Sports respects your rights UK logo
Sports respects your rights UK

Between April 2013 and March 2015, CPSS Director Mike Hartill led a youth team from the UK in the project, Sport Respects Your Rights.

SRYR was a transnational project, developed to fight abuse and gender-based violence in the youth sport sector. Funded by the Daphne III Programme 2011/2012 of the European Union, the project ran for 24 months.

Sport Respects Your Rights UK banner - featuring Edge Hill hockey team players performing the "one-in-five" hand gesture, with an index finger of one hand presented in front of the open palm of the other.
Sports Protects Your Rights: Young people advocating children’s rights and challenging sexual and gender-based violence in and through sport
A group shot of the Sports Respects Your Rights Youth Team
SPYR Youth Team

The youth-led campaigns were celebrated at a conference in Vienna and are also captured in a project booklet.

Sport Respects Your Rights supported Europeans, aged 16 to 22, to develop self-confident behaviour against sexualised violence and harassment in sports. Young sportswomen and sportsmen were given the platform to develop their own youth-led campaigns through which they raised awareness amongst peers, in their own sport environment.

Sport Respects Your Rights UK project

Our campaign in the UK – initiated by a group of young people from rugby league – was a social media campaign using a simple hand-signal to highlight the Council of Europe’s finding that:

“Available data suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence. It is estimated that in 70% to 85% of cases, the abuser is somebody the child knows and trusts.”

This campaign – #STOP1in5 – had fantastic support from the rugby league community and beyond:

The hand-signal became a symbol of the project throughout Europe and was adopted in other countries such as the Netherlands. A video of the campaign was also produced by Jamie Elkaleh who was responsible for developing the hand-signal:

#STOP1in5 Promo Video

Hartill, M. and Kainz, A. (2014) ‘Sport respects your rights: Empowering young Europeans in sport for a culture of respect and integrity against sexualised violence and gender harassment’, in D. Rhind & C. Brackenridge (eds.) Researching and enhancing athlete welfare: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium of the Brunel International Research Network for Athlete Welfare (BIRNAW) 2013. Brunel University Press, e-book, pp. 62-66. ISBN 978-1-908549-12-9