Humans and Violence in Sport

Through most of human history, displays of violence, between either humans or animals, have been an integral component of sport. Just as physical aggression was present in most people's daily and working life, so inevitably was it an uncontroversial element of their recreational life as well.

Yet the past two centuries have witnessed an unmistakable redrawing of the place of violence in sport. Starting in Britain and progressing from there to western Europe, the United States and Australia, governments have actively sought to eliminate sports which involved staged acts of aggression between animals. At the same time, sporting organisations have imposed ever greater regulation around the violence that human combatants might perpetrate against each other - opening, in the process, a space for female involvement, firstly as spectators, and in the second half of the twentieth century as participants. Outside the West, however, opposition to violence in sport has been more muted. Whilst most non-Western societies have been involved in the move to restrict the extent of violence that humans might commit in the name of sport, they have been far less interested in imposing restrictions on sports that involve animals. Here, the force of ‘tradition' has invariably trumped the self-styled ‘humanitarianism' of the Western abolitionists.

It is helpful to begin by thinking about the range of violent sports enjoyed in the past, many of which have now disappeared from the industrialised world. These fall broadly into two categories - sports encouraging violence amongst animals and those involving violence between human combatants.

Hunting differs in principle from animal combats in that the animals are wild rather than domesticated and are hunted in their natural habitat - some animals hunted by men armed with guns, others by men working in tandem with other animals, usually dogs or birds.^[338] In reality, though, this ‘pure' form of hunting has been hard to maintain in the past 200 years - an era of unprecedented population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation throughout the world.

Sitting alongside those sports involving animals and violence was a wide range of sports involving interpersonal violence. Various forms of human combat have existed across the globe since the beginning of time, though the precise form they have taken has varied widely. In East and South Asia, martial arts have dominated.^[340] In the West, bare-knuckle fighting has always been more popular.^[341] Generalising about the nature of these sports is an impossible task owing to the enormous global variation, but at heart they involve displays of fighting strength and skill between two (invariably male) opponents. In addition, many team sports which are today considered to be ‘non-contact', such as football, involved high levels of physical violence in 1800. More generally, these sports always took a non-standard format. This is not to suggest that they were not governed by rules. Parameters such as the rules of combat, the size of teams and pitches, or the length of play were all subject to rules, but these rules tended to vary from one village or region to the next. As a result, team sports in 1800 looked very different from those of the present day. They were characterised by very high levels of interpersonal violence and, though rule bound, they were played according to local custom rather than by national, standardised sets of rules.^[342]