Sport Violence and Health

• Violence and Sport are the topic for Lecture 15, March 14, 2025, with reading material from S. Lorenz, Violence (C9)
• Monday, March 17
  • No in-person lecture
  • Instead, read Chapter 10 (Sport and Health: Full lecture notes provided) and watch the following 25-minute documentary: the Problem with Pain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Sb664bCYU

The Concussion Crisis

• The NFL denied the link between football, repetitive head trauma, and CTE and funded inaccurate research

• CTE is a "hidden" injury that has been found in the brains of players in every position

• After being compared to the tobacco industry, the NFL finally conceded in 2007 that a link existed

• A successful class-action lawsuit settlement occurred between the NFL and former players

  • Up to $5 million per retired player for serious medical conditions, but with troubling “race-norming” dementia tests
  • There are new international concussion guidelines which not always followed by both teams and the players themselves
  • The new rules have altered sports and definitions of violence

• Some leagues like the NHL continue to deny a link between repetitive head trauma and CTE

• The CFL eliminates contact practices and lengthens the schedule in the name of safety

  • League and Players Association made joint announcement, September 13, 2017
  • Clubs in the NFL can have 11 padded practices over the first 11 weeks of the season, a maximum of one per week
  • After that, teams can have three more for a total of 14 on the year
  • The 2018 CFL regular season will be extended one week to 21
  • As a result, each team will have three bye weeks instead of two

• Proposed 'Duerson Act' aims to prohibit tackle football for Illinois children under 12

• The Tua Rule is an update to the NFL's concussion protocol, jointly agreed upon by the league and NFLPA

  • Under the updated protocol, ataxia or gross motor instability has been added to the list of "no-go" symptoms that mandate the immediate removal of a player from a game
  • The other such symptoms include unconsciousness, confusion, and amnesia
  • The updated protocol, enacted in Week 5, has ATC spotters looking for players who show signs of ataxia, at which point they are removed for the remainder of the game and placed in concussion protocol
  • The Mayo Clinic defines ataxia as "poor muscle control that causes clumsy voluntary movements, which may cause difficulty with walking and balance, hand coordination, speech and swallowing, and eye movements
  • An acquired cause of ataxia can be blows to the head such as the ones Tagovailoa suffered vs. the Bills and Bengals

• The contradictions of professional football remain

  • The sport and its profitability are inextricably aligned with inevitable damage to bodies and brains

International Concussion Guidelines

• Produced by Concussion in Sport Group (CISG)

• Guidelines are almost exclusively based on research on adult male professional athletes (88%)

  • Children and amateur athletes not well represented

• CISG is funded by powerful sports organizations and 32 out of 36 experts on concussion statement affiliated with them

  • There is a huge conflict of interest and tension with public health objectives to prevent brain injuries
  • CISG continues to downplay the link between repetitive head trauma and CTE, lagging behind even the NFL

• Women report more concussions, but why?

  • Mounting evidence shows female brains are more easily injured and take longer to recover
  • One sociological explanation to this trend is the gendering of concussions and more broadly, health reporting and gender roles within the sex-gender system

• Late Australian footballer Heather Anderson first diagnosed case of CTE brain trauma in a female athlete

  • Heather Anderson who was an Australian rules footballer was found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy after she died in November 2022 at the age of 28
  • Australian researchers have for the first time diagnosed a female athlete with chronic traumatic encephalopathy,
  • Heather Anderson's family donated her brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank hoping to better understand why she died
  • Findings from the ASBB researchers were published in the medical journal Acta Neuropathologica, and describe the examination of her brain and neuropathological findings that fulfills current diagnostic criteria for low-stage CTE
  • Heather Anderson is the first female athlete diagnosed with CTE, but she will not be the last
  • In 2022, there were almost one million women and girls playing some form of contact sport in Australia

Defining Violence: Challenging

• Aggression is behaviour designed to injure physically or psychologically
• Violence is intended to injure another person physically (often seen as part of the game)

Scale of violence in sport

• 1. “Relatively legitimate” or Tolerable
  • Brutal body contact occurs which is permitted by rules, like tackling in football
  • Borderline violence does not conform to rules, but sanctioned by informal codes of sport (fistfights in men's hockey)
• 2. “Illegitimate” or Intolerable
  • Quasi-criminal violence violates formal and informal codes of sport and results in suspension (cheap shots, hits from behind)
  • Criminal violence results in criminal charges and civil litigation
  • These categories are fluid and change over time as the cultures and informal codes of sport change and are socially reconstructed

Competing Theories of Violence

• 1. Instinct: violence rooted in human biology, aligns with structural functionalism
  • Violence can be released cathartically like a safety valve and should be tolerated in certain settings
• 2. Frustration-aggression is a psychological theory
  • Violence is an inevitable, individual response to frustration and violence can be cathartic
• 3. Social learning: Violence is a learned/taught response
  • Through socialization processes and cultural understandings of what is acceptable behaviour in particular societies and certain points in history, especially around ideas of gender and power
  • Sports violence is socially constructed/taught behaviour that serves to legitimate and foster more violence (violence begets violence)

History and Hegemonic Masculinity

• A manly nation requires manly games
• Normalization and legitimization of violence is a way to turn boys into men in light of broader social changes and concerns about cultural feminization
• "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

Thinking Sociologically: Fighting in Men's Hockey

• “It's part of the game”: Catharsis theory, structural functionalism, and ideology
• The better question is how has fighting been institutionalized in men's hockey in North America?
• Critical Social Theories: fighting is part of an unwritten, gendered code of honour and status that [male] players and fans are taught as “common sense”
  • A learned/taught action to cultivate status and punish transgressions; a player who violates the code of honour must 'pay the price'
  • This produces profitable spectacles via labour of players
• But, can't proper rules/penalties prevent infractions? Is fighting an action that can change momentum in a game? But, can't other strategies work? And can't fighting lead to more violence?
• For a more in-depth look at the socially constructed code of honour, and about the labour of NHL players who "enforce" it, check out the documentary Ice Guardians
• Key Definition of Contextual Morality: informal codes, ideologies, and sub-cultural norms, as well as peer pressure/authority, provide a powerful social structure that 'frees' the partiipants from agency and the responsibility of moral choice

Costs of the Code?

• The death of Don Sanderson in January 2009, the result of a fight
• There ecists a clear division between the labour conditions of hockey, and the broader social world, its legal and medical institutions, and growing concerns about concussions/brain damage, self medication, and suicide of players
  • Why is any hit over the head tolerated ever?
• See Box 9.1 for a case study using conflict theory to explore these questions as labour issues and examples of alienation
• QMJHL has officially banned fighting from the league
  • The QMJHL has officially banned fighting from the league, potentially signalling a new less violent era of hockey

Growing concerns about CTE: the decline of fighting in men's hockey?

• Hockey fights are declining in NHL, and many teams have abandoned designated "enforcers"
• Much of the "code" remains, it is reproduced by many players and fans who support fighting in the sport and want it to remain
• A key question is at what point do we restrict individual agency for safety/wellbeing?
• There is a call to ban fighting in hockey and some refer to the "Pansification” of hockey
  • Mike Milbury, former Hockey Night in Canada commentator, (himself a noted hockey pugilist) coined the expression to describe how the NHL was being "softened" by the decline of fighting
  • Similarly, Sportsnet columnist Mark Spector noted: "I've always been pro-fighting or perhaps more aptly against the pussification of hockey” (October 6, 2013)
  • Why are some people threatened by the calls to ban fighting?

Fighting for Hegemonic Masculinity?

• “The ultimate threat, the threat that produces a recalcitrance to change, is the perceived threat to the maleness of the game, and beyond this to the place of traditional masculinity in a changing economic, cultural and gender order” (Gruneau & Whitson, 1993)
• Do calls to ban fighting threaten hockey's traditional role as a training ground for hegemonic masculinity?
  • Do these calls jeopardize not only the masculine subculture of hockey, but a wider erosion of manhood in the broader sex/gender system?
  • Is mens violence one of the last bastions of male dominance and physicality, especially in light of changing sex gender system and gains by women in both sport and society?
• The triad of men's violence in sport
  • 1. Violence against women and the normalization of 'everyday sexism'
  • 2. Violence against other men
  • 3. Violence against our own bodies
  • Two group-based processes have historically underlined the triad:
    • a) misogynist and homophobic talk and actions
    • b) suppression of empathy for yourself and others (alienation)
    • These two processes are now being held up for meaningful critical reflection, but...
    • Structural change is slow: codes of behaviour learned/taught at very young ages that discipline bodies, attitudes, and feelings
• In Lethbridge high school, football players were charged in an alleged sex assault of a teammate
  • Police say incident occurred in locker room at local high school last week Are there links between violence, bullying, battering, and sexual assault in men's sport? What, if anything, do these issues have to do with a changing sex/gender system?
  • Gender identities closely tied to our understandings of violence in sport (historically and in present)