Kimura lock applied at the 2015 Pan Kids.
A petition surfaced this Wednesday on the website Change.com that affects the Jiu-Jitsu community.
William Murphy, of Sarasota, FL, is the author of the petition started August 10, 2015, asking the US Senate to make illegal chokes and locks on grappling competitions in the USA for children under the age of 12.
Murphy argues that: “If the referee is poor, this can result in permanent harm to the child. Even if the referee stops the match quickly, children’s brains are still developing, and deliberately cutting off the blood supply to a child’s brain is a dangerous and ridiculously negligent practice. These same tournaments often allow children to apply joints locks to the wrists, elbows, shoulders, knees, ankles, or neck until the child “submits” from the pain of the lock. If these locks are applied with too much force or for too long, lasting damage to the child’s joints can occur.”
The text also says that teaching children this “dangerous” techniques open the possibility of accidents when they use those techniques on friends as play in unsupervised moments.
The petition has 48 suporters so far.
Click here to read the full text of the petition.
What do you think of the initiative?
