Reported to whom, exactly?

How we work

Why safeguarding sits on the front page

Sports instruction places an adult and a child together repeatedly, often with no other adult present, sometimes involving physical contact that the technique genuinely requires, and in settings where ordinary oversight is at its thinnest: changing facilities, cars on the way to a competition, residential camps. Those are simply the working conditions of the activity, and they happen to be identical to the conditions in which harm occurs. Almost no website in this sector mentions any of it, which is itself worth noticing, because the discomfort of raising the subject is exactly what makes it difficult for a child to raise it too.

Two arrangements do most of the work. The first is the criminal record extract intended for activities involving contact with minors, which exists precisely so that a parent or an organisation can ask without it being an accusation. Asking should be routine, it should be asked of everyone who will be alone with a child rather than only of the person who seems least familiar, and a provider who bristles at the question has answered it. The second is a named route by which a participant, a parent or a guardian can raise a concern without it passing through the person the concern is about. That one is structural rather than courteous. A complaint which must be reported to its own subject is not a complaint anybody makes, and an organisation whose only reporting line runs through the coach has, in practice, no reporting line at all.

Around those sit the ordinary disciplines. Supervision matched to age, level and the genuine risk of the activity, with a higher standard of care owed to minors, which sometimes means declining a group size or a setting where adequate supervision is not possible even when the work is wanted. Physical contact necessary for technique or safety explained before it happens, so that a participant learns what ordinary instruction looks like and is better placed to recognise something that is not. Changing rooms, travel and residential activities organised so that an adult is not alone with an individual child where it can be avoided, with the arrangements communicated to parents in advance. And a clear limit: instruction is not a healthcare act, so injury, health conditions and diet belong with a physician, and coaching qualifications are stated as what they are rather than presented as protected professional titles, which in Belgium they generally are not.