Millions of Australian kids take part in some form of community sport each and every week.
And so they should. It’s proven that sport has a ton of benefits when it comes to kids’ mental, physical and social wellbeing. For kids though, the main
reason they play sport is: “because it’s fun.”
But when the sport environment is no longer physically or emotionally safe, that fun can rapidly disappear.
In recent years, cases of violence against children in sport in Australia have garnered a lot of national media attention. A recent national study by Victoria University looked at the frequency of experiences of violence against children in community sport in Australia. It’s the largest study of its kind to date and found that 82% of respondents had experienced some form of violence while playing community sport as a child in Australia. And just this week a Canberra man was sentenced to 13 years jail for systemic historical abuse against six junior athletes. Unfortunately, it won’t be the last case of this kind we hear about.
On Thursday 1 June, Play By The Rules (in association with Sport Integrity Australia) will launch a new campaign called ‘Start To Talk’ and unveil some new online resources designed to help keep our kids safe in sport.
To find out more, we caught up with Morgan Lander, an independent consultant for Play By The Rules since 2006 who has assisted Sport Australia in child-safe risk management, complaint handling and member protection since 2011. Morgan has spent more than a decade with NSW Sport & Recreation in areas that primarily involved child protection and safeguarding children in sport, Morgan set up his own safeguarding consultancy company, Not On My Watch. Morgan is an independent Member Protection Information Officer for various national sports, State Sporting Organisations and sits on the board of the Sport Access Foundation.