A Hamilton couple says it wasn’t until they connected with an athletes advocacy group that they felt supported after they made a complaint about the behaviour of players on their son’s hockey team in 2024.
“Finally, someone is hearing us,” the dad recounted feeling. “It took some of that emotional strain away.”
CBC Hamilton is not identifying the parents to protect their son’s privacy.
They alleged bullying and sexual misconduct by multiple players on an under-14 AA Stoney Creek Warriors hockey team. A confidential third-party investigation resulted in several players and coaches receiving suspensions of one to seven games. It found some players had acted in a way that amounted to psychological, physical and sexual maltreatment, bullying and harassment of other players.
Feeling the punishments were too light, the family appealled. An arbitrator with the Sports Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada reviewed the case and imposed periods of probation on six players and two assistant coaches, and suspended the head coach for six months.
The minor hockey association the team is part of previously told CBC Hamilton that other than the complainant and their family, “any individuals involved in this matter are no longer participants, coaches or volunteers.”
During the process, while the family was struggling to find legal representation, someone suggested they contact Athletes Empowered, a Canadian non-profit that supports athletes who have experienced abuse.
Athletes Empowered does not offer legal advice but was able to provide invaluable guidance in the two months it took them to find a lawyer, the mom said. The group also helped by validating their feelings, she added.
Athletes Empowered began as Gymnasts for Change Canada before broadening its focus to all sports, director Amelia Cline told CBC Hamilton in an interview this week.
She’s a lawyer and former elite gymnast who started sharing her own story of emotional and physical abuse in sport in 2020.
“Unfortunately,” she said, the Hamilton family’s experience was “relatively typical” for a maltreatment complaint, both when it came to what the victims experienced, and the response to their complaint.
“There’s backlash that happens to you,” the dad said, adding “a lot of the fears” that come with making a complaint, such as concerns about impacts on a child’s place on the team, “become extremely real.”
Often, Cline said, people who report bad behaviour are met with retaliation and hostility from their peers and organization.
“At best, it’s sort of seen as ‘This is not a big deal. Why are you reporting this?’” Cline said. “At worst, it becomes, ‘You’re threatening our organization, you’re threatening our results, and therefore we’re going to retaliate against you.'”
“It can start to make you feel a little bit crazy when you feel like you’re presenting something that should be so obvious,” Cline said. “To say it’s salt in a wound is almost too light. It’s sort of a secondary injury when you’ve already had a really traumatic thing happen.”
The Hamilton mom said she thinks sport complaint systems like the one Hockey Canada has could benefit from referring parents to groups like Athletes Empowered.
Hockey Canada is the sport’s national governing body. In an email, spokesperson Jeremy Knight told CBC Hamilton the organizations’ policy on managing maltreatment complaints is “routinely reviewed to ensure that it remains victim-centred” and that Sport Complaints, the group that manages complaints for Hockey Canada, is using “trauma-informed processes.”
The culture of sport is part of the issue, Cline said, and so is the structure of complaint processes.
“The institution of sport itself is not designed to deal with these types of complaints. It’s been set up to foster a culture in which results and medals are the priority and that naturally deprioritizes the athlete as a human,” Cline said.
“I think people really buy into [the idea that] you’re going to have to endure certain things… in order to be a champion.”
The amount of time it takes to investigate a claim can be an issue too, she said, pointing out there was a year between the adjudicator and arbitrator’s decisions in the Hamilton hockey case. In the review, the arbitrator said due to the length of time that had passed, it would be unfair to impose new suspensions.
“If we’re saying that we can’t discipline people because too much time has passed, but too much time has passed because that’s the system we have, we’ve got a very very broken system,” Cline said.
Sport Complaints annual report says it got faster at processing complaints this past year and implemented “new protocols to reduce processing time of accepted complaints,” Knight noted.
Cline also pointed to issues with the confidentiality involved in processes like the one Hockey Canada follows.
While it’s understandable organizations may want to redact the names of minors, Cline said, secrecy can prevent people from making informed choices. For example, she said, a person found to have abused or mistreated someone may be able to carry on at another organization without participants ever being aware.
Cline said she’d like to see more recognition that violence and abuse in sport are unacceptable, and more urgency in addressing them.
In the fall, Athletes Empowered launched a program called Keep Me Safe, which Cline said is designed to teach adults to identify abuse or maltreatment in sport, address and report it.
“We need to do something about it and when someone comes forward, we need to take that very seriously,” Cline said.
“It sounds so basic, but I think we’re still not quite there.”
