Safeguarding from the Global South: G4CI’s Perspective on Safe Sport 2026
By Nicole Pavier Carr
Sitting in the auditorium at the Safe Sport 2026 conference in May in Cape Town alongside delegates from 62 other countries, as a survivor of athletic abuse and as a representative for Gymnasts for Change International was both nerve wracking and empowering. When you have lived through systemic harm within sport and have dedicated as many hours fighting to reform it as we have at G4CI, attending a global gathering on athlete protection was an intense exercise in grounding myself, expanding learning and opportunities to connect with others within sport.
The conference underscored a truth we fight for daily: safe sport is not a corporate compliance exercise or a face-saving mechanism. It is an urgent, complex human rights issue. Safeguarding should not simply exist as a set of policies imposed from the top, it is an active exercise and should be carried out from the margins. Athletes (most often children) are human beings first, entitled to physical, psychological, and social protection. Yet across disciplines around the world - from gymnastics to football – sport still continuously prioritises medals and institutional reputation over human dignity and care.
The Illusion of Protection
Each session and day had a different focus, but a key topic was "safeguarding washing": the practice of rewarding organisations for surface-level compliance, such as publishing codes of conduct while providing zero real protection on the ground. These top-down frameworks create phantom policies: rules that look good on paper but evaporate when an athlete steps within a system that is not capable of protecting them in practice. It is key that safeguarding is targeted from both the top down and from the bottom up, while simultaneously expanding outwards from the grassroots and into the rural and fringe communities furthest from the centre of the sports system. It was therefore impressive to see and hear about programmes at the conference, in rural areas of key African countries - leading by example.
In traditional ‘safeguarding environments’, institutions rely on the resilience trap, praising silence as "mental toughness" while – as I know myself - athletes underneath are paying a heavy somatic tax, existing in a state of chronic physical and emotional exhaustion. When athletes eventually break and walk away, institutions hide behind the deficit myth, claiming the individual athlete lacked "grit." In truth, leaving is an act of self-preservation to protect your body and mind from a continuously abusive culture.
Safeguarding in Context: Global Lessons
One of the biggest lessons for me from the conference was the perspective it offered from the Global South. It opened my eyes to how different safeguarding can look around the world and how these perspectives are key when looking at protecting gymnasts globally. Listening to the presenters helped me comprehend in real terms that safeguarding cannot afford to be a rigid Western import; it must adapt to local realities. The conference highlighted how protection functions or fails across different contexts, these are some of the examples:
Malaysia & Rural Asia: Research presented showed how deep cultural norms surrounding deference to authority can trap young athletes in silence. Speaking out is viewed as severe social deviance. Because safeguarding is narrowly defined as physical safety, severe psychological coercion and emotional abuse can go unchecked.
Rural Zambia (Muchinga Province): Grassroots research revealed a complete absence of formal reporting pathways for female athletes. Without local, community-driven systems, centralised policies never reach grassroots gymnasts or athletes just starting their careers.
Coastal Kenya: Community-led models demonstrated that young girls do not report abuse to distant national federations. They tell trusted local figures. By training peer "safe-guarders" to spot behavioural changes, communities built organic protection networks using local storytelling as an alternative to top down ‘safeguarding speak’ which is often seen on the ground as alienating jargon.
South Africa: Case law analysis exposed how authority actively enables grooming. In 7 out of 10 sexual offence cases analysed, the victims were male children, dismantling the myth that female athletes are the sole target group. Predators routinely leverage normalised physical contact to erode boundaries. It was also apparent how predators are prone to exploiting structural gaps to move between sports and regions undetected.
The Structural Reality of Abuse
Abuse in sport is rarely a series of isolated events; more often, it is driven by asymmetric power dynamics set up to preserve that power. From our work at G4CI, we see how these exact structural failures leave athletes vulnerable:
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How Traditional Safeguarding Methodologies Fail the Athlete:
Governing bodies handle severe abuse as internal policy breaches rather than criminal offences, allowing predators to avoid legal prosecution.
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How Traditional Safeguarding Methodologies Fail the Athlete:
A sanction in one federation or sport rarely guarantees removal from another.
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How Traditional Safeguarding Methodologies Fail the Athlete:
A lack of international data-sharing allows banned coaches to cross borders and resume coaching in new jurisdictions (something our curator Hannah Liley is addressing in an upcoming piece of work).
Moving Beyond Paper Policies: If we are serious about protecting athletes, we must stop reacting after the damage is done. As advocates for reform in gymnastics and sport overall, we need to see process-based frameworks put in place that regulate patterns of ‘low level concerns’ to prevent more serious beaches occurring - holding leadership accountable from the outset:
Establish Independent Oversight: Create fully funded, independent sports Ombudsperson systems separate from sport, including being separate from National Governing Bodies (NGBs) and Olympic Committees to eliminate conflicts of interest. This is something we have been asking for since the Whyte Review was published in 2022.
Mandate Cross-Border Information Sharing: Require international federations and statutory law enforcement to track and share data on sanctioned coaches and officials to prevent banned and sanctioned coaches from country hoping as is so often seen at both the elite and grass roots levels in sport.
Embed Trauma-Informed Practice: Ensure reporting mechanisms centre victim autonomy, emotional safety, and choice as opposed to forcing survivors through re-traumatising administrative processes.
Safe Sport 2026 reminded us all of Nelson Mandela’s unifying vision for sport: “sport has the power to change the world, to unite and inspire in ways we can’t understand.” However, as the conference organisers also reminded us, that is true only if it is safe. Real safe sport isn't measured by the documents an organisation prints, but by the dignity, voice, and protection it guarantees to every single athlete on the floor as well as the whistleblowers attempting to raise concerns. Sport can - and should be both humane and high performing.