Child Safety Standards Policy

1. Who we are and who this applies to

SportNet is operated by The Sporting Network Limited, a company registered in England and Wales. SportNet is a professional networking and talent-discovery platform for sport. Athletes build a profile, share their achievements and video, and are discovered by coaches, scouts and clubs. Teams are created and managed on the platform.

Our minimum age is 13. Many of our users are young people aged between 13 and 18. Our platform exists to connect athletes with the coaches and clubs who can offer them opportunities, which means adults and young people interact here. We take that responsibility seriously.

This policy applies to everyone who uses SportNet, on every device and in every country, whether you are an athlete, a coach, a scout, a parent or a club.

2. Our standard

2.1 What is prohibited

The following are prohibited on SportNet without exception:

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Creating, uploading, sharing, requesting, linking to or seeking any image, video or other material that sexually exploits or abuses a child. This includes material that is computer-generated, animated, edited or artificially produced.
• Sexualisation of children. Any content that presents a child in a sexualised way, including content that focuses on a child's body in a sexual manner, and sexualised commentary about a child. This applies to sporting images and video as much as to anything else.
• Grooming. Building a relationship with a child in order to sexually exploit or abuse them. This includes attempting to move a young user to private messaging or another platform, requesting secrecy from a young user, offering gifts, selection, trials, sponsorship or opportunity in exchange for contact or images, and any attempt to isolate a young person from their parents, coaches or club.
• Sextortion. Threatening to share a young person's images or information in order to obtain further images, money, contact or any other thing.
• Solicitation. Asking a young user for sexual images, sexual contact, or contact details for a sexual purpose.
• Trafficking and exploitation. Using the platform to recruit, advertise, arrange or facilitate the sexual exploitation or trafficking of a child.
• Off-platform conduct. Using SportNet to make contact with a young person and then continuing prohibited conduct elsewhere. Where we become aware of it, we act on the SportNet account.
• Facilitating any of the above, including sharing methods, coded language, or directions to material or to people who provide it.

2.2 The sporting context does not change this

SportNet exists so that adults in sport can identify and contact young athletes. That is a legitimate purpose and it is what the platform is for. It is also the exact situation in which grooming occurs, and we know that.

Being a coach, a scout, a club official or an agent gives no latitude here. Selection, trials, tours, sponsorship and progression are the currency of youth sport, and using them to obtain contact, images, secrecy or compliance from a young athlete is grooming, whatever it is called. We treat it as such.

3. How to report

If you see something on SportNet that concerns you, report it. You do not need to be certain, and you do not need to explain it well. Tell us what you saw and we will look at it.

• In the app. Every profile, post, comment and message has a report option. Reporting is available on both the web and mobile applications and does not require you to contact the person concerned.
• By email. main@thesportingnetwork.com — monitored by our Designated Safeguarding Lead and Deputy.
• Anonymously. You can report without your identity being shared with the person you are reporting.
• If someone is in immediate danger. Contact the police on 999. Do not wait for us.

3.1 Reporting to outside organisations

You can also report directly to organisations independent of us:

• Police — 999 in an emergency, 101 otherwise.
• Internet Watch Foundation — iwf.org.uk — for reporting child sexual abuse imagery online.
• CEOP — ceop.police.uk — the National Crime Agency's child exploitation reporting route.
• NSPCC — 0808 800 5000 — for advice about a child's safety.
• Childline — 0800 1111 — free and confidential, for anyone under 19.

4. What we do when we receive a report

• We review it quickly. Our target is 72 hours for all reports. Anything indicating risk to someone under 18 is reviewed the same day.
• Who reviews it. Our Designated Safeguarding Lead, or our Deputy Designated Safeguarding Lead. Reports concerning children are not handled by anyone else.
• We remove content. Content that breaches this policy is removed. Where we have actual knowledge of child sexual abuse material, it is removed immediately and without waiting for any further process.
• We remove accounts. An account involved in CSAE is banned permanently. There is no warning, no second chance, and no restoration on appeal for confirmed CSAE.
• We report to the authorities. Confirmed child sexual abuse material and child sexual exploitation are reported to the National Crime Agency. We are registered with the NCA's reporting portal for this purpose. Where a child is at risk, we also refer to the relevant local authority children's services and to the police.
• We preserve evidence. We keep the records the authorities need, for as long as they need them, even if the account is deleted.
• We tell you what happened. Where we can, we let the person who reported know the outcome. Sometimes we cannot give details, because doing so would interfere with an investigation or reveal information about another person.

4.1 Appeals

If we remove your content or your account and you believe we got it wrong, you can appeal by emailing main@thesportingnetwork.com. We will look at it again. This does not apply to confirmed CSAE, where removal is permanent.

5. What we do to prevent harm

• We verify coaches and scouts. Anyone who wants to search our athlete database must first complete identity verification using a government-issued document. Coaches and scouts cannot search for athletes until they have done so.
• We control who can message a young person. Messages from people you are not connected to go to a separate request inbox. They do not land in your main messages, and you do not have to respond.
• We have named people responsible. We have a Designated Safeguarding Lead and a Deputy. They are named individuals with defined responsibilities, not a shared inbox.
• We have written rules about adult contact with young people. Our Adult-to-Minor Contact Policy sets out what contact between an adult and an under-18 user is and is not acceptable on this platform.
• We keep our policies under review. We carry out formal assessments of the risks to children on our service, and we update what we do in response to them.

5.1 What we are still building

We think it is more useful to tell you what we do not yet have than to imply we have everything.

• We do not currently use automated detection or image hash-matching. Reports from users are how we find harmful content, which is why reporting matters.
• Our enforcement options are removing content and banning accounts. We are building the ability to restrict an account's messaging as a step short of a full ban.
• Age on SportNet is self-declared. We are keeping our approach to age checking under review.

6. Our child safety point of contact

We maintain a designated point of contact for child safety matters, including notifications from app store operators and platform partners about CSAE content found on our service. This contact can speak to our enforcement and review procedures and can take action.

Name

Charles Heffron

Role

Director of Operations & Finance, Designated Safeguarding Lead

Email

main@thesportingnetwork.com

Deputy

Daniel Lindley, Technical Director, Deputy Designated Safeguarding Lead

Postal address

The Sporting Network Limited, 14 Hollywell Row, London, EC2A 4JB

7. Our legal obligations

We comply with the child safety laws that apply to us. In the United Kingdom this includes the Online Safety Act 2023, under which we have duties to assess and manage the risk of illegal content and of harm to children on our service, and a duty to report child sexual exploitation and abuse content to the National Crime Agency. We are registered with the NCA reporting portal.

Where our users are outside the United Kingdom, we report confirmed child sexual abuse material to the appropriate authority for that jurisdiction, which may include the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

We follow recognised industry practice on combating online child sexual exploitation and abuse, including the guidance published by the Tech Coalition.

8. Related policies

• Community Guidelines — the full rules for what is and is not allowed on SportNet.
• Terms and Conditions — the agreement between you and us.
• Privacy Policy — what we do with your personal information.
• Content Reporting & Removal Policy — how reporting and removal works in detail.
• Adult-to-Minor Contact Policy — the rules on contact between adults and under-18 users.
• Safeguarding Policy — how we protect young people and adults at risk, and how concerns are handled.
• Your Privacy, Explained — a plain-English privacy guide for users aged 13 to 17.

9. Changes to this policy

We review this policy at least once a year, and whenever our service, our practices or the law changes. The current version and its effective date are shown at the top of this page. Where we make a significant change, we tell our users.

9.1 Version history

This policy is published by The Sporting Network Limited, developer of the SportNet application, and is publicly available at thesportingnetwork.com/child-safety.