Update: Possible NFL Concussions-Domestic Violence Link Geting More Scrutiny
Ray Rice beat his wife-to-be. It was disgusting, abhorrent, and unforgivable.
Was it medically preventable?
NFL players suffer repeated blows to the head every Sunday. A star player like Rice will get tackled hundreds of times every year. And there is evidence to suggest that all those hits to the brain may increase the propensity to commit domestic violence.
"It's a very, very important question," Adrian Raine told me. Raine is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is the nation's most prominent "neurocriminologist" — essentially, a researcher who is trying to tease out how brain function can help explain criminal behavior.
"It's a plausible hypothesis, without doubt," he added.
This article isn't an excuse for Ray Rice's actions. It's impossible to know what was going through Rice’s mind as he assaulted his fiancée, or the minds of the dozens of other NFL players who have been arrested for domestic violence in the past few years.
"We have to be careful what we're talking about from a causality standpoint," Brian O'Connor of Futures Without Violence told me. NFL players are taught to be aggressive; they deal with all kinds of high-pressure stressors and triggers, O'Connor pointed out, from a career that plays out on national TV to the possibility of getting cut from a team without a guaranteed salary.
But there's increasing evidence that the NFL's domestic violence arrest rate — which is "downright extraordinary," Benjamin Morris writes at FiveThirtyEight — could be associated with more than the culture of football.
At this point, there's no debate that football itself changes the brains of its players. The NFL has admitted to it. The sport's head injuries have long-lasting consequences — and may even alter personalities in the short term.
And it raises the question: What came first — the hits on the field, or the hit at home?
Courtesy AP/Bill Haber
High Arrest Rates For Domestic Violence
Consider what we know about NFL players' supposed problems with the law, and their very real tendency to commit domestic abuse.
It's a myth that NFL players in general are prone to criminality; their overall arrest rates are actually much lower than national averages. (The average man in his late 20s is about nine times more likely to be arrested than an NFL player for any cause.)
That's not surprising, given a team's structured environment and athletes' incredibly high income. An NFL player's minimum annual salary is $420,000, and an income that high is generally correlated with a lower likelihood of being arrested.
But NFL players get arrested for domestic violence at an "extremely high [rate] relative to expectations," Morris writes at FiveThirtyEight. "Domestic violence accounts for 48 percent of arrests for violent crimes among NFL players, compared to [an] estimated 21 percent nationally," he adds.
Basically, NFL players are about four times more likely to be arrested for domestic abuse than you'd expect, based on their overall arrest rates. Counting Ray Rice, more than two-dozen pro football players have been arrested for domestic abuse in the past five years alone.
Is There A Link Between Concussions And Domestic Violence?
You can't draw a straight line between players who are known to abuse their partners and a record of football head injuries. At this point, that data is incomplete, partly because NFL concussion data is so piecemeal.
But neurologists have repeatedly found a neurobiological link in individuals who commit repeated acts of violence. In one recent study, Raine and a neuroscientist scanned the brains of men arrested for domestic abuse and found neural abnormalities, like a hyperactive amygdala. Essentially, these men were much more likely to violently lash out when provoked by something as simple as a partner's nagging.
"We all get aggressive at times. What stops us from lashing out? It's a well-functioning prefrontal cortex," Raine told me.
"In spouse abusers, that guardian angel of behavior — that prefrontal cortex — is just not working as well."
It's possible that some of those problems are congenital. But it's also plausible, Raine says, to consider the role of environmental events.
"If you get a whiplash injury" — say, a football tackle — "the very front ridge of the brain is especially likely to be damaged," Raine said. "The region that is very much involved in emotion regulation."
Meanwhile, the NFL has increasingly acknowledged that its sport leads to serious, long-term brain damage. According to the actuarial data made public on Friday, almost 30% of NFL players will suffer from at least moderate neurodegenerative disease.
Also See: 61 NFL Players — At Least — Had Concussions In The Preseason
NFL players appear to be especially at risk for a specific disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. The disease seems to be slow but progressive; essentially, the brain deteriorates over time. Early CTE symptoms include "impulsivity, explosivity, and aggression," Dr. Ann McKee and coauthors point out in a recent journal article.
The disease can only be detected with an autopsy, but it can strike young; CTE has been found in the brains of high school and college football players, including football players who never had a diagnosed concussion.
And it's thought to be widespread across the NFL. Boston University neuroscientists have tested the brains of 62 former NFL players who suffered from symptoms like depression and violence — 59 of them tested positive for CTE.
McKee, who's one of BU's lead researchers, has suggested that a majority of professional football players could suffer from CTE.
"Is a concussion going to lead to CTE? No, probably not in most cases," McKee told PBS Frontline last year. "But if you have enough concussions over a certain amount of time, yes, then I think you can lead to CTE."
It's also turned up in the brains of football players linked with domestic violence.
Junior Seau, the former NFL star who was found to have CTE after his suicide in 2012, was arrested two years before his death. The charge? Suspicion of assaulting his girlfriend.
What It Means For The NFL
Let's say the evidence adds up. That football players' head injuries are linked with their propensity to hurt their partners.
What does it mean for the NFL — other than yet another sign that playing football brings serious risks?
Responding to the Ray Rice fallout, the NFL's hired several experts in domestic abuse. But if the NFL really wants to protect players' partners and families, perhaps franchises should be actively screening and treating players for mental health — not booting players with mental illness from the team.
"I do think we need to recognize that there's more to domestic violence than … men's using physical power to control women," Raine contends in his book, "The Anatomy of Violence." "We need to consider a contribution by the brain to spousal abuse."
Perhaps the league could be focusing on players who suffer the most physical battery, too. As a star running back, Rice has taken his share of hits to the head, getting tackled more than 1,500 times in a six-year NFL career, and thousands of times before that.
He also initiated plenty of contact. In 2013, Rice talked about how he'd deliberately lower his shoulder to deal out helmet-to-helmet hits.
"There's not going to be a guy that's going to be able to get a free lick on me," Rice said at the time.
Concussions And Violence— Like Smoking And Cancer?
Despite consensus in the scientific community of a brain-behavior link when it comes to regulating aggression, some passionate football fans might say that the data is unproven as of yet.
So to explain the connection between repeated head injuries and violent behavior, Raine offers a metaphor.
"It's a bit like smoking and cancer," he told me.
"Does smoking cause lung cancer? Yes, but many people smoke and do not have cancer. But certainly smoking raises the odds of lung cancer, just as damage to the prefrontal cortex can raise the odds of impulsive, aggressive behavior."
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