By the end of this stop you will be able to:
Costs of discrimination in sport are multi-faceted and multidimensional. Their impact can range from mild to devastating. The visual below is an attempt to capture this complexity.
These various costs show that the world of sport must work to improve all the possibilities of social inclusion factors, starting with friendly and safe sports centres for women, migrants, LGBTQI+ and people with disabilities. This includes, for example, removing architectural barriers, providing signs in different languages, ensuring reliable lighting and safe women's changing rooms.
Addressing these elements requires a comprehensive approach, including policy change, cultural change, education and increased representation at all levels of sports organisations. This can only be done on the basis of sound data.
The sport sector can provide significant contributions to tackle acts of discrimination in our society. Sports venues and sports operators are pertinent stakeholders in promoting more inclusive societies and through their actions, they can contribute to a dialogue between communities and designated institutions, and ultimately, prevent discrimination.
In order to understand the true extent of the phenomenon of discrimination in sport, it is important to know what kind of action is needed in which particular communities or sports.
Currently, only extremely violent cases are reported by the media and cause public outrage, while other incidents tend to be downplayed and do not receive the attention they deserve. For sport, the failure to analyse the phenomenon of discrimination in sport means not only a loss of athletes, but above all a decline in social and cultural terms.
The under-reporting, especially in grassroots and less popular sports, creates a gap, so that the anti-discrimination projects, information campaigns, regulations and sanctions provided by the sports government risk being half-hearted and ineffective.
Monitoring discrimination in sport is the most effective way to highlight this scourge and identify strategic actions to prevent and combat it.
If grassroots sport organisations are to tackle discrimination, they need to become more evidence-based - hence the need for monitoring, as there is a need for reliable data that goes beyond anecdotal evidence.
The aim of monitoring discrimination in sport should be to systematically investigate the forms of discrimination that permeate the world of sport on a daily basis. In this way, the dynamics and characteristics of discrimination can be identified and analysed, and effective strategies to prevent, mitigate and protect those affected can be defined.
The following short exercises have been designed to help you reflect on your context and get ready to move on to the next stop on our MONITORA roadmap.