‘Charity’ boxing raises questions
SHE looked sombrely at the camera. Her opponenttobe managed a faint smile as they faced off. But the picture in the ODT
(23.6.18) was dominated by the large boxing gloves they were wearing, because, in a few weeks, they would be attacking each other in a ‘‘charity fight’’, organised by the Otago University Students’ Association, to raise money for a variety of causes.
One of those is the Sophie Elliott Foundation, the charity set up by Lesley Elliott, after the horrific murder of her daughter Sophie by her exboyfriend, to educate women aged 1524 about unhealthy relationships.
There’s no doubt about the value of such work, or the women’s sincerity, but this means of funding it raises some concerns.
Boxing isn’t just a dangerous ‘‘sport’’: there are many of those, including what’s often described as New Zealand’s national sport, rugby, which, as its controlling authority has at last recognised, causes a significant amount of brain damage from concussion. Boxing is different, because brain damage is its prime aim, and the most effective way to win a bout.
Most people will be aware of the high rate of dementia and neurodegenerative disorders in retired professional boxers (as with Muhammad Ali), but boxing can cause immediate death from brain damage, too. German research published in 2010 found an average of 10 immediate deaths from boxing, in the ring or just after, per year, since 1900, 80% of them from head and neck injuries.
A fourthyear neuroscience student, like the two young women in the picture a firsttime boxer, is planning to take part, to raise money for the Mental Health Foundation. One might have expected her, at least, to be acutely aware of the effects on the brain, and its bloodvessels, of repeated blows to the head.
Is Civis alone in finding it odd that fundraising for such a worthwhile cause as the prevention of emotional and physical violence towards young women should involve two women bashing each other, risking lasting brain damage? Or good mental health promoted by knocking the brain about?
Is this type of fundraising, like other socalled ‘‘Fight for Life’’ contests, the manifestation of some weird selfsacrificial cult?
There’s nothing new about sacrificing one’s self for others. Jesus is recorded as having described it as the greatest example of human love, and those killed in war are frequently described as having done so, whatever their real motives for fighting.
But proportionality is needed. Being shaved for charity is a proportional sacrifice — the loss of what has been described as a woman’s ‘‘crowning glory’’ (both the boxers pictured have long hair) shouldn’t cause any damage.
Risking one’s life to save another’s, as when someone’s at risk of drowning, is proportional, and, rightly, applauded. Encouraging brain damage and risking death merely to raise money for charity is not proportional, and raises questions about the intelligence and commonsense of those running the OUSA. Has the university given up teaching proportionality, and how to think, with its recent downgrading of the humanities?
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s labour and delivery last week was ‘‘news’’, both in New Zealand and around the world, and the country’s glowing in the warmth of being a place where a (fairly) young mum isn’t automatically relegated from important nonmaternal work. At the time Civis was born, having a child meant a woman was normally expected to retire from paid employment: Civis suspects that, if the pregnancy had been known during the 2017 election campaign, the present parliamentary opposition would have bellowed ‘‘can’t do both!’’
Civis also wonders, given that it was known the birth would be announced on social media, and the first interview wouldn’t be until just before the family left hospital for home, why reporters sat in a hospital room drinking coffee (or something stronger?) while waiting for that announcement ? What a waste of time, money, and space.
Congratulations and aroha, Jacinda, Clarke, and Neve.