The Responsibility Of Sport Violence In The United States

When participating in a sport, there is always the likelihood of physical contact, and with that, comes the potential for injury. Of course, this is especially true in contact sports such as Football, Rugby, Hockey, Lacrosse, and rather frequently, Basketball and Baseball/Softball. Some rare cases involving injury as a result of violent acts in sports have resulted in court cases, and subsequent cases have produced largely inconclusive results, with some cases ending in criminal convictions, some ending with civil settlements and some concluding that the incident at hand is a result of sporting behavior despite the nature of the act. Many incidents go unnoticed and are punishable only by an athlete’s respective sport league. These inconsistent
In Sports and Criminal Law: The Manly Sports, the Problematic Use of Criminal Law to Regulate Sports Violence, Jeffrey Standen proposes a standard to clarify the line between sport violence, and criminal or civil violence by clearly limiting the implied consent that athletes have when they agree to participate in a sport and limiting the range of acceptable behavior in sports. According to Standen, this approach not only covers incidents in sports that would be seen as “foreseeable”, but also includes acts that might be anticipated outside the scope of the game, such as a fight that occurs during an event that results in injury to an athlete (Standen 2009). Standen argues that in order to create uniformity, criminal prosecution in sport should only take place when an athlete commits an act that is beyond the sporting behavior and beyond the rational thought of rule makers in a sports league (Standen 2009). In other words, an athlete should only be punished beyond the scope of the respective sport league when he/she has committed an act so violent that it exceeds all foreseeability in a