Julia Lee: Police detective, amateur coach and professional fighter | ‘Boxing chose me’ | Boxing News

Being a detective in south London is a busy enough job, let alone combining it with professional boxing. But Julia Lee is a police officer, a coach for at-risk youths, and a pro fighter.

Her most unusual career has taken her from studying at Oxford University to working as a lawyer before joining the Metropolitan Police and combating child exploitation in south London.

She was also a two-time Elite champion as an amateur boxer and will have her fourth professional bout on Saturday in Tolworth.

Lee, originally from Korea, gave up a role as a lawyer for an investment fund to join the police.

“Being a detective has been a real dream of mine since I was really young. I think you always have to just follow your heart,” she told Sky Sports.

“[Otherwise] it leads to a life of discontentment and regret. So I thought while I’ve still got time I better pursue these things.

“I work in the child exploitation team,” she explained. “It’s a two-pronged, safeguarding, protection and investigating, prosecution role.

“You’re looking at young people under 18 who are still developing, who may have come from backgrounds or have had experiences that have shaped who they are now and how they interpret things and they’re very, very vulnerable.

“They just get completely pulled out of education, pulled out of normal childhood, experience a lot of difficult situations, a lot of violence, get injured or even lose their lives.”

If she’d always had ambitions of police work, her involvement in boxing came more at random. Lee had become a competitive boxer when she was studying at Oxford University. “I have no idea where it came from but it almost feels like boxing chose me,” she said. “It kind of came out of nowhere.”

She was out of the sport for almost seven years when she practised law. But when she joined the police, she began to box seriously again. So seriously, in fact, that she won the national Elite championships in two weight classes.

“It was unfinished business so when I joined the police, I thought they must have a boxing club,” Lee said.

“I remember watching the Elites going: ‘They’re so fantastic, they’re amazing, I wonder if I’ll ever get to that kind of stage.’ And then within four months, I was straight into the Elites from the Devs [the development or novice championships]. I won that and then I was [thinking] this is absolutely crazy.

“The year after I won at a higher weight class. So it’s been three consecutive years of absolute madness.

“At the end of the line, there was nowhere really for me to go. Because I was Korean I couldn’t really represent England or Great Britain so I thought the only way to continue evolving was turning professional.”

She has managed to combine her boxing with her career in the police force, though her proficiency as a fighter is not something she’s had to use directly as a police officer.

“I have never had to employ boxing skills, but I think with any sport or a certain level of athleticism, you have an aura of the way you carry yourself is different and you’re more confident. And that actually makes you de-escalate situations better than if you were hot-headed and just wanted to get into a fight,” Lee said.

“So I think you know how to pick fights, because you know if it comes to it you can take care of yourself.”

But she has merged her two careers by starting a boxing club for at-risk young people.

“That’s where I see the young people going as well, because before they did boxing they might pick fights on the street because they need to get the aggression out somehow. But once they start boxing, they realise what fighting is really about. [They think] I really don’t need this,” she said.

“You don’t need to prove yourself. Which I think where often the urge to fight comes from is to prove yourself in a non-life threatening situation.”

She explained: “Sometimes I will work with kids I come across in policing and then bring them to the gym and then continue my work there in two different contexts. That’s how I manage to marry them together. It takes a lot of time.

“I’m very tired a lot of the time, but it’s worthwhile,” Lee continued. “The child exploitation team was actually really perfect for that because I knew that I would be working directly with young people who are in difficult situations and also be able to introduce them to boxing in a way that was more natural than just a referral. That was part of my motivation to create the Rebels amateur boxing club. Because I was frustrated at the transient nature of some of the boxing camps and projects that were available.”

The aim of the project is to give those vulnerable young people more alternatives.

“Sometimes they are excluded from school and they’re in an in-between time or they might be waiting for another school to start or they might have been permanently excluded,” she said. “And they go out on the street and meet people in the same situation and often influence each other to do things that might not be the most sensible decisions.

“So we try and give them somewhere where they can come for free, do something productive, be fit, get good training, and go home really tired so you won’t want to go out again.

“I think in terms of the bond that we have built, it’s really strong. Some of them have come to my own fights as well,” Lee added. “Hopefully, we can keep building on that.”

The issues she is confronting as a police detective and boxing coach are becoming more complex.

“Even if they are engaging in criminal activity, you can’t just look at them as criminals, you have to consider them as victims as well,” she said.

“There are so many different things to consider and your ultimate aim is to protect and allow that child to thrive whether it’s extricating them from a criminal environment, through even prosecution sometimes, that might be the only way. There are so many things to consider.

“I think that understanding is really improving but the risks are also continuously evolving. With things like social media it’s almost impossible to keep in time with the risks they have every day.

“It is very difficult, it is high risk and we just have to try our best and hope to connect, with at least some of them.”

Watch the finals of the Manchester Box Cup live on Sky Sports‘ digital platform on Sunday.