Why would you need to redefine violence, except for the purpose of personal ideology? Seems rather Orwellian to me, an attempt to control language to be right by default?
Words don't have singular definitions, that's inorganic thinking. Words exist on a practical continuum to communicate ideas. The ideoform precedes the word.
A great example is the word slut. It used to mean one thing, and then it was "taken back." Now everyone uses Thot to mean more or less the same thing that slut used to mean (though not rigidly, words are fuzzy little things). You can shift definitions and take back words all you want, society will just invent new ones, or repurpose old ones.
Violence is not unidefinitional, sometimes it means brutality, sometimes ferocity, sometimes savagery, sometimes force or vehemence. It's a constellation, a continuum.
I see this kind of thing all the time in Conlangs, people get exercised on the ambiguity of language, try to invent a logical, rational, fixed unidefinitional language, and what they get is an inexpressive, obtuse and mechanical language that no one wants to use.
The beauty and power of poetry, or a stirring speech, or a poignant ballad all rely on the ambiguity of the language, and the multi-definitional nature of words. That's how you can find words that mean and rhyme how you want them to mean and rhyme.
Not all of the problems we are trying to solve as a species are rational. Some are beautiful, and sterile precision is violence to beauty.
With that being said, if you have some kind of argument to make, you can freeze the definition, like saying: let violence = ..., which exists for the presentation of some analytical idea or narrative or some such.
Is society violent? Of course. Nature is red in tooth and claw, humans and society are outgrowths of nature. Is that such a bad thing? Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forest of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry.
This is quite a bit like asking "is water wet?" There is no society in all of recorded history that wasn't founded on violence, and that didn't employ varying levels of violence internally and externally. There is also no "lower" order system in existence that is not violent in one way or another. All social animals, all social insects, even bacteria, even fungi are violent. Your immune system is violent to intruders. Violence is, and always has been, the de facto way to get anything done.
The only way that a person, or ideology, can claim to be "non-violent" is by redefining violence away from their objective, but that definition is purely local.
Violence is a word that can be moved about, it can mean physical, emotional, financial, legal, sexual and so on. We can denude it of ambiguity for utility, but there will always be some group, somewhere, that takes the inverse position.
Defining violence as being something done without consent just seems so much progressive "consent injection." It's the new buzzword. It's a kind of gray, Pratchetian Auditor practice of making everything utterly joyless and anodyne. The danger of any such practice is that ultimately it leads to the fetishisation of the inverse, and ultimately cynicalisation soon follows.
I think your use of the MMA example, what equates to proto-gladitorialism, is a perfect example of adjusting definitions to facilitate fetichisation of violence. One needs to redefine violence purely to alleviate pseudo-moral guilt at being thrilled and aroused by the portrayal of "violence." What in previous generations would have been castigated as the brute portrayal of crass savagery, is now a family entertainment opportunity. So what if we add death into the mix, I mean, after all, they consent?
It won't be too long before we cart out prisoners, I mean, after all they "consent" by virtue of having committed crimes? Right? Amiright? Before you claim this is a slippery slope fallacy, let's table the conversation for 20 years and see.
The minute you start drawing lines in the sand, you're tacitly agreeing that lines can be drawn. The rest is time. The line you draw today, will be moved tomorrow, inching ever closer and will bring about the exact inversion of your intent.
Such is the arc of the moral universe, it bends not towards justice, but depravity.
This is just a coup d'oeuil opinion. I don't suggest that I am right, in fact, I am probably totally wrong about everything I just said. Please don't take this as me trying to put words in OP's mouth, I am not suggesting OP suggested anything, what precedes is just where my mind went thinking about the question, and trying to put it into context to have some meaning based on my personal perspectives. Your miles to kilometers may vary. Void where prohibited by law. My opinions have been known to cause dryness, soreness, halitosis, psoriasis and death. Please read responsibly.
-------------------- Everything I've said is opinion. I am not here to be right, I'm here for the shrooms.
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