Kate Russell

The Football Association’s Child Protection in Football Research Project 2002–2006:Rationale, design and first year results

In common with most sport organizations, the English Football Association has come relatively recently to the issue of child protection. Abuses of various kinds have been known about in the sport for many years but, until the late 1990s, very little systematic work was undertaken to address them. The launch of a Child Protection Strategy by the English FA in May 2000 reflected recognition by those in authority within the sport that child abuse and protection were properly the subject of football policy and should become embedded in all aspects of the affiliated game. In addition to adopting child protection, the then-Chief Executive Officer of the FA made a commitment to evidence-based policy in his strategic plan for the game. In line with this commitment, the FA commissioned a 5 year study of the impact of child protection on the game, the first year of which constituted an audit of the state of child protection in the affiliated game. Data were collected through 11 internet surveys, 32 club case studies, over 200 interviews with various stakeholders and an analysis of 132 case files for child abuse referrals. This paper sets out the context of child protection in sport more generally and the background to the FA’s child protection research project in particular. It also presents selected first year results for key stakeholder groups.

Children in football: seen but not heard

Although the academic analysis of association football continues to proliferate, the experiences of children in this context appear to be of marginal concern to researchers and policy makers. Drawing on developments in the sociology of childhood and a review of football literature, this article analyses data from the first year of the English Football Associations (FA) Child Protection Research Project, a five-year programme commissioned by the FA in order to assess the impact of their child protection policies and measures in both the professional and amateur game. The article argues for a new agenda for football-related research which challenges the problematic assumptions of many adult stakeholders, and which prioritizes research strategies that empower young football players at all levels of the sport.

Measuring the impact of child protection through activation states.

Child protection (CP) has risen to the top of the UK sports policy agenda in the past four years and the Football Association has invested in this major strategy as part of its commitment to ‘use the power of football to build a better future’ (Football Association, 2000a). Evidencing the impact of child protection is, however, a complex task, exacerbated by the dearth of measurement tools that exist for this purpose in sport. This article presents a new model of ‘Activation States’ that has been designed and used to measure shifts in football culture as child protection has begun to impact upon the sport. The model is used to map changes over time related to the knowledge, feelings, actions and discourses of key stakeholders in football. The research for which the model was designed is a longitudinal study, commissioned by the English Football (soccer) Association, on the impact of the organisations child protection strategy on the culture of soccer. Sample data from the project are used to illustrate the model and to examine its potential and limitations as a tool for measuring impacts in child protection and other social inclusion themes.