An Open Letter to.... Joe Calzaghe

The champion boxer has said he would like to see his sport introduced into school PE lessons, as a way of helping to prevent youngsters getting involved in knife crime

Dear Joe,

I READ with interest your suggestion earlier this week that children should be taught to box at school to help prevent them from turning to knife crime.

"Hopefully in the future," you said, "if you bring back boxing to schools like they used to, those problems (ie knife crime] wouldn't happen."

I can certainly see where you're coming from with this: some recent boxing initiatives have been incredibly successful in getting troubled youngsters off the streets. Particularly impressive is the Haringey Police and Community Amateur Boxing Club, run by former police boxing champion PC Gerry Willmott. Since it was established ten years ago, 90 young offenders in that London borough have become members and to date not one of them has fallen foul of the law.

However, boxing is undeniably a dangerous sport, and there's a whole world of difference between offering training to young people who want it and making pugilism part of the PE curriculum at schools up and down the land.

As I'm sure you are aware, the British Medical Association, which represents 84 per cent of doctors in the UK, has been campaigning to have boxing banned since 1982. Although it doesn't cause as many deaths per year as some other pursuits (horse racing, sky diving, mountaineering and scuba diving), the BMA says the sport is still a major concern because of its capacity to cause chronic brain damage. (The American Medical Association says this affects three out of four boxers who have more than 20 professional fights.) The BMA also objects to boxing on the grounds that it is the only high-risk sport in which the primary purpose is to cause physical harm to an opponent – not a very positive message to teach in schools, when you put it like that.

True, some changes have been made to professional boxing in the past 20 years in an attempt to make it safer: title fights have been reduced from 15 rounds to a maximum of 12 and the medical care at the ringside has been stepped up. These days a doctor is always on duty and an ambulance stands by to take any seriously damaged boxer straight to the nearest neurosurgical unit.

But none of this alters the fact that getting thumped in the head isn't very good for your brain – particularly if the brain in question is still growing and developing (medical evidence suggests that key brain-growth continues well into the teenage years). This is why the BMA is particularly concerned with preventing children from entering the sport, and why it is campaigning to make it illegal for under-16s to box.

You're right about one thing, Joe: the current knife-crime epidemic is a huge problem – I'm just not convinced that having the nation's schoolchildren punch each other repeatedly in the head every Wednesday afternoon is the best way to go about solving it.

All the best,

Roger Cox