Boxing in the Community: Moving Beyond the Myths of Sports’ Positive Potentials to Reduce Violence

2023 PhD Project

About The Project

The link between martial arts and violence reduction has long been assumed and anecdotally measured. Some recent research by Matthews and colleagues calls these links into question (Channon and Matthews, 2018; Matthews et al 2022). The evaluation and monitoring of such programmes are usually either short-term (12 weeks is common), or if longer, focuses on simplistic quantitative measures (e.g. numbers of participants). The outcomes of research are often linked to continued programme funding which leads to several ethical and methodological concerns (Matthews, et al, 2022). In particular, Matthews argues that long-term community-orientated research is required in order to move beyond poorly designed evaluation and monitoring of programmes in order to use sport as a social development tool.

The Pythian Club is a home for martial arts and community sports in the Old Basford area of the City of Nottingham. Their aims of developing social impact, equity and mobility inform the various sports-based sessions they run across the week. In particular, they use boxing as a ‘hook’ to attract the kind of young people that tend to not engage in such civic-orientated programmes. Alongside learning the skills of boxing, the coaches at The Pythian Club focus on developing community cohesion, mentoring young people, encouraging youth leadership, well-being and associated social skills, as well as a specific focus on anti-violence, specifically knife crime.

The focus of this project will be to work with The Pythian Club to help them refine their existing anti-violence programmes and generate knowledge about enhancing good practices and mitigating poor practices. Findings from the work will contribute at a community level by shaping future practice and lessons will be shared with other local sporting initiatives. Further afield, the findings and research design will be presented in various ways to governing bodies, scholars and practitioners who are interested in developing sports’ positive potential.

This project has been co-created and is supported by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and partners at The Pythian club.

Project Aims

This project aims to combine the agenda of recent sports research with the social aims of The Pythian Club to address the following aims:

Use co-creation methods with community partners and club participants to explore an anti-violence programme in the heart of Nottingham. 
Work with local coaches and participants to refine the delivery of their programmes in line with their needs and those of the wider community. 
Understand how boxing might reduce violence. 
Explore the experiences of those who drop out of boxing programs. This population is almost completely absent from research on the topic and more broadly sports development programmes.