“The only people who say boxing is violent have never done it,” says Luke Dowdney. The former amateur boxer from England knows this from practice and scholarship. While at the University of Edinburgh, he became a British Universities Light-Middleweight boxing champion and wrote a dissertation on the violence-ridden lives of Brazilian street children. In 2000, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and founded Fight for Peace/Luta pela Paz, a nonprofit for young people ages 7 to 25 living amid crime,…

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Read more stories by Tamara Straus.