Last week was the Ann Craft Trust’s annual Safeguarding Adults Week, during which they bring safeguarding professionals from across the UK together to share expertise and raise awareness of important topics. This year, the theme was prevention. Each day, they held free online seminars with safeguarding experts on various topics, including preventing abuse in sport, forced marriage, brain injuries in football, grief support, and more. I was invited to lead an online seminar on day one, titled ‘A Holistic Approach to the Prevention of Abuse in Sport’.
I was joined by around 80 attendees from the Ann Craft Trust’s safeguarding in sport network. I opened the seminar by giving a background of my personal story as a former fighter, athlete-survivor and advocate and how this led me to conduct research on sexual violence in Muay Thai as part of my master’s degree in Sports Ethics & Integrity. After discussing the findings of my study, I used the socioecological model to illustrate the importance of a holistic, multi-layered and collaborative approach to safeguarding, in which everyone has a role to play. I emphasised the need to centre survivor perspectives in order to create policies and procedures that cater to their needs, and the importance of upholding survivor-centred principles in order to do that in a safe, respectful and trauma-informed way. This included tips for survivor-centred engagement, sharing survivors’ stories, and creating supportive spaces for survivor speakers. Crucially, I also emphasised the need to compensate survivor speakers for their contributions. Before closing out the session with a Q&A, I gave some examples of harmful comments I’d received as a survivor speaker from safeguarding officers, psychologists, teammates and friends, and discussed with participants how to provide feedback in a more sensitive, positive way.
Two days later, I attended the Ann Craft Trust’s Safeguarding Adults conference in Nottingham, which provided a full-day of insightful sessions. This provided an opportunity to connect in-person with some of the people who’d attended my online seminar, including Ieuan Watkins, fellow Trustee board member at Safe Sport International. Ieuan has many years of experience in safeguarding in sport, has led safeguarding advancement in UK cricket, and was also the trainer for an advanced course I recently took part in for safeguarding leads in sport by the Ann Craft Trust.
The conference began with a talk by Paralympic gold medalist Richard Whitehead on how to increase access to sports for people with disabilities. Mhairi Maclennan, CEO of Kyniska Advocacy, then gave a keynote speech on her journey as a survivor of abuse by her athletics coach and a safe sport advocate, emphasising the importance of a person-centred approach which treats people as individuals, not athletes, products or statistics.
A stand-out session came from Duncan Craig, CEO of We Are Survivors, a charity supporting male survivors of sexual abuse. Duncan shared his own story as a survivor while also describing his work in raising awareness, consulting on storylines of sexual abuse against men and boys for television, and working in both prevention and response.
The day concluded with a presentation and performance by Magpie Dance, a charity running inclusive dance programmes for people with learning disabilities. Their performance, ‘Human Not Statistic’ reinforced the need to centre the needs, perspectives and empowerment of impacted people while challenging misconceptions to foster meaningful inclusion. It was a fitting reminder that people need to be at the heart of safeguarding.
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