Mega-Sporting Events, Rights and Children’s Everyday Lives: Exploring the Impact of the Brazil 2014 FIFA World Cup

Children’s rights, and the violations of such rights, have been widely discussed in academic literature, yet there are still significant gaps in our understanding of how rights are experienced and practiced particularly where global processes are impacting on children’s local contexts. This chapter seeks to widen discussions of children’s rights and to connect with processes of global change that are affecting, and affected by, the increasing reach of mega-sporting events (MSEs), through a focus on the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. The chapter documents the tensions that exist between hosting successful events and the impacts and outcomes for the most marginalized. This occurs through implementing processes of urban governance and securitization as well as economic growth and tourism juxtaposed with the needs of people facing poverty and inequality on a daily basis. The chapter goes on to identify a series of negative impacts on children resulting from hosting the World Cup including police (and army) violence, displacement, sexual exploitation, and work. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the bidding and hosting process needs to not only connect the local context with the wider organizational remit of organizing bodies but should also explicitly focus on children’s rights as a key criterion in the bidding process. MSE organizers have a role to play in preventing or mitigating violations of rights through nonessentialist, context-specific applications of rights policies for their events.