Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently made a policy statement against boxing participation by children and adolescents. You might assume that this statement was grounded in science, but you’d be wrong. This is the passage that jumped out at me:
The overall risk of injury in amateur boxing seems to be lower than in some other collision sports such as football, ice hockey, wrestling, and soccer.
However, unlike these other collision sports, boxing encourages and rewards direct blows to the head and face.
So, the overall risk of injury from amateur boxing is lower than the risk from football, ice hockey, wrestling, or soccer, but this august assemblage calls for an end to boxing because it encourages blows to the head and face.
Later in the statement we get some numbers:
The authors of 1 cohort study reported an injury rate of 1.0 injury per 1000 hours of participation for amateur boxers (15.1–37.1 years of age).
This rate is actually lower than reported high school athlete injury rates of 4.4 per 1000 athlete-exposures in football, 2.5 in wrestling, and 2.4 in soccer.
Intentional facial and head injuries, however, are more frequent in boxing.
I can only assume they’re calling for the end of fencing as well, since it encourages and rewards stabbing people in the face and torso.
But… but… doing it on purpose is wrong! It has to be by accident.
“Having retards control your life” would probably not be welcomed, but if you frame it properly as “remember to vote, it’s the patriotic thing to do” it’s much easier to understand
The actual numbers in the report show that although boxing might have less injuries overall, it has more head and brain injuries, which seems to be the point. Nobody wants children with long-term brain damage.
The text, however, keeps going back to the issue of it being “intentional”. I guess they gave the text writing to one of the brain-damaged kids.
If it’s intentional, that makes boxing not just inadvisable but immoral, which is the real issue here. Contact sports are just so… male. Of course we can’t just go right out and ban major sports like football, but we can certainly start to pick off a few stragglers. And, let’s see, what can we find… ooh, look, head injuries! Perfect!