Staged violence versus real violence. Does one produce the other?

On the evening of 25 July 2026, a van was driven into the crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebration in the Tiergarten. The driver, a 21-year-old man later identified as Abdul Ballout, struck pedestrians and then continued the attack with a machete before fleeing on foot. One woman was killed. Twenty-nine people were injured, several critically. Police shot Ballout dead the following day during his arrest. Germany’s interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, said the attack was suspected to be Islamist terrorism, aimed deliberately at a pride event. The celebration, which had drawn hundreds of thousands of people, was called off within the hour. This incident starkly contrasts with the concept of staged violence versus real violence.

In the same week, a very different kind of violence has been quietly growing in popularity across Europe and North America: buhurt, sometimes called Historical Medieval Battle, in which teams of five wearing up to 15 kilograms of steel armor fight each other with blunted but real weapons until one side is left standing. Nobody dies. People do get hurt — broken fingers, concussions, torn ligaments are routine. Attendance and team numbers at tournaments have climbed for several years running.

Put those two facts next to each other and an obvious, uncomfortable question presents itself: at a moment when real violence is visibly rising — in the streets, in the news, in the tone of ordinary social media — what does it mean that staged violence is rising with it? Is a sport like buhurt a healthy outlet for something that would otherwise come out worse? Or is it one more rehearsal, training a culture to find violence more familiar, more watchable, more normal? This highlights the complexity of understanding staged violence versus real violence.

Two categories that must not be blurred

Before going further, the distinction has to be stated plainly, because the question above collapses into nonsense the moment it isn’t: the Berlin attack was ideologically motivated mass-casualty violence against a specific, targeted community. Buhurt is a consensual, rule-bound sport that people choose to enter and can leave at any point. No serious reading of the evidence suggests that one causes, excuses, or explains the other, and nothing that follows should be read as implying it does. The honest question is narrower and more interesting than “does violent sport cause real violence.” It is: what does the psychological research on staged and simulated aggression actually say about its effect on the people who participate in and watch it — and does that research offer any real guidance for a cultural moment this uneasy about violence in general?

The catharsis myth

The instinctive answer — that hitting something lets off steam that would otherwise come out somewhere worse — has a name, catharsis theory, and a lineage running back through Aristotle’s account of tragedy and into Freudian psychoanalysis. It is also, according to decades of experimental psychology, largely wrong. The psychologist Brad Bushman’s 2002 study, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, angered participants and then had one group hit a punching bag while ruminating on the person who’d angered them, another group hit the bag while thinking about something unrelated, and a third group do nothing at all. The rumination group came out angrier and more aggressive than either of the other two — and doing nothing beat “venting” outright. Bushman’s explanation is unsettling precisely because it matches lived experience: venting anger feels good in the moment, and that good feeling reinforces the aggressive behavior rather than discharging it. The catharsis model has the mechanism backwards.

What the dolls actually proved

If catharsis theory doesn’t hold, the leading alternative is worse news for anyone hoping violent sport is neutral at worst. Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment, run at Stanford in 1961, had children watch an adult either calmly play with toys or violently attack an inflatable doll — punching it, hitting it with a mallet, kicking it around the room while shouting. Children who watched the aggressive adult subsequently attacked the doll themselves, often replicating the specific actions and insults they’d seen, with no reward or instruction to do so. The finding became the foundation of social learning theory: people, and especially children, learn aggression by observing it modeled, independent of any direct consequence to themselves. Four decades of subsequent media-violence research has largely confirmed the basic mechanism, even as the size of the effect and its application to adult, voluntary, rule-governed activity like organized sport remains genuinely contested.

The counter-current: violence as a manufactured safety valve

Here the picture complicates in a way that matters. The sociologist Norbert Elias, in Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (1986, written with Eric Dunning), argued that modern societies have spent centuries steadily suppressing overt violence from public life — no more public executions, duels, or blood sports as everyday entertainment — and that this suppression has a cost: a corresponding hunger for controlled, pleasurable excitement that everyday civilized life no longer supplies. Organized sport, in Elias and Dunning’s account, is not catharsis in the naive sense of draining off a fixed quantity of aggression. It is something closer to a manufactured space, hedged by rules, referees, and shared consent, where a level of intensity that civilized life otherwise forbids can be safely re-introduced and enjoyed. On this account, buhurt’s growth isn’t evidence of a culture becoming more violent — it’s evidence of a culture so successfully non-violent in its everyday texture that it has to go looking for a regulated dose of the thing it spent three centuries designing itself to avoid.

Both things — Bandura’s modeling effect and Elias’s manufactured safety valve — appear to be true at once, which is exactly why the question resists a clean answer. The same act of watching or performing staged violence seems to model aggression in one frame of analysis and safely discharge the appetite for excitement in another. The research doesn’t resolve this tension. It just confirms that the tension is real.

The variable that actually matters in analysis of staged violence versus real violence

What the literature does suggest, taken as a whole, is that the deciding factor isn’t the presence of staged violence itself but whether the boundary around it stays intact — whether participants and audiences retain a clear, felt sense that this is bounded, consensual, and categorically separate from the real thing. Combat sport with clear rules, visible referees, and a shared understanding that it ends when someone taps out or the bout is called looks, on the Elias account, closer to a controlled release than a rehearsal. What erodes that boundary is not the sport itself but the context around it: violence consumed without any of that framing, stripped of rules and consequence, algorithmically served up next to real footage of real harm until the two start to blur in a scrolling feed. Social media’s default mode — violent clips, real and staged, presented in the same format, the same autoplaying rhythm, often without clear labeling of which is which — is a far better candidate for eroding the felt boundary between staged and real violence than a supervised buhurt tournament with a referee and a hospital tent on site.

Where Berlin actually belongs in this picture

None of this explains an attack like Berlin’s, and it shouldn’t be asked to. Ideologically motivated terrorism against a targeted community sits in a wholly different causal universe from a contested sociological debate about combat sport — driven by radicalization, ideology, and intent to kill, not by exposure to staged violence in a stadium. What the Berlin attack does is sharpen the stakes of the narrower question. In a period when real violence against real people is visibly climbing and spreading through the same feeds that carry entertainment, the discipline of keeping staged violence honestly labeled, clearly bounded, and consensual isn’t a minor curatorial detail. It may be the actual variable the research says matters most.

Buhurt fighters climb into fifteen kilograms of steel, agree to the terms, and know exactly when the fight ends. That knowledge — shared, bounded, mutually consented to — is precisely what was missing in the Tiergarten on the evening of 25 July. The two events don’t belong on the same axis of explanation. But the difference between them is the clearest available answer to the question of what actually makes staged violence safe: not that it’s violent, but that everyone in the room agreed to be there, and everyone knows when it stops.

Sources & further reading

• Brad J. Bushman, “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2002)
• Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Ross, the Bobo doll experiments, Stanford University (1961)
• Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Basil Blackwell, 1986)
• Reporting on the 2026 Berlin Pride attack, 25 July 2026, Tiergarten, Berlin — TO VERIFY final casualty figures and investigation details against updated reporting before publish, given the story was still developing at time of writing