No link between rugby games and assault: Study | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

WOMEN'S REFUGE and Police question the findings of three Canterbury University researchers that big rugby matches don't contribute to assault-related admissions to Christchurch Hospital.

Associate Professor Simon Kingham and Drs Kyoko Fukuda and Gregory Breetzke of the GeoHealth lab analysed seven years of the hospital's admission data to study the impact of rugby games.

Canterbury and the Crusaders played 160 matches in that time, and won 75 per cent.

The research showed no association between the rugby matches and assault-related hospital admissions.

Matches home or away, win or lose, were not significantly associated with assault-related hospital admissions, they said.

However, raw admissions counts were higher during weekends when rugby games were played.

"Quite predictably, assault-related admissions were significantly higher on weekends than weekdays," they said.

But unexpectedly they found that assault-related admissions were significantly higher for females on weekdays and significantly higher for males at weekends.

This showed incidences of domestic violence might occur more often during the week, they said.

The increase in male admissions at the weekend could be the result of male social interaction during weekends with possibly an increase in alcohol consumption typically occurring, they reported.

The Canterbury research confirmed overseas studies which also found little correlation between sports events and hospital admission rates.

However, Christchurch central police commander Inspector Derek Erasmus said that when major sporting events were on, there was an increase in activity in the central city and police put on extra staff.

Frontline staff believed there was a change of mood among the crowd in town depending who had played and what the result was, said Mr Erasmus.

"The accepted wisdom is when we lose a major game, the crowd is not as happy and there are more drunken-related incidents," he said.

"But that may not translate into assaults."

Many of the incidents police dealt with did not end up with hospitalisations, and minor assaults might just end in somebody being moved along, he pointed out.

And for one of the major sports events in recent years, the 2005 Lions rugby tour, extra staff were rostered but police had no issues.

Very few people were involved in any sort of incidents, but this may have been because British visitors had a different attitude to how they socialised in town or because of the extra police presence, he said.

"We plan for the worst case scenario and are pleasantly surprised when it does not eventuate."

Women's Refuge CEO Annette Gillespie said family violence was something that happened behind closed doors, so victim attendance at hospital was a last resort, not a first option.

Violence could occur at home and police might attend, but that did not automatically translate to the the victim being treated at a hospital, she said.

And hospitals did not actively screen for family violence incidents.

Hospitals were unlikely to have been asking the questions over the period the research was done, so the finding was not a surprise to her.

It was not consistent with what police or Women's Refuge found, and both certainly had a different experience, she said.