2.1 Why Sport Matters for Recovery
What This Module Covers
This module explains why sport can play a meaningful role in the recovery and reintegration of individuals who have experienced violence, displacement, or trafficking. It outlines how sport can support physical health, emotional stability, social connection, and a renewed sense of agency.
It draws on findings from the Needs Analysis Report to highlight the benefits of sport and the areas where professionals feel they need more support in applying trauma-sensitive and emotionally safe approaches.
This module supports sports professionals and practitioners by strengthening their understanding of sport as a psychosocial and integrative resource within recovery and reintegration processes. It helps build practical skills to design emotionally safe, inclusive, and community-based sport sessions, while increasing awareness of trauma responses and the situations in which collaboration with other professionals is needed. The module also aims to increase professionals’ confidence in adapting sport activities to different stages of recovery and to the diverse needs of participants.
Why This Matters in Work With VoTs
Across the partner countries, sport, play, and movement-based activities were consistently described as accessible and meaningful tools that support recovery for people who have experienced violence, displacement, or trafficking. Professionals identified several ways in which sport contributes to healing and reintegration:
1. Sport provides a safe, nonverbal way to engage
It helps trauma survivors engage safely by offering a nonverbal, body-based approach that reduces emotional and cultural resistance. Participation is sustained by the sense of community, trust, and shared purpose that team activities create, restoring belonging and cooperation after experiences of isolation or control.
2. Movement helps survivors reconnect with themselves
Body-based practices like yoga or dance enable survivors to reconnect with themselves, building autonomy, confidence, and emotional resilience. Regular sport participation improves emotional regulation, daily routines, and soft skills such as empathy and persistence.
3. Safe facilitation is essential
However, safe facilitation requires trauma-sensitive training so coaches can detect stress signals and maintain a supportive environment. Ultimately, sport-based recovery emphasizes predictability, participation, and empowerment, not performance, helping individuals move from survival toward reconnection.
Existing frameworks support this approach. Several European initiatives underline the role of sport in health, inclusion, and cross-sector work, such as:
- EU Work Plan for Sport (2024–2027): promotes sport for inclusion, health, and cross-sector cooperation.
- EU4Health: supports mental health and psychosocial recovery initiatives.
How to Apply This in Practice
Sport can support recovery when offered in safe, predictable, and low-pressure environments (World Health Organization & Terre des hommes, 2019). Start with gentle, accessible activities, such as walking, stretching, yoga, or cooperative games, that emphasise connection rather than competition.
Sport works best when it links participants to wider support services, including mental health and social programmes (Save the Children, 2008). Attention should remain on participation, process, and emotional awareness, instead of performance outcomes.
Trust and community grow through consistent schedules, small and steady groups, and simple shared routines such as group warm-ups or closing reflections (Sport for Development and Peace International Working Group [SDP IWG], n.d.).
Progress should be gradual. Noticing small achievements and group moments helps build confidence. Ongoing coordination between coaches, psychologists, and social workers ensures activities suit participants’ emotional readiness.
Avoid high-pressure formats, competitive settings, or situations that may cause distress. Sessions should not be led by unsupervised volunteers, and personal histories should never be discussed in groups (Sport and Human Rights Coalition, 2023). Recovery-focused sport rests on choice, safety, and respect for personal boundaries, using movement as a supportive, non-verbal path toward healing.
Sport supports psychosocial recovery by supporting emotional regulation, bodily reconnection, belonging, and structure, but these benefits only arise in emotionally safe, trauma‑informed, and structured environments that prevent harm and promote stability (Save the Children, 2008).
- Sport may be most suitable in later stages of recovery, when individuals begin rebuilding autonomy and identity.
- Structured group sessions create a “structure of purpose,” encouraging ongoing participation without pressure to win.
- Team sports help reduce isolation; migrant women describe them as a way to understand new cultural norms.
- Practitioners report that regular routines motivate participation: “Even on difficult days, they come to training; it becomes a habit.”
