[williamdclt]

I can see how it makes sense. Rather than repress the violence, make it safe enough: it still works as an outlet, it facilitates it so that hunger for violence doesn’t reach high levels, it provides rules and boundaries implicitly accepted by both sides which helps avoiding revenge and escalation…

It applies to many undesirable -but-hard-to-eliminate things really, eg drug use probably ?

[Zak]

It's usually called "harm reduction" in the context of drug use, but I hadn't made the connection that this was an example of the same thing until now.