MMA and Domestic Violence – The Uncomfortable Truth

When attempting to evangelise the sport of MMA to the non-believers in our everyday lives, we often encounter a degree of suspicion and cautiousness.

Normal humans often initially recoil at our enthusiasm at the prospect of people attempting to separate one another from their consciousness in a cage. However we always break them down in the end. We show them Gracie In Action tapes, we tell them how it’s just the four combative Olympic sports all mixed together, we inundate them with phrases that are quickly becoming cliché such as “purest form of competition”, “human chess” and “high level problem solving”. More often than not, we often find our target willingly sat next to us a few weeks later at three ‘o clock in the morning in front of the TV while trying to explain to them the mechanics of an omoplata through mouthfuls of cheap lager and Domino’s pizza.

My point is that as a sport that has been ignored, degraded and bastardised publicly for so many years (especially in the UK), we fans are often so quick to become defensive and wax lyrical about the beauty and positivity in our sport that we are at danger of ignoring the darkness. The truth is that bad people can learn martial arts too, and they quite often do.

It’s no secret that there is a domestic violence problem in the MMA community. Back in 2015, the HBO: Real Sports series featured a documentary on the problem, and conducted a particularly moving interview with adult film star Christie Mack, who was allegedly beaten “to the point of convulsions” by her MMA fighter boyfriend Jon “War Machine” Koppenhaver. They also released a detailed report which specified that domestic violence occurred at a rate of 750 per 100,000 amongst MMA fighters, more than twice the US national average of 360 per 100,000.

I’m not here to detail every case of a high-profile MMA fighter being accused of women beating – that information is readily available and there’s no need to recycle what we already know. What I’d like to do is attempt to understand the problem, and figure out why, how and if the problem in our sport can be addressed from within.

Conventional wisdom might suggest that the results of the HBO study are not surprising. MMA fighters are not the same as the normal population, so why would the results reflect any difference? The tired phrase “Correlation doesn’t equal causation” comes to mind. It wouldn’t be fair to infer a causation between domestic violence and the sport of MMA when by nature the data set involves a younger, more testosterone fuelled demographic, would it?

It could be the case that male participants of many sports would be more likely to be guilty of this crime based on numbers alone. Well the HBO study suggests otherwise. Surprisingly, it was found that amongst NFL players the number sat at 210 per 100,000 – way below the US average. They are involved in a practice that involves a somewhat commensurate level of power and physicality to MMA, so why are their rates much lower? This brings to mind a Facebook comment that I saw on the topic recently which initially struck me as pretty thoughtless and vacuous, and said something to the effect of “surprise surprise, someone who punches people for a living ends up punching someone”. The more I think about this statement, the more conflicted I become.

I saw this comment on a post that was one of my main influences for writing this article. It was an audio clip of the truly horrifying 911 call that the girlfriend of then UFC heavyweight Cody East placed while she was locked in the bathroom of their trailer. She whispers through tears, barely comprehensible as her 265lbs boyfriend attempted to bash the door down, allegedly threatening to in her words “break her face”. The call ends with screaming and banging, during which some media outlets have reported that she was dragged by her hair and kneed in the face. East has subsequently been arrested and released from the UFC. He was initially scouted for the promotion on Dana White’s “Lookin’ For A Fight” reality show with the full knowledge that he had been arrested on multiple occasions in the past for sexual assault and domestic violence, and had even served three years in prison for child abuse charges.

Needless to say, East’s behaviour and the lack of judgement by the UFC in signing him is absolutely deplorable – however as previously stated, the point here is not to chastise and denounce every perpetrator of domestic violence in the MMA community. That practice is already taken care of by the force of public opinion and while important, ultimately amounts to not much more than noise. I’m more interested in the why, not the how.

So, back to this Facebook comment. Is it really just a psychotic desire to hurt people that lies at the heart of this link? Anybody who knows any MMA fighters can see that there can be a healthy middle ground between enjoying a fight and leading perfectly conflict-free, amiable personal life. In fact this is the norm, as opposed to the exception. Despite my earlier comments about MMA cliché, it is self-evident that a good proportion of people who compete do indeed see it as a high-stakes game of wits and athletic ability. Just listen at any length to podcasts or interviews with fighters and you’ll see that many of them took their athletic and competitive mentality from other sports and applied it to a greater challenge, to see how far they could make it in the hardest sport in the world.

There is the other familiar story – those who had the misfortune of growing up under circumstances that offered them no vocational opportunities, fighting was an alternative to falling victim to the lure of drugs, gangs, crime and an eventual prison sentence. Then there are those who simply enjoy fighting. They fight on the streets growing up, they fight full blast every day in the gym, and they fight in the cage for the pure hell of it. Obviously these motivations are not mutually exclusive. The lines are blurred, there are those who appreciate the beauty in martial arts to its deepest extent whilst simultaneously relishing the intensity of the fight itself.

I hasten to add that the last thing I’m doing is conflating a love of fighting with a desire to beat women. But I do believe that a given individual’s desire to beat a woman can stem from the same depravity that attracts them to MMA. I don’t see how anybody could honestly suggest that learning the mechanics of how to throw your fists and shins would suddenly or even gradually instil in somebody a desire to try it out on a defenceless person, less so a cowering girlfriend. But violent individuals do violent things, and why would somebody unstable and aggressive enough to hit a woman draw the line at fighting for money in a cage? Nothing prevents them from going to a gym and gaining the same skills that everybody else has. And what’s more, once they achieve notoriety for their achievements in the cage, in what world could we expect them to suddenly rid themselves of whatever pathology made them so violent in the first place?

Due to the very nature of our sport these individuals will keep cropping up, and it is the job of the MMA community as a whole to shun them. Trainers should not train them and promotions should not promote them. I can’t pretend to understand what goes through the mind of a woman who is physically assaulted by somebody who supposes to be their boyfriend, but I imagine that the pain of seeing them gain fame and fortune by using the very same fists with which they beat you wouldn’t inspire feelings of confidence in the society’s willingness to help.