestic law. The UNCRC outlines three categories of children’s rights, which are known colloquially as “the three Ps”: 1) survival and development rights, 2) protection rights, and 3) participation rights² (UNICEF, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c). While sport is not specifically mentioned in the UNCRC,³ the rights enshrined within the UNCRC are applicable to all settings, including sport (David, 2005). The UNCRC is by no means a “perfect” document – there are legitimate concerns that it suggests an unrealistic global standard of childhood that reinforces Western norms and does not reflect cultural understandings of childhood or economic realities within Global South countries (Faulkner & Nyamutata, 2020). Notwithstanding this caveat, the UNCRC offers a useful starting point for thinking about children’s involvement in sport and how coaches and other stakeholders treat child athletes. For example, when we evaluate sport against the rights embedded within the UNCRC, many traditional coaching practices – early specialisation, intensive training, the valorisation of athletes who train through injury, shouting as a way of enacting control – are called into question. Children suffer physical, pyshcological, and sexual abuse from coaches and fellow athletes in violation of Article 19 (Vertommen et al., 2015); early sport specialisation and year-round intensive training regimes pose risks to children’s health, wellbeing, and physical development that are protected under Articles 24 and 31 (David, 2005; Lang, 2010a; Turkeri-Bozkurt & Bulgu, 2020); pressure to win from coaches and parents has resulted in child athletes being forcibly doped (David, 2005) in contravention of Articles 19 and 33; child athletes may be removed from school and families to attend intensive training centres, sometimes against their will and where education may be limited, breaching Articles 9 and 28 (Hong, 2006; Wachs, 2009); and children are trafficked from the world’s most economically vulnerable communities into wealthy countries to play football or serve as camel jockeys (Anti-slavery International, 2010; Pattison, 2018). David (2005) identifies 37 of the 42 substantive UNCRC articles as having direct relevance to sport. Word limits prevent discussion of these so readers are referred to literature on children’s rights and sport (see Cervin, Kerr, Barker-Ruchti, Schubring, & Nunomura, 2017; David, 1999, 2005; Donnelly & Petherick, 2004; Eliasson, 2017; Grenfell & Rinehart, 2003; Hong, 2006; Smits, 2021; Turkeri-Bozkurt & Bulgu, 2020; Vanden Auweele, 2016; Wachs, 2009).

Almost 50 years after Ralbovsky (1974) first made the link between sport and human rights, sport is now a recognised site for human rights violations. Crucially, such violations occur regularly and often go unchallenged or unrecognised. Abusive coaching practices and the commodification of (child) athletes are often structurally and culturally embedded in sport and have come to be the dominant model for success; such behaviours are rationalised as “functional” and “normal” – not only leading to improved performance and, therefore, success but necessary for this (Lang, 2021).

Yet while interest in children’s rights in sport is increasing, there has still been relatively little academic work on children’s rights in sport and what does exist tends to focus on violations of children’s protection and developmental rights – the first two strands of the three Ps. Almost no work has centred on strand 3, children’s participation rights, and how coaches and other stakeholders might integrate these into sport. While there are some examples of sports organisations establishing children’s committees and/or distributing online surveys to garner children’s opinions, such initiatives are not widespread (Everley, 2020) and independent evaluation of these is rare. Equally importantly, gathering children’s views is not analogous with participation, as the UNCRC makes clear. Almost nothing is known about the extent to which children’s views are genuinely integrated into coaches’, clubs’ and organisations’ policies and practices but scholars suggest there is a significant gap between the provisions of the UNCRC and children’s real lives in sport (David, 2005; Eliasson, 2017). Personal experience from almost 20 years of working in this field also suggests that while things are slowly changing, integration of children’s opinions does not happen on any significant scale at any level of sport.

To better understand why sport fails to provide an environment in which children can fully exercise their right to participate, we need to consider prevailing attitudes towards children, particularly how they are constructed in relation to adults in sport (Brackenridge, 2001).

Developmentalist models of childhood and their influence on sport

The way we understand childhood impacts the way we treat children; different ways of conceptualising childhood result in different ideas about the status of children in society, their rights and responsibilities, and what legal protections/restrictions are placed on them. For example, if we consider childhood a time of innocence and virtue, this characterisation will influence the language we use around and about children; regulations relating to when and what children learn about sexuality; how long compulsory schooling lasts and what children should/should not learn; minimum ages for employment and political rights; understandings of children’s health and welfare standards etc. (Lee & Vagle, 2010; Moore, 2020).

In the Global North, developmental approaches have dominated understandings of childhood for a century (Gabriel, 2020; Prout & James, 1997). These models, which are underpinned by the disciplines of biology and psychology, are based on notions of so-called natural, immutable growth. Development is seen as unfolding sequentially over time, with universal, fixed stages to human growth and development that everyone must go through (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998). Childhood is one phase in this linear trajectory from child to adult. In this view, childhood is positioned as a period of immaturity, incompetence, and irrationality and, through steady progression through each stage, children are understood as incrementally and cumulatively evolving to develop competencies. The end of this journey is adulthood when, if children have fully and sequentially completed each stage through achievement of the key indicators or “norms” of development (commonly referred to as “milestones” (Gabriel, 2020); see (Hargis, 2018 for example), they are assumed to be mature, competent, and rational (Kehily, 2009).

This way of thinking also commonly aligns physiological development with cognitive and social-emotional development (Moore & Reynolds, 2018) so the development of cognitive and social-emotional competencies comes to be mapped against chronological age. Chronological age therefore becomes a key determinant of maturity and of which physical, cognitive, and social-emotional competencies individuals are expected to have developed by a certain age; children’s achievement of “appropriate” motor skills, cognitive, language, and social-emotional competencies thus serve as signs of “normal” developmental progression (Gabriel, 2020). This developmental lens, commonly known as the “ages and stages” approach, underpins UK government and health service guidance on children’s development; textbooks for trainee medical, childcare, and sport practitioners; parenting guidebooks; and is the basis for many diagnostic tools for assessing developmental disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (see Department for Education, 2020; Hargis, 2018; NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, 2017; Singh, Jung Yeh, & Blanchard, 2017; Smith, Cowie, & Blades, 2015).

Developmentalist ways of thinking about children inform ideas about the status of children in society, their rights and responsibilities, and what legal protections/restrictions are placed upon them. Most legislation, policy, and practice relating to children in the Global North is underpinned by developmentalist assumptions, for example: when children can gamble, buy alcohol, take contraception, vote, marry, or join the armed forces (Lee & Vagle, 2010; Moore, 2020).

Similarly, developmentalist understandings underpin much coaching practice. Influenced by sports science knowledge, coaches assess children based on their chronological age and the associated competencies they are expected to have developed. Many sports track skill acquisition along a progressive certification system, such as the Learn to Swim Stages awards within the Aquatic Skills Framework in swimming (Swim England, 2021). Coaches set training plans based on the age and developmental stage of children (see Dominic & Baxter-Jones, 2019). Talent identification programmes screen children’s skills against developmentally accepted standards to select (and reject) participants (UK Sport, n.d.). If chosen, “athletes are exposed to a carefully constructed developmental experience and their rates of progression are tracked to assess their suitability for the sport” (UK Sport, 2020). Athlete development frameworks, including the influential Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) model (Balyi & Hamilton, 2004), are also based on assumptions about there being a natural and predictable pattern to development. In this sense, sport, like other child-related settings, is a key location for the expression of dominant developmentalist ideas about childhood. In fact, the developmentalist model of childhood has become so entrenched that it is often regarded as “the” version of childhood and other ways of thinking about children’s development are rendered invisible.

Developmentalist understandings of childhood assume one version of childhood development exists for all and minimise the differences between and among children (Wyness, 2006). This naturalises understandings of “normal” and “abnormal” development. In doing so, it risks children whose development conforms to normative understandings being included (and, if their development is above what is expected, advanced), while consigning children whose development does not match assumed evolution or whose development is “delayed” to being excluded or even pathologised as “developmentally disabled” (Gabriel, 2020; Moore, 2020). Take the LTAD. This assumes there are particular times in a child’s development that are correlated with chronological age where it is functionally optimal to train for certain competencies (i.e.: motor skills, endurance, strength etc.) – so-called “windows of opportunity”. The embedded belief that all children go through these stages sequentially based on their maturity promotes notions of normative development by suggesting a single experience of development and of childhood for all children. In doing so, the LTAD risks writing off child athletes who enter sport later than the model suggests or who fail to successfully progress through the associated stages or miss their allocated “windows” for optimal development (Lang & Light, 2010).

An alternative model: the social construction of childhood

In the 1990s, childhood scholars began locating childhood in social constructionism (James et al., 1998; James & Prout, 1997). Rather than seeing childhood as a universal fact of biological immaturity with fixed stages through which children are expected to progress in a linear fashion, collecting competencies as they go, social constructionists regard childhood as “a specific structural and cultural component of many societies” (James & Prout, 1997, p. 8). In this view, childhood is recognised as a relative experience:

The biological facts of infancy are but the raw material upon which cultures work to fashion a particular version of ‘being a child’. Thus, to have been a child in seventeenth-century England was … a very different social experience from being a twentieth-century child, not only in terms of the material conditions of their existence but, more importantly, in relation to the duties, obligations, restraints, and expectations placed upon children. In brief, what a child is reflects the particularities of particular socio-cultural contexts.

(James & Jenks, 1996, p. 317)

This recognises that children and their experiences of childhood are not homogeneous, and the way a society perceives childhood differs across time, place, and culture (James & James, 2004). This allows for a plurality of experiences and avoids pathologising children as “other than” and, specifically, “lesser than” adults, as occurs in developmentalist thinking (Moore, 2020). Recognising childhood as a contested, socially constructed concept explains why, in English law, children are considered able to understand the difference between right and wrong for the purpose of criminal charges at age 10, but not competent to make decisions about having sex until age 16, and not competent to vote until 18. It also explains why it was once considered acceptable in England for children to labour in factories and mills – a practice now prohibited and considered child exploitation.

The tabula rasa construct

Evidence of the socially constructed nature of childhood can also be found in the multiple versions of childhood that co-exist. Here I discuss two common constructions of children in sport and how these effectively distance children from their participation rights; Sorin and Galloway (2006) provide an insightful discussion of other constructs, though not in a sporting context. Many of the common constructions of children derive from developmentalist conceptualisations of childhood. For example, children are positioned as incomplete, “apprentice adults” (Gabriel, 2020) in constant preparation for adulthood, their development a work in progress until adult maturity has been reached (Woodhead, 2009). This construct of tabula rasa, or “blank slate”, assumes children, by virtue of their youth and “innate” incompetency, know little but, with the appropriate (read: adult) guidance, can develop into competent, knowledgeable adults (Duchinsky, 2012). In sport, child athletes are often positioned in this way, as empty vessels waiting to be filled up by knowledgeable adult coaches (Lang, 2010b). Adults’ knowledge is privileged over that of child athletes, (re)producing and legitimising the subjectivities of the expert coach who controls the entire coaching process, and the unquestioning, compliant child athlete who is expected to do as they are told (Johns & Johns, 2000; Lang, 2010b). This obscures the knowledge of athletes and positions them as passive and incapable of making decisions, which can lead coaches to expect – and athletes to adhere to – practices that risk children’s physical and emotional health (Lang, 2010a, 2010b). Uprichard (2008) refers to this as a “future-oriented approach”, one that “places the onus of importance on that which the child will be rather than that which the child is”, effectively dismissing the child’s abilities now.

This way of thinking also defines children as “what adults are not” (Jenks, 1996, p. 3) – it is a deficit model of childhood based on the understanding that children are different to adults and defined in opposition to them by what they lack: compared with adults, children lack maturity, competence, rationality, knowledge, and the ability to look after themselves etc. As such, developmentalist thinking gives way to the understanding that there is a clear distinction between childhood and adulthood but also a clear hierarchy between children and adults, with adults positioned as superior and children inferior (James et al., 1998; Mayall, 2000). The associated assumption is that children need to be treated differently from adults and that adults should have corollary differing and lower expectations of children (Moore, 2020; Stainton-Rogers & Stainton-Rogers, 1998). Thus, adult control over children’s lives is justified and children’s experiences are tightly regulated and constrained:

Routinely, children find their daily lives shaped by statutes regulating the pacing and placing of their experience. Compulsory schooling, for example, restricts their access to social space and gerontocratic prohibitions limit their political involvement, sexual activity, entertainment and consumption. Children are further constrained not only by implicit socialising rules which work to set controls on behaviour and limits on the expression of unique intent, but also by customary practices which, through the institution of childhood, articulate the rights and duties associated with ‘being a child’.

(James & Jenks, 1996, p. 318)

The link made in developmentalist conceptualisations of childhood between physical maturity and cognitive and social-emotional (in)competencies further reinforces children’s low social status. There are clearly differences between children and adults; most children are physically smaller and weaker than most adults, and there are emotional, experiential, and capacity differences between adults and children. Yet in corelating children’s cognitive and social-emotional competencies with their smaller physical stature, children are infantilised in realms that go beyond the physiological, and beliefs about who children are, how they should behave, and how they should interact with adults come to be institutionalised as taken-for-granted “fact”:

Children’s physicality is what seems to characterise children’s minds and identities; throughout most of the twentieth century, at least in Western societies, the idea that children’s physical immaturity determines their social identities has been built into our way of thinking such that it assumes the status of fact.

(Wyness, 2006, p. 7)

When children are positioned as adults-in-training, on their way towards becoming an adult with adults’ rights and responsibilities, the implicit suggestion is that they do not yet have those rights and responsibilities – they are not yet complete citizens, subjects of rights (Tisdall, 2012). With lower social status and assumed competencies, children are distanced from their rights, positioned as passive, incompetent “becoming adults” rather than active, competent “being children” who are social actors in their own right (Mayall, 2000).

Positioning children as naturally incompetent and incapable not only denies them their rights but also naturalises the notion that they are unworthy of such rights as they lack the capacity to exercise them (Mayall, 2000; Tisdall, 2012). As Uprichard (2008, p. 306) notes, this interpretation “is not only troublesome to children, who seemingly cannot be competent at anything, but it is also troublesome to adults who are seemingly competent at everything!” It also means that adults tend to ignore or fail to recognise children’s attempts to resist or limit their exploitation, as researchers have found occurs (see Fontes & Plummer, 2010; Kitzinger, 1997; Wurtele, 2008), since the dominant adult-centred discourses do not recognise children’s strategies or capacity to resist (Kitzinger, 1997). Within sport, positioning children in this way may further explain why coaches are expected to have absolute authority over children and the coaching process, why many coaches and coach educators argue that control and discipline are key aspects of successful coaching (Cassidy, Jones, & Potrac, 2004; Fox, 2006), why coaches are positioned as higher in status and knowledge than child athletes (Johns & Johns, 2000), and why child athletes are expected to unquestioningly conform to coaches’ wishes (Claringbould, Knoppers, & Jacobs, 2015; Lang, 2010b). It may also explain why children’s rights – particularly children’s participation rights – have yet to take hold in sport.

The vulnerable child construct

A consequence of the notion that children are at a different, lower evolutionary stage to adults is the Romantic idea that they are deemed closer to humans’ “natural” state of innocence, an idea propounded by Rousseau (1991). Considered pure and in need of protecting from the adult world to retain this purity, children come to be seen as incapable of looking after themselves; they are vulnerable and dependent on adults for their needs, including the need for protection and, as a result, adults are positioned as their protector. It is upon this construction of childhood that the first child protection laws were established in Victorian England (Kitzinger, 1997).

In sport, the vulnerable child construct underpins legislation that established sports coaches and other adults in loco parentis as responsible for children’s welfare (see Department for Education, 2018), the introduction of safeguarding and child protection regulations into sports organisations, and specialist coaching courses and techniques for training youth athletes. It is also one of two key constructions of children present in the UNCRC: Article 19.1 codifies children’s rights to protection from “all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect, or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation including sexual abuse” (UN General Assembly, 1989).

Constructions of childhood as a time of innocence (re)produce protectionist ideologies that shape understandings of abuse. As I have argued elsewhere (Lang, 2021), concerns about child sexual abuse (CSA) have dominated the child protection in sport field in and beyond the UK for more than 20 years. In childhood, innocence is conflated with asexuality as children are positioned as naturally not developmentally “ready” to be sexual (Egan & Hawkes, 2008). As such, significant efforts are made to protect children from the “adult world” of sex (Moore & Reynolds, 2018) – the watershed in British TV prevents “unsuitable material … such as sexual content” from being shown before 9pm (OfCOM, 2021); age restrictions apply to accessing pornographic content and to sex education classes in schools; and engaging in sexual activity is criminalised until the age at which society has deemed a young person “capable”. Sexual abuse of a child represents a transgression of this innocence and thus is commonly positioned as a uniquely traumatic, damaging event, one that “steals” a child’s innocence forever as the abused child is “tainted” with knowledge and experience beyond what is expected for their age (Kitzinger, 1992; Moore & Reynolds, 2018). As such, CSA is commonly portrayed as a crime against childhood itself in a way that other forms of abuse are not. For this reason, CSA is often positioned as the “worst” of all crimes (Jewkes & Wykes, 2012; Kitzinger, 1997), garners more media headlines, outrage, sympathy, and policy attention than other forms of child abuse, and dominates much safeguarding work in and beyond sport (Lang, 2021; (O’Dell & Reavey, 2001). This is not to suggest that CSA is not a horrific crime or that it is not potentially damaging or traumatic, nor is it to downplay the challenges often faced by CSA “survivors” in making their voice heard by the authorities and having their experiences acknowledged (Tucker, 2011).⁴ Rather, it is to acknowledge that this is only one (albeit the most dominant) version of the story and, however unpalatable it may be to some, does not represent the reality for all who experience abuse or even all who experience CSA (see Kitzinger, 1997; Smith & Woodiwiss, 2016; Woodiwiss, 2014). CSA and other forms of child maltreatment can only be understood in relation to available discourses, which currently frame child maltreatment, and CSA in particular, exclusively in terms of risk, vulnerability, and harm (Plummer, 2001; Smith & Woodiwiss, 2016; Woodiwiss, 2014). As others note (Egan & Hawkes, 2009; Smith & Woodiwiss, 2016), this has not always been the case. Rather it is a representation of society’s changing understanding of childhood and of related changing beliefs about childhood sexual innocence rather than an immutable “fact”. As such, the current meta-narrative that positions CSA as “the worst” form of abuse and a “fetishistic glorification of the ‘innate innocence’ of childhood” (Kitzinger, 1997, p. 164) represents only one, albeit dominant, version of many possible accounts. This meta-narrative, particularly when the issue at hand is a valance issue, as is CSA (see Lang & Pinder, 2016), serves to silence other understandings of maltreatment and limit whose voices are heard and recognised (Smith & Woodiwiss, 2016; Woodiwiss, 2014):

… these stories … risk silencing the voices of those whose experiences do not fit … one of the dangers of a single theory or a singular story is that it cannot encompass the lives of everyone: some (and quite possibly very many) will not only be unable to recognise their own lives in mega theories or single stories, but the narrative frameworks that accompany such theorising or storytelling serve to silence many … and deny them a narrative framework within which to make sense of their experiences at the same time as they claim to give them a voice.

(Woodiwiss, 2014, pp. 139–140)

When considered critically, then, the paramountcy accorded to CSA as a result of understandings of “innate” childhood innocence marginalises other forms of and different experiences of abuse. This potentially makes it more difficult for child “victims” to disclose non-sexual abuse as they may not recognise their own experiences as abuse since they do not align with dominant narratives of what constitutes abuse, or they may not feel others will consider their experiences abuse. Equally, it may make it more difficult for adults to identify behaviours that constitute non-sexual abuse or to label such behaviours abuse given their divergence from the meta-narrative of child abuse (Lang, 2021; Lang & Pinder, 2016; O’Dell & Reavey, 2001). This could explain why sports authorities have failed to take allegations of non-sexual forms of abuse seriously (see BBC Sport,2021), and why sports authorities are more likely to report CSA compared with emotional/psychological abuse to safeguarding services (see Hartill & Lang, 2018), despite emotional/psychological being the most prevalent form of abuse (Vertommen et al., 2015).

The agentic child construct

Many scholars of childhood also now recognise children as active social agents in their own lives. Prout and James (1997) argued this way of thinking about children emerged in the 1990s and represented a new paradigm: the “new” sociology of childhood.⁵ Central to this new paradigm is the understanding that children are agentic and “must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live” (Prout & James, 1997, p. 8). In the 1990s, this was a novel idea; the notion of children as active agents first appeared just a few years earlier in the UNCRC. Importantly, conceptualising children as agentic offers new ways of thinking about children’s involvement in the world and brings them closer to being able to access their participation rights.

Recognition of children as agentic has transformed many child-related settings; children’s opinions are now given appropriate weight during child custody hearings, for example, and when children are undergoing medical treatment. However, the understanding that children are active agents in their own lives has yet to make significant inroads in sport and children’s participation rights are not often actualised in this setting (David, 2005; Everley, 2020). The agentic child construction appears in the UNCRC: Article 12.1 states that:

State Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

(UN General Assembly, 1989, my emphasis)

In other words, children should be able not only to give their opinion but to expect that opinion to be listened to and, potentially, to be acted upon. As such, protecting children and young people from violence and abuse is only one part of protecting and promoting children’s rights. This encapsulates why a children’s rights approach has so much potential for sport. As noted earlier, protecting children from violence and abuse has been the central driver behind most safeguarding initiatives globally in sport over the past 20 years (Lang, 2021; Lang & Hartill, 2015). While such developments are positive, they conform to and reinforce the construction of children as dependent and vulnerable which, as noted earlier, is incompatible with seeing children as agentic and thus inadvertently distances children from their participation rights (Lyle, 2014; Mayall, 2000). The actualisation of children’s rights as enshrined in the UNCRC would still mean children are protected from abuse and other harms perpetrated against them. But empowering children by giving them a voice that is acted upon enhances children’s personal development and learning and can better protect them from harm, leading to improved outcomes for all (Lansdown, 2001). In challenging traditional developmentalist perspectives of children as incompetent and vulnerable, encouraging children to give their opinions and have agency over their own lives may also begin to transform adults’ views about their capacities. This is crucial given that adults who subscribe to traditional developmentalist conceptualisations of childhood are less likely to embrace children’s rights (Lyle, 2014).

The right to participate has been deemed so important to actualising children’s other rights that it was identified by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child as the fundamental principle underpinning the UNCRC (UNICEF, n.d., p. 1). In other words, the fundamental values of all children’s rights are enmeshed throughout the participation agenda and, therefore, are crucial to ensuring children’s other rights are respected. However, as Lansdown (2001, p. v) notes, “listening to children and considering seriously what they have to say can hardly be said to have been a frequent hallmark of interpersonal relationships or societal organisation”. Meanwhile, David (2005, p. 193) notes that “the context of competitive sport does not necessarily provide a favourable environment for young athletes to exercise this right”. More than 15 years on, David’s (2005) point remains.

Some sports organisations have enacted measures to allow children to express their views but these are not widespread (Everley, 2020) and too many still focus on expression rather than active engagement; there are important differences between children having the opportunity to articulate their views and those views being heard and acted upon (Archard & Skivenes, 2009). Giving voice is not enough; enabling agency by recognising children as active citizens of inherent equal worth to adults is necessary for full participation, yet it remains rare for children and young people to be consulted let alone involved in decision-making in sport.

Developing the participatory agenda: Hart’s Ladder of Participation

Models of children’s participation can help counter the undervaluing of children and their opinions and help adults understand what full participation rights look like in practice. The Ladder of Participation (Hart, 1992) has been especially influential here but has yet to feature in the sports coaching or child welfare in sport literature. Hart’s ladder model has eight rungs, each representing an ascending level of decision-making agency. Rungs are named, from lowest participatory level to highest:

1. Manipulation

2. Decoration

3. Tokenism

4. Assigned but informed

5. Consulted and informed

6. Adult-initiated, shared decisions with children

7. Child-initiated and directed

8. Child-initiated, shared decisions with adults

(Hart, 1992, p. 8)

Two zones span the ladder – rungs 4–8 are zoned “degrees of participation” and demonstrate different but valid levels of engagement with children, with level 8 being the highest and most participatory. Rungs 1–3 are zoned “non-participatory” because they do not offer children genuine participation. Below I illustrate how the different levels on the Ladder of Participation manifest in practice in sport.

Non-participatory

• Rung 1 – Manipulation: This is when adults use the guise of participation with children. In sport, examples include having children design a poster on an aspect of safeguarding but without the children being informed of the issues and, thus, not fully understanding them; or adults consulting with children via a questionnaire about what they like/dislike about their club but providing no feedback on this or on how the children’s opinions were used.

• Rung 2 – Decoration: This is when adults co-opt children into a cause but without pretending to genuinely involve them (unlike with manipulation). Examples could be inviting children to attend a club’s executive committee meeting but without them knowing why or having any input into the meeting’s organisation; or providing them with sports kit branded with a safeguarding slogan that they know nothing about and had no say in deciding.

• Rung 3 – Tokenism: This is when children appear to have been given a chance to express their views but have actually had little/no involvement in planning or communicating around this and little/no chance of forming their own opinions. Examples could be inviting children to speak at a safeguarding conference or sit on a youth panel without them being fully prepared for this to sufficiently understand, in an age-appropriate way, the issues, or without it being made clear which peers they are representing.

Some degree of participation

• Rung 4 – Assigned but informed: This is when children are assigned to a project or position rather than coming up with the idea themselves but may, if they are enabled to learn about the project/role and engage in critical reflection about it, feel a sense of ownership over it. An example could be a child being asked to sit on a youth panel. Their role would be thoroughly explained to them, they would be allowed to ask questions about it, do their own investigation into the role to decide themselves how best to carry it out. Then when they carry out the role, they would reflect on what they have done and learn from this.

• Rung 5 – Consulted and informed: This is when a project is devised and run by adults but children are invited to give their opinion on it and the way these opinions are used are explained to them. An example could be a welfare officer devising a code of conduct for child athletes then explaining the plan to the child and asking the child for their views on it. For this level of participation to be met, the welfare officer would have to take the child’s opinion seriously and, while they ultimately make the decision on the code of conduct, they feed back to the child what changes were made as a result of their opinion.

• Rung 6 – Adult-initiated, shared decisions with children: This is when a project is devised by adults but children are included in the decision-making process. An example could be a club running a course for youth members on a safeguarding issue. To meet this level of participation, the club would involve the youth members in every stage of planning the course – who will attend the course, who will deliver it, the topic(s) that would be covered, the activities planned etc. The club would make no assumptions about what the young people want.

• Rung 7 – Child-initiated and directed: This is when a project is devised and led by children with no adult interference or direction. For example, a young person may decide they wish to initiate and run a youth safeguarding committee. The adults may be aware of the plan but allow it to develop and be led solely by children and young people. Hart (1992) considers this the second most participatory level because children often do not tell adults about their ideas as they do not trust adults to ask for their involvement out of fear the adults will take over.

• Rung 8 – Child-initiated, shared decisions with adults: This is when a project is devised and led by children but they feel confident enough in their role that they value getting the input of adults without fearing the adults will take over. Expanding the above example, children would initiate and run the youth safeguarding committee but would ask adults for input if they feel they need it, and adults would act as sounding boards rather than intervene without being asked or take over the committee or its activities. Hart (1992) considers this more participatory than rung 7 as it involves children trusting adults.

The Ladder of Participation is a useful starting point for determining the extent to which sports organisations are (or are not) including children and how they could do so in a more participatory way. The idea is that children’s participation should always feature somewhere in the “degrees of participation” zone (rungs 4–8). Importantly, however, all children do not have to be involved at the top level of participation at all times. Choice and capacity are crucial. As Hart (1992, p. 11) notes, “Different children at different times might prefer to perform with varying degrees of involvement or responsibility”. Equally, the capacity of each child to participate will vary based on the child’s development – a 5-year-old child may be able to draw a picture to express what they like about their coach while an older teen may be able to devise and direct an entire research project on the same topic.

So little is known about sports organisations’ participatory initiatives that the extent and level of children’s participation is largely unknown (Everley, 2020). There are likely to be pockets of good practice⁶ but many sports organisations and staff are likely doing little to engage young people and many more may be implementing initiatives that would be designated non-participatory according to Hart’s model. Certainly, child-initiated projects (rungs 7–8) are rare even in youth work settings, where Hart’s model has been used for several decades. As such, it is unlikely that such projects are occurring in sport where Hart’s model has, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be used. As such, sport still has a long way to go before it can say it is fully integrating children’s participatory rights. It is hoped the ladder of participation model provides some incentive for adults in sport to better engage with this important issue.

Conclusion

The “new” sociology of childhood has helped establish the notion that childhood is socially constructed, heterogeneous, and culturally specific, allowing for more diverse and potentially inclusive understandings of children’s experiences, including those in sport (Prout & James, 1997). It has also helped advance the children’s rights movement, shifting the emphasis away from protectionist approaches that position children as predominantly incompetent and vulnerable towards increased recognition of children’s agency (Prout & James, 1997). As such, this lens, which has yet to feature in the sports coaching or child welfare in sport literature, not only offers a theoretical explanation of children’s traditional low social status but also suggests ways of redressing the imbalance of under-valuing children by propagating conceptualisations of children as agentic that are better aligned with them actualising all their rights (Kitzinger, 1997; Lyle, 2014; Mayall, 2000).

However, more than 30 years after the UNCRC came into force, developmentalist understandings of childhood still dominate in sport, reinforcing protectionism and limiting children’s participation rights in this context (Lang, 2021). Constructed as incompetent and vulnerable, children’s sporting activities remain largely determined and managed by adults such as coaches and parents, who determine what they do, when, and how – what technique they use, how often they train, what training to do, what diet to follow etc. (Brackenridge, 2001; Lang, 2010b).

While there have been many positive and much-needed advances in safeguarding and protecting children in sport in recent decades, sport is only now beginning to make concerted efforts to incorporate the participation agenda. In part this is due to dominant constructions of children as tabula rasa – lacking in the competencies assumed of adults and therefore incapable of having much of use to say – and vulnerable – and thus dependent on adults to protect them and to develop knowledge worthy of be listened to (Mayall, 2000; Tisdall, 2012; Uprichard, 2008). These constructions perpetuate traditional notions of children as “lesser than” adults, which reinforce children’s low status and disempowerment (Moore, 2020). These seemingly natural ideas also make it easy to see why coaches, policymakers, and researchers often fail to recognise children as agentic. Of course, abuse is never the “victim’s” fault and recognising children’s full agentic capacity alone will not erase abuse in any of its forms. However, recognising that current understandings of children and childhood result from limiting developmentalist conceptualisations and highlighting alternative ways of thinking about children and their capacities has the potential to positively transform children’s sporting lives. As well as empowering children, allowing them full access to all their rights, and enhancing their personal development and learning, it could also make it easier for adults and children to recognise and respond to all forms of abuse – simultaneously enhancing children’s right to protection as well as to development and participation (i.e.: advancing the “three Ps”).

In sum, reconceptualising childhood and actualising children’s participation rights in sport are crucial to effectively protecting them and promoting their overall development and welfare (David, 2005; Lansdown, 2001). This, in turn, is central to ensuring children’s legal rights as stated in the UNCRC are fully implemented, to offering the best possible sporting experience for all, and to ensuring good sports governance. Embedding children’s rights in sport means more than protecting children from violence and abuse; it involves granting them their full participation rights – enabling children’s agency by recognising them as active citizens of inherent equal worth to adults and including their views in all aspects of the sporting experience. Hart’s (1992) Ladder of Participation provides a useful heuristic to enable sports stakeholders to understand how children’s participation rights may be enacted in sport in a meaningful way. As such, it is a useful addition to the sports coaching and child welfare in sport literature.

However, this and all participatory models should be seen as a starting point for action to increase children’s participation in matters that affect them in sport and should be included alongside concerted action that challenges children’s low social status. Educating children about their rights is one part of this. If we are to truly begin to dismantle dominant conceptualisations of children that reinforce their passive, low status and distance them from their rights, adult stakeholders such as coaches, child welfare officers, and sports scientists also need to be made aware of critiques of developmentalist assumptions about childhood, the impact of these on how children are conceptualised in and beyond sport, and alternative, more inclusive approaches.

Equally, researchers in sport must move beyond developmentalist assumptions of children’s capacities and include children in research as researchers and active decision-makers rather than only participants or recipients of research. Much more work also needs to be done with coaches and other adults in sport about how they understand children’s rights, especially their participation rights, to understand the strengths and limitations in their understandings and a way forward to better including children in the coaching process. Finally, sports organisations also need to make their participation initiatives (or lack thereof) available for independent external scrutiny and work with sociologists of sport and/or childhood to collaborate on initiatives aimed at enhancing children’s right to be heard. Only through these steps can the participation agenda be advanced over the next decade as successfully as the protection agenda has advanced in the last.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the editors of this Special Issue for their thoughtful comments and their support in drafting this paper, and to the two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful comments helped clarify my thinking and improved my first draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. “Rule 50” of the Olympic Charter prohibits “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda” (International Olympic Committee, 2020a, p. 90) at Olympic venues.

2. This does not refer to children’s right to participate in sport. While children do indeed have this right – UNCRC Article 31 articulates the child’s right to leisure, which encompasses sport – the participation rights I am referring to relate to Article 12 and children’s rights to participate in decision-making, in this case about sport (see Lansdown, 2001).

3. Rather, the UNCRC refers to “leisure activities”, of which sport is one (David, 2005).

4. Indeed, these points are also true of non-sexual abuse; these forms of abuse can also have serious and traumatic short- and long-term consequences for those affected (Norman et al. 2012; Spinazzola et al. 2014). Moreover, because behaviours that commonly constitute physical and psychological/ emotional abuse are often normalised in sport, sports “insiders” often do not recognise the behaviour as abusive, making it difficult for these “survivors” to get their abuse acknowledged.

5. Also referred to as Childhood Studies.

6. One such example is the “Listening Club” initiative established by the Rugby Football League in England in 2017. The initiative encourages clubs to hold regular meetings with children and young people to find out what they enjoy about the club and what they could improve (see https://www.rugby-league.com/governance/safeguarding). Little information on the initiative is available publicly but it appears to sit around rung 5 or 6 on Hart’s ladder since it was devised by adults and the extent of children’s involvement in decision-making as a result of the initiative is unclear.