Despite moves to overturn the ban on using cages in mixed martial arts it remains the victim of demonisation. But conflating the sport with street and domestic violence is a dangerous rhetorical move, writes Stephanie Convery.

If you had told me a year ago that I could have a great time on a Friday night sipping overpriced beer and watching people punch each other, I would have laughed at you.

But that's exactly what happened two weeks ago when, in an underground function space in Parkville, I watched a number of my friends from boxing class get into the ring for the first time.

I've been an amateur boxer for eight months. When I first told people about my training, eyebrows were raised. Their surprise wasn't unexpected: women have been boxing for as long as the sport has existed but have been sidelined for much of that history by trainers, other boxers and the law.

Queensland only legalised women's boxing in 2000, with NSW refusing to lift its ban until 2008. It was a mere three years ago that women's boxing was finally accepted as an Olympic sport.

The attitudes that underpin this discrimination are depressingly familiar. Women are taught to think of themselves as in need of protection, inherently weaker and less resilient than men, less physically capable. We are told that virtue is found in being skinnier, smaller, prettier. But there is nothing more guaranteed to puncture those stereotypes than women's participation in combat sport.

Boxing teaches you to focus on strength, stamina and speed rather than appearance. It requires you to be alert, observant and poised to act. It teaches you that the physical and emotional parts of yourself are not independent of each other and that you have the capacity to control and direct that energy. It brings all of this to bear because it forces you to confront the limitations of your body, but also to recognise its great potential for resistance.

For women in particular this is often the revelation that allows them to internalise and accept their own capacity for independence and agency. But it is also why there are so many stories of young wayward men joining a boxing gym and turning their lives around for the better. The self-discipline, control, commitment and presence of mind required to even get to the ring on a fight night is transformative. Boxing, as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, is not a metaphor for anything else. In a fight, after all, what's at stake is not just a championship, an accolade or a pat on the back from your coach, but you.

Mixed martial arts, a much newer form of combat sport, has been growing in popularity over the last three decades. Originally devised as an open competition in which to test different martial art forms against each other, the sport has developed into its own discipline. Like traditional boxing, however, MMA has a bad reputation because the explicit objective of the sport is to physically dominate your opponent, and this comes with an obvious potential for injury.

MMA is ideally performed in a cage - an octagon - comprised of padded posts and chain link fences covered in vinyl. But while mixed martial arts is legal in Victoria it must be performed in a traditional boxing ring, after the Labor government in 2007 banned the use of the cages, although not the sport itself. During that incident, and in subsequent debates in Victoria about the legalisation of the cage, MMA has been characterised as a brutal, thuggish practice that invokes and glamorises blood lust. And despite Labor now indicating it will overturn the ban on the use of the cage, this characterisation is still used.

In a way it's easy to understand why. A combat sport performed in a cage conjures up images of gladiatorial duels, mistreated animals or "human cockfighting". The chain-link fence suggests seedy, back-alley bouts run by shady gangsters. The cage has an image problem, no doubt, but its bad reputation belies its important function in the sport.

It is, quite simply, a safety apparatus: it allows a competitor on the ground to move themselves into a standing position, thus limiting head strikes. It also prevents the competitors, who engage in a lot of grappling on the mat, from rolling off the edges of the ring on to the ground or into the audience and officials, while still allowing the spectators to view the action. Without it, referees must stop the match when the competitors come close to the edge of the boxing ring, move them back to the centre, rearrange them, and restart the match.

The bruises, broken arms, blood noses and concussions that may be sustained in a legal fight may not look any different to those sustained in an assault, but context is crucial. It takes many, many months of committed training to participate in a match, which is then performed under the scrutiny of experienced and qualified referees and judges, with attendant ringside doctors. The sport is fully regulated and sanctioned under the Professional Boxing and Combat Sports Act, which requires all competitors to undergo mandatory blood tests, physicals and pre- and post-match examinations.

If injuries are sustained, competitors are referred for further medical attention, barred from training for six to eight weeks, and medical clearance is required before they resume. Injuries are not unique to combat sports and risk is not something that any sporting code takes lightly. MMA is no exception and the cage ban simply makes risk management within the sport more difficult.

In October last year the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, Ken Lay, argued against the legalisation of the cage:

It concerns me when we start considering cage fighting in the world's most liveable city, especially when we're seeing such great progress in reducing violence in our community.

But to conflate an organised and regulated sport with street violence, domestic violence, assault and battery is a dangerous rhetorical move. It fundamentally misrepresents the people involved in combat sport and does nothing to solve actual violent conflict in the community.

From the point of view of participants and the martial arts community, the cage ban is patently ridiculous - a political move designed to score easy public image points in a campaign against street violence with no evidence to back it up. Meanwhile, issues such as outdated gender roles, economic instability and racial discrimination that are the real causes of violence within the community remain unfixed.

It's time we stopped making combat sport the scapegoat, and allowed the men and women who love it to practice their discipline freely and safely.

Stephanie Convery is a Melbourne-based writer. On Twitter, she is @gingerandhoney.