Violence at sporting events

Coakley (1982) considers sports from a functionalist point of view and notes that this approach sees sport as usually providing learning experiences that reinforce and extend the learning that takes place in other settings:

In other words, sport serves as a backup or a secondary institution for primary social institutions such as the family, school, and church. Through sport people learn the general ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that make them contributing members of society (Coakley, 1982, 29).

However, sport has also been cited as a source of violent behavior in society and as an activity that brings this violence out in

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which can be imposed on the playing field to reduce violence, but this is not so easily accomplished with reference to fans: Controls on our society, however, are not so firm. The situation is no different today than it was in times of bloodlust sports in the Roman Coliseum. Violence in sports is nothing more than a reflection of our society. Our games will continue to be as violent as we want them to be (Aaseng, 1993, 42). Guttmann (1986) asks how serious the problem of spectator violence was at that time, noting that many of the more horrendous examples are repeated endlessly and that most of the deaths reported are accidental, the result of people being crushed in a panic situation. He notes that there is much research on crowd psychology which says something about the reaction of spectators and people in large groups Sociological literature on football violence shows that the individuals most likely to be involved in crowd violence are young, single males. Hockey fans who come to the games in hopes of seeing fights break out and those who have a history of brawling are most likely to join crowd disturbances (Kerr, 1994). Psychological elements of those individuals who claim to be willing participants in creating c
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Approximate Word count = 2690
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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