The Prohibition of Violence in Youth Sports: Gaps in Legal Regulation and Means of Overcoming Them

The paper is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of violence and other forms of abuse in youth sports from the perspectives of labor law and criminal law, taking into account international standards for the protection of children’s rights. It establishes that international instruments adopted for the purpose of protecting children from violence are merely declaratory in nature. The study also notes that the current legal regulation in the Russian Federation is fragmented due to the absence of a unified definition of the term «violence» and of any characterization of potential abuses in the sports environment. At the same time, international instruments likewise do not articulate a uniform approach to the term «violence». In addition, procedures for the early detection of and response to incidents of violence have not been developed, while the range of protective guarantees afforded to minor athletes is narrower than that available to ordinary minor employees, which is most clearly reflected in Part 4 of Article 348.8 of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation. Drawing on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and legal doctrine, the paper substantiates the need to shift the emphasis from declaratory norms to an operational monitoring mechanism, which may be constructed on the model of the SafeSport system currently existing in the United States.

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