Children’s rights, sport and migration

The study of sports migration has gathered pace over the past three decades as sport has become increasingly globalised (Agergaard et al., 2023, Falcous and Maguire, 2011). The particular impact of sports migration on children from a rights-based perspective has, however, only recently begun to attract the attention of scholars (Mason et al., 2019, Esson and Drywood, 2018, Yilmaz et al., 2020), reflecting the emergence of children’s rights frameworks as an important benchmark against which to measure sport. This shift towards recognising children as rights-bearers within the sports environment can be traced back to a number of child protection scandals that emerged from the early-90s onwards around the use of oppressive and harmful training methods and the sexual abuse of young athletes. At the same time, there has been a wider turn towards the use of human rights language by sports governing bodies and as a way of critiquing their activities by external commentators (e.g. Heerdt and Rook forthcoming). It is now commonplace for children’s rights instruments to be referred to by sports governing bodies in their constitutional documents and their programmes of activity, whilst a burgeoning body of research applies a children’s rights critique to sport (Donnelly, 2023, Aine et al., 2022, Lang, 2022). This chapter takes stock of this emerging field, and considers the growth of children’s rights research in sport in the specific context of sports migration. Adopting the classification of sports migration scholars, it looks at children’s rights in both sports as migration and sports in migration (Agergaard et al., 2023).