Protect everyone from violence: educate, be alert, take away fear, find contact points
An important measure of prevention work is to sensitize and train the different actors in sport for the topic of protection against violence. With the help of funding from the IOC program Olympic Solidarity, the German Sports Youth (dsj) and the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) together with the SchirrmacherGroup have six Awareness and training videos developed. They raise awareness of the topic of protection against violence in sport and look at various facets of psychological, physical and sexualised violence. They refer to different target groups and contexts in mass and competitive sport. Attention is also drawn to the effects and consequences of experiences of violence on a person.
Stefan Raid, 1st Chairman of the dsj, finds it particularly successful “that we can reach even more people in sports on the subject of protection against violence with these low-threshold videos. The options for action explained in the videos also offer good orientation as to what to do if you observe signs of violence or incidents in your own environment. Because we all have to be attentive to support those affected on the way to concrete help!”
When creating the videos, it was particularly important to involve different groups of people in order to be able to cover the different needs and perspectives as well as possible. In addition to the colleagues in the area of protection against violence at the dsj, employees from competitive sports as well as trainers and athletes were involved. Two handball players from the 1st and 2nd Bundesliga sum up: “We really like the videos. The topic is very well worked up and the forms of violence are clearly defined. The contents of the videos are direct and do not beat around the bush. It is particularly good that it is also shown that there is psychological violence in sport – many people always forget it.”
Birte Steven-Vitense, head of the health management topic in the competitive sports division, also draws a positive balance: “Until now, there were few materials that also included the needs and requirements of competitive athletes. We are glad that we can now make the topic of protection from violence accessible to all those involved in multi-sport events via the media.” to be made available in sport.
The new training videos are available on both the Safe Sport Website as well as on the YouTube channels of etc and DOSB to find. Of course, the videos can also be used by associations and clubs for their own qualification measures in their prevention work.
