Australian Catholic University has collaborated with Hockey Australia to deliver strategies on how to best safeguard children in sport.
In a web seminar hosted by the Institute of Child Protection Studies at ACU, its director Professor Daryl Higgins said the National Centre on Action on Child Sexual Abuse had given the institute $3 million to conduct research on continuous quality improvement in safeguarding at Hockey Australia and other national sporting organisations.
Higgins said the research was conducted largely in two areas with one being the participation of children and young people in child-safe organisational practices.
The other area of interest was looking into the safeguarding capabilities of staff and volunteers to prevent and respond to organisational child sexual assault.
The study was done in part through two surveys, one focusing on children’s safety and the other on adults’ abilities to protect children.
“The surveys helped to evaluate the effectiveness of Hockey Australia’s Safe Hockey framework by measuring both children and young people’s perceptions of safety in hockey,” Higgins said.
Higgins was chief investigator of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, which surveyed 8,503 randomly selected Australians across a range of ages and showed more than one in four, or 28.5 per cent, of Australians had experienced sexual abuse as children.
Institute of Child Protection Studies senior researcher Douglas Russell says the findings from the maltreatment study are not specific to sport, but other domestic and international research has helped to identify the prevalence of violence in sport.
The studies showed 82 per cent of surveyed athletes suffered some form of interpersonal violence, with 76 per cent being victims of psychological violence and 66 per cent suffering physical violence.
Russell said the studies did not explicitly focus on sexual abuse but showed 38 per cent of participants suffered it in their sport.
“Some other research in the sport sector specifically has identified how every participant that they researched had experienced violence from a coach at one point or another,” he said.
