A boxing club which helps survivors of domestic abuse to rebuild their lives has ambitious plans to support thousands more women.
Fight Forward is a not-for-profit organisation in London that uses boxing to help women recovering from trauma and abuse.
It was set up by former Team GB boxer Lesley Sackey who herself survived domestic abuse. Sackey was part of Britain's first female Olympic boxing selection team and won gold at the European Championships in 2008.
POSSIBLE
Fight Forward, which is based at a gym in Kilburn, north-west London, has worked with more than 100 women so far since 2022, with 20 going through the full programme to step into the ring.
"I'd love to help 100,000 women," Sackey told the BBC. "I think it's completely possible.
"Currently, one in four women in the UK experience abuse in their lifetime. I actually think it's higher, that's around eight and a half million women just in the UK alone."
Read more about 'Fight Forward' on BBC News
Sackey has explained how boxing helped her. She told the Express: “After leaving the relationship, I felt like I was in a survival mode and I really wanted to connect with feeling strong and empowered again - boxing was the first thing that came to mind.
“I want to use boxing as a tool to help women and I realised because of my own journey that getting into the ring is a powerful way to help shift trauma to help reclaim a voice.
“My main goal is to create a safe environment to allow whatever needs to come out. There's so much research to show trauma lives in the body and so it takes something rigorous and you know big to shift that and so boxing is a great tool for that.
BAGGAGE
“By the time you get to the ring you feel like your baggage feels a little bit lighter. I can see the reasons why people say ‘Why would you want to put women who've experienced abuse into a potentially harmful situation?’ but it's so much deeper than that.
“It’s the training, it's the journey, it's about consent these women are choosing for themselves which is powerful because they're deciding and they're learning from that process.”
Sackey says she hopes women who have experienced domestic abuse find a support network. “What a gift safety is - it can come in so many forms, it's about peace, physical safety, emotional safety and to be able to navigate any situation without knowing that you're going to get harmful response. I hope survivors will create a support network community like what we have here.”
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