The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Boxing has called on the Ministry of Justice and prisons in Great Britain to offer non-contact boxing to offenders as part of their rehabilitation programmes.

It is based on the experiences of Ashfield Prison and HMP Doncaster, which have successfully used boxing in their rehabilitation work, and is one of a series of recommendations in a new report, The Right Hook, published today by the APPG.

The report (which is available at https://appgboxing.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/boxing-the-right-hook/) examines the social and educational benefits of boxing and its impact in addressing a range of social problems including crime, educational underachievement, truancy, bullying, inactivity and obesity.

It presents an overview of grassroots boxing in Great Britain and features examples and case studies of projects that have been set-up to address specific social problems. The examples show how boxing is a vital tool in engaging disaffected young people and then providing them with structures and values that have a positive impact on their behaviour.

The report challenges the perceptions of boxing as unsafe and provides detailed examples as how it is delivering benefits covering gangs and anti-social behaviour, education, health and wellbeing and policing and criminal justice.

It looks at how more help can be given to boxing clubs and projects and identifies ways in which the sport can be deployed as a policy tool to help support efforts to address a wide range of social problems.

The report calls on sport to be given a more central role in policy making across a range of areas and claims: “It may well be that a lack of co-ordination of sport policy across government is hampering the wider and more effective use of boxing and other sports. Just as the sporting community needs to do more to engage with policy makers and funding organisations, we believe the government should consider the evidence presented in this report and actively consider how amateur boxing clubs can be more readily engaged and supported in helping to deliver policy objectives such as improving educational attainment and fostering safer and more cohesive communities.”

Specific recommendations in the report include:
Ø The Ministry of Justice and National Offender Management Service should work with prisons and England Boxing to encourage the wider roll-out of non-contact boxing programmes in prisons including a pilot scheme with violent offenders
Ø All Government departments should designate a Minister with responsibility for sport in each department to recognise its role in addressing many issues and make policy-making more joined-up
Ø The Government should perform a sports impact assessment on all relevant policies so that it can evaluate the effect of government decisions on sport and physical activity

The Chair of the APPG, Charlotte Leslie MP, said: “The Right Hook provides compelling evidence that boxing is a force for good and can be much more widely deployed to help combat a wide-range of social exclusion issues covering everything from gangs and knife crime to inactivity, obesity, educational under-attainment and anti-social behaviour.

“If we want to base interventions on prejudices, we cannot be surprised when they don’t work. If we really want to tackle some deep-rooted problems, we have to get real, and look at what is really effective. The evidence increasingly shows that boxing is an invaluable tool at reaching the areas other interventions do not reach.”

The report was welcomed by Olympic gold medallist, Nicola Adams and England Boxing, the national governing body for the sport in England which operates a network of more than 900 clubs and over 14,000 members.

In her Foreword of the report, Nicola Adams, wrote: “For someone like me who is passionate about the sport, it is great to see that boxing is getting the recognition it deserves. I sincerely hope that all of the recommendations in this report are acted upon and that local authorities and government departments take a closer look at how they can harness the sport to benefit the people and communities they serve.”

Mark Abberley, Chief Executive of England Boxing said: “The fact is boxing is more than a sport and we know from our work at the grassroots that it has a track record of combatting a wide-range of problems and delivering a variety benefits to society. By aggregating data and providing examples, this report by the APPG provides very strong evidence of that and makes an extremely persuasive argument for boxing to be more widely deployed as a policy tool by government and local authorities.”

The report was launched at the Fight 4 Change Foundation in south London which is one of several community based boxing projects featured in The Right Hook. The Foundation was established in 2009 by Rebecca Donnelly MBE and uses boxing to help turn around the lives of young offenders and people from the local community by teaching respect, discipline, healthy living and providing access to qualifications and educational opportunities.

Others projects and organisations included in the report include Empire ‘Fighting Chance’ from Bristol, The Charter Academy in Portsmouth, Mount Carmel Catholic College for Girls in London, Rye Town College in Rye and The Boxing Academy in Hackney which have all used boxing to address educational issues.

Other case studies include: Fight for Peace, Fitzroy Lodge and Pedro ABC in London, Yate ABC in Gloucestershire, Leyburn Road Mosque in Sheffield, Ashfield Prison and HMP Doncaster.