Last month, I started writing something and it quickly became apparent that it was more than a blog post. So I kept working on it and it turned into a research paper, which I submitted to the sociology blog Hockey in Society, who published it last week. I certainly don’t expect everyone to read 3400 words on safe sport in Canadian amateur hockey, so I’ve provided some brief framing on why I was driven to write about it. However, the framing that I’ve included doesn’t get into the critical thinking aspects. In my paper, I present and analyze data that I collected from PSOs/NSO, discuss why the current situation is a problem, and then present solutions. I’ve included the link to my paper for anyone who is interested.
Table of Contents
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- Introduction
- Framing the Problem
- Policy Accessibility
- Failure of Current Policy Solutions
- Safe Sport Requires Proactivity
- Conclusion
Framing
The concept of “safe sport” was first coined in response to the sexual abuse that was uncovered in sports in the 1980s; it’s impossible to know when, in the history of modern sport, predators began using sport as a cover for abuse. When these abuses were finally taken seriously by authorities (both legal and sporting), “safe sport” was coined to refer to the physical safety of participants.
In my first draft of this post, I wrote that “safe sport was originally an idea that everyone could get behind”. While this is true, I feel the need to qualify it: everyone understood a need for safe sport protections but Sport Organizations quarrelled with governments over scope and jurisdiction. It’s impossible to say that “Safe Sport 1.0” (from the 1980s onward) didn’t work; how can you measure the number of crimes that didn’t happen? Moreover, we don’t (and will never have) sufficient data to make that determination. But the evidence suggests these measures were at best moderately successful and at worst, a failure.
Now the world is moving on. Over the last decade, society has slowly woken up to the injustices that have been perpetrated against people because of their race, religion, gender, or sexuality. It was only a matter of time before this bled over into sport. I won’t presume to speak for other sports but social movements were always likely to come into conflict with hockey’s natural conservatism. An unrelated indicator of hockey’s conservatism is that there are still a handful of NHL teams, fully professional entities with payrolls approaching a hundred million dollars, who don’t employ anyone in the field of data science/performance analytics. Safe sport is primarily an issue in amateur sport but I use this point to illustrate the general culture of North American hockey. Since the worldwide protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder in May, Hockey Canada has released a single-paragraph statement; most provincial hockey organizations didn’t make any kind of statement. When the NHL resumed play in July, they were roundly criticized for the tepid quality of their racial justice statements [1, 2, 3].
So what does any of this have to do with safe sport? Our constituents who are part of racial, religious, or gender/sexuality minorities are asking for more than words; they are asking to be shown a pathway to success within the sport. As the world moves on, sport must do the same. We cannot simply guarantee that our participants will be safe from physical abuse and expect that to be enough. We need to take steps to secure the emotional and psychological safety of our participants and provide sport environments that are free from discrimination and harassment.
The concept of safe sport is important to me but I also believe this is more than a moral imperative. I truly believe that our current approach to safe sport is an existential threat to the place of hockey in Canada’s sporting landscape. The cost of hockey is rising, the demographics of Canada are changing, and the upper-echelons of the sport are still predominantly, if not exclusively, white and male. It is not pre-ordained that hockey must be Canada’s most popular sport and if the sport’s governing bodies are not in a position to guarantee safety for all, then hockey may become a niche sport over the few decades.
This is the place from which I approach the problem of safe sport in Canadian amateur hockey. I engage the NCCP competency of critical thinking by comparing what is currently available around safe sport and our current practices with the changes in social attitudes and scholarly knowledge on the subject. Then, I evaluate and recommend options for further action by stakeholders in the sport.
Link to my paper: