From compliance to culture in safeguarding: What really protects children and athletes in sport

Almost every sports organisation can now point to a safeguarding policy, a code of conduct, a reporting channel and a designated safeguarding officer. Far fewer can show that any of it protects children and athletes when protection is actually tested. This article is about that gap, between visible compliance and real safety in sport, and why closing it has become central to the legitimacy of sports governance.

Adopting a rights-based approach grounded in instruments such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention^[1], it argues that safeguarding in sport should be judged not by the existence of policies but by their capacity to prevent harm, enable disclosure, and deliver a credible remedy when prevention fails. It treats athletes and minors not as objects of welfare but as rights-holders whose dignity and safety institutions have an enforceable duty to defend.

Using the Tree-Iceberg model developed by Bastianon (explained more fully below), and drawing on the Italian safeguarding framework, the official position of the Italian Association of Sport and Exercise Psychology (A.I.P.S.), and the child safeguarding frameworks of FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, the article shows why formal compliance is necessary but never sufficient.

What determines whether a child is safe is the submerged institutional culture beneath the paperwork, and the decisive test of that culture is how an organisation responds when harm occurs, through an effective, trauma-informed remedy or a second source of harm. Sport can be a space of dignity, growth and fairness, it concludes, only when enforced compliance is matched by proactive remedy and a genuine culture of responsibility.

Please note that the author works in safeguarding at Centro Sportivo Italiano (CSI), a national grassroots sports-promotion body, and draws throughout on the Italian statutory framework and the official position of A.I.P.S. in this article.

This article looks at:

• Safeguarding as a constitutional requirement of sports governance
  • Increasing external legal and regulatory oversight on the sports sector
  • From a welfare approach to a rights-based duty
• The Tree-Iceberg Model: Visible compliance and the culture beneath it
  • The visible layer of compliance
  • The submerged layer of organisational power
  • Increased obligations towards minors in sport
• How institutions respond when safeguarding fails: Remedy as the decisive test
  • Remedy as process and outcome
  • Internal and external pathways to remedy
• The A.I.P.S. official position and the professionalisation of safeguarding
  • Safeguarding as a collective professional duty
  • The Safeguarding Officer as an independent governance function
• FIFA’s child safeguarding framework
• Safeguarding must be embedded in organisational culture to be effective
• Instilling a culture of safeguarding in sport