About and sources
Why we built this, how we checked it, and what it can’t tell you.
Why it exists
Young athletes shouldn’t have to choose between belonging in sport and speaking about harm. This site lets you practise a response, check the evidence and find a private next step, without ever sharing your own experience.
It is built for athletes aged about 12 to 18, and for the teammates, coaches, parents and teachers around them.
Project team
[Team names], [school or group], for Design for Change.
How we use evidence
- Every number keeps its label: who was counted, where, when, and what was measured.
- Allegations are not proven findings. Abusive posts are not the same as people targeted.
- We never add studies together or rank one sport against another; their methods differ.
- Quotes are copied word for word from published sources and marked as written sources. No interviews were carried out for this site.
- The situations in the game are fictional. Athletes’ stories are kept apart from them.
What it can’t tell you
Most of the numbers come from UK cricket and football, and from elite international and US competitions. No source here measures how many young athletes worldwide face discrimination. Online monitoring misses private messages and offline incidents, and reporting depends on people feeling able to report.
Neurodivergent, migrant, refugee and rural athletes, and many other groups, are not yet measured in this evidence. Their voices should shape the next version.
How we designed it
UK research on how 8 to 17-year-olds use the internet shaped some design choices. It is background for design, not evidence about sport:
So the site is built to be useful to someone who just reads quietly, and it never asks visitors to post their own story.
Source register
All official sources, last checked on 8 November 2026. Each claim on the site links back to one of these.
| ID | Title | Publisher | Published | Type |
|---|
The structured data is available as research.json.
Photo credits
The photos show the world of each sport. Apart from the 1968 podium, they do not show the athletes quoted on this site.
- Evening match under the pines, PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0
- John Carlos, Tommie Smith, Peter Norman 1968, Angelo Cozzi (Mondadori Publishers), public domain
- Wheelchair Tennis, Edwin Martinez, CC BY 2.0
- Saturday cricket match on the village green, Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0
- Kin Tak Street Basketball Court, Tombus20032000, CC BY-SA 4.0
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All via Wikimedia Commons. Licences: CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-SA 2.0, CC BY 2.0.
Corrections
Found a mistake, a broken link or a quote out of context? Tell us at [contact]. We’ll check it against the original source and note the change here.
Accessibility
We aim to meet WCAG 2.2 AA: keyboard access, visible focus, readable contrast, text alternatives for images, and a reduce-motion setting. Videos open on their publishers’ pages; captions there have not all been checked.
Privacy
No accounts, no forms, no analytics, no cookies. The only thing stored is your reduce-motion choice, and only in your own browser.