Canadian national sport organizations’ safe sport policies: are pregnant and parenting athletes included?

Safe sport policies, sometimes referred to as safeguarding policies, have rapidly increased internationally, highlighting a global movement to combat maltreatment in sport. In Canada, there has been a surge in National Sport Organisations’ (NSOs) safe sport policies; however, researchers have found that these policies lack equity-owed perspectives and are hyper-focused on sexual violence. Lost in these policy gaps is the equity-owed group of pregnant and parenting elite athletes (PPEAs) who are self-identified women, transgender (trans) men and non-binary people (SWTMNB). Therefore, we examined Canadian NSOs’ safe sport policies for the manifestation of dominant discourses surrounding gender, pregnancy and parenting and to understand how they influence the safe sport support available for SWTMNB PPEAs. Guided by feminist methodologies, we engaged in archival research to collect policies relating to safe sport from all 64 Canadian NSOs, totalling 426 policies. We analysed the policies using Allan (2008, 2009) feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, which produced three overarching discourses: i) maltreatment occurs mainly to minors, ii) athletes are not parents in equity and inclusion policies and iii) PPEAs do not need proactive support to create a safe sport environment. Our findings illustrated how dominant discourses related to age, gender and parenting were woven throughout Canadian NSOs’ policies, serving as technologies of domination to determine who is (and is not) protected under safe sport policies. To conclude, we provide several suggestions for how NSOs and policymakers can update their safe sport policies to consider the safety of SWTMNB PPEAs.