Awareness Avoidance Action

After taking a hiatus to get some other business done. BTW, I'll be teaching the Rape Escape Course for the North Canton City Schools - Continuing Education in 2009. Now I want to get back to addressing some ideas about Self-Protection. Let's go back to the drawing board....When we consider the steps we take to protect ourselves - sometimes it helps to look at things from a paradigm or a descriptive example. What I would like to throw out to you is the paradigm of the Triangle. Take a look at the triangle that I have hastily drawn below...

You see that there are 3 sides to the triangle - each side has a different verb under it. At the base of our protective paradigm is Awareness. We cannot avoid or take action from crime (or even learn how to do so) unless we are aware that it exists and how it can affect us. In some ways this also requires us to be honest with ourselves and do a little bit of "what iffing".

What if a man was following me?

What if a man was in my backseat and I didn't know it?

What if a man approaches me in a parking lot?

What if a someone broke into my house while I was home alone?

This isn't paranoia....its just asking yourself "what would I do in the following situation?". Its actually the basis of learning too. Take a Rape Escape/ Fight Like A Girl course and we address several of these "what if" situations. In fact the course is based on actual research of over 100 sexual assault/ victimization studies compiled from a 7 year period (OK enough of the marketing - Back to the topic).

Avoidance

When you start to think about this you may seem overwhelmed but the truth is that you know when you meet someone that they are not a "good person". They give you the heavie-jeevies but being polite people and raised in a society that teaches women to be demure and passive; you'll find reasons why to distrust your feelings. Gavin de Becker, the author of The Gift of Fear (a most excellent book) gives an example of a woman who had a handyman that her cat did not like. When she asked about this, Gavin stated that it wasn't the cat that sensed the man's "evil" - rather the cat was playing off of the woman's intuition, yet she was doing everything to discredit her own feelings. The moral of your story: Trust your instincts - they are probably correct! The flip side of this is that often we allow nice people to get into our space and to threaten us; Ted Bundy often abducted his victims by appearing as a well dressed young white man who spoke softly and asked women to help him. He wasn't the paradigm of what we think an evil person would be, but he was evil. And he prayed on women's misconceptions and kindness.

Action

Speaking of space, you have probably heard the same old tired advice "Walk with Confidence". Phooey! What if someone approaches you and calls your bluff? Paxton Quigley, author of Not an Easy Target has an interesting take on this that I really like. It gets into the paradigm of what men thinking women should be like (as I say it changes your OODA Loop - but that's a lesson for another time). She calls it her Get the F__k out of here! defense. She says that when someone or some people approach you who mean you no good tell them straight out to: GET THE F__K OUT OF HERE! The reason this works is because men expect women to be passive and when you show that you are anything but that they are taken aback (Also, this attracts attention, which is something that bad guys don't like). If you have trouble doing this - stand in front of your mirror and say this out loud - be sure to point when you do this and say with all the vitreol you can summon up. Now when you are going about your daily routine you know you have a psychological weapon you can utilize. Then you can follow up with your hard challenge and open hand strike that you learned in Rape Escape।

Having this knowledge - you can now really walk with confidence!

Stay Safe!

Cursing the Darkness

Somewhere in my lifetime I remember hearing a proverb that went to the effect of: "don't curse the darkness, rather light a candle". I'm not sure where this little maxim comes from but it has spurned me to seek pragmatic solutions where there often appears to be none. If we begin to look at our self-defense position the first thing we need to concern ourselves with is Awareness. In Rape Escape that's our first rule: Pay attention to people around you. Criminals tend to exhibit predatory behavior before an attack.

Be aware. The problem comes that at night, especially in these dark months at the end of the year, its not always easy to be aware of what's around you. When your walking to and from your vehicle you should be looking all around, even behind you. It may look strange to the regular passer-by but it lets the thug and rapist know that you are on guard. Your probably saying "I have heard that before - but during the night its hard to see into those dark shadows or between the cars". I agree!

That's why I encourage ladies (and men) to carry a flashlight. Mind you, not just any flashlight. But one that is small enough to fit in your coat pocket or your purse. Also, you want to be familiar with the specification of 80 lumens. The lumen is the basic unit for measuring light output (or perceived output). The beauty of 80 lumens is that at night it is a sufficient light source to blind a person's well adjusted night vision. The original purveyors of this technology have been Surefire, LLC. They are known far and wide in the law enforcement/ military community as having the best tactical flashlights. These types of lights are not cheap they usually start around $60 and can easily go up to $150 depending on make and model. Furthermore, many of them use special batteries that cost more money than AA or AAAs. But for an off the shelf self-defense item - I highly recommend the investment.




Now, don't get me wrong - I am not trying to sell you a Surefire flashlight. I have no interest in the company and do not hold any stock in Surefire. In fact I'll even tell you that I carry a knock-off brand flashlight marketed under the Smith & Wesson logo. The key thing here is to make sure whatever light you get - it has at least 80 lumens output so you know you can light the darkness to check around and in your car, and if need be you can put the beam in someone's eyes to give you time to escape. I've been shined in the eyes when people were goofing around and I can tell you it does disorient you and produces floating lights that leave you somewhat dazed. At a night time training exercise someone shined one of the 120 lumen ones in my eyes and I swear that it felt painful (supposedly the optic nerve does not have pain receptors - but i would beg to differ).

One of the advantages of a tactical flashlight is that the on/off switch is on the tailcap. You hold it in your hand like a roll of quarters and use your thumb to activate the switch. What I like about using this kind of flashlight you usually have it raised to shoulder height since its easier just to bend your arm up. If you have taken any of the Rape Escape courses you'll know that you now have one arm already up to defend against a hit to the face and you can also blind them and/or do your hard challenge escape.

Also, there's a psychological concept at work here too. Your carrying a flashlight at night, that looks like its what a police officer might carry, your checking your surroundings, your holding it like a police officer might. A rapist or mugger might think that you are a police officer or that you have some training or maybe you have a gun. Hey if they think it, and it keeps them from you more power to you. Power perceived, is power achieved.

One word of caution though, Surefire makes a few of their lights with crenelated strike bezels and scalloped strike caps. These are so that a user can turn them into an expedient striking weapon. Unless you train with this and have experience using it - I would caution against it. An untried weapon or technique has no place in a fight for your life - use what you know works.

So I hope this helps shed some light on what you can do to be aware of your surroundings at night and in dark places.

Stay Safe!

21

The other day I watched the movie 21. A film about a really smart kid who learned to beat the game of Blackjack with a team of other smart people. There were a few things that grabbed my attention when it comes to self-defense. For instance when the security guys wanted to beat the tar out of someone for "cheating the casino" they always took them to a secluded garage. Second rule in Fight Like A Girl! is go to people or stay with people - don't go somewhere secluded - that's the worse thing that can happen. Do whatever you can to stay with people or get official help. That can be anything from faking an illness, screaming fire, or starting a fight with someone else (yes its extreme) - BUT YOU CANNOT GO WITH THE BAD GUYS!

The other thing that leaped out at me was the 2nd plot on the smart kid needing to have a "dazzling life experience" that would wow the scholarship director at Harvard to give our hero a scholarship to Harvard Med School. You wanna know what the most powerful words are in a self-defense scenario when someone is trying to rape or kill you and you are fighting for your life?

Those words are; "I've done this before, I can do it again". Having the life experience of having done realistic self-defense training is what is going to make the difference. Because if you have had the experience, then you have at least practiced it several times, you've done it with the added stress of a realistic attacker, and your muscles have a memory from doing it before. Hence, experience yields knowledge. As Brad Parker so succinctly puts it; "Empowerment comes from knowledge. But panic begins where knowledge ends."

Stay Safe!

The Big Picture

12/02/08 - OK, my first post on the blog. Rather than diving in to any one of the myriad topics of Personal Safety/ Self-Defense I thought I would try to look at it from a holistic perspective, get the Big Picture without trying to overwhelm everyone at the same time. So where to begin?

Let's look at it like this: we are people. Social creatures that live in a social environment, that has several stressors (economical motivators, fears, expectations, societal standards, laws, mores, norms, basic human needs, etc) . Ultimately, we all want something - to call up from some of my workplace violence lectures "all behavior is motivated". We may want several things. Most of the things we want are legitimate desires (wealth, a happy family life, people to like us, enjoyable experiences, a legacy....... you get the picture). There's nothing wrong with this. Therefore we pursue them; more often than not we look for avenues that are within societal norms (go to school, go to work, make a paycheck, save for wants, spend here and there as desired, etc.). This is typical of probably a good portion of American Society. Now i am sure there are people who live and function legitimately outside of these norms (more power to them!) but for the most part this is the average slice of Americana.

Outside of this slice of the pie there exists a different social caste of society. Often we identify them as criminals, miscreants, sociopaths, etc. Whether or not the label fits and how/why they got the label is beyond the scope of my blog (though I may touch on it occassionally). According to a Washington Post article 1 in 32 adults in the US has been behind bars, on parole, or probation. That equals about 0.03125 or 3% of the population that is classifiably criminal - which seems to jive with my recollection from my Criminal Justice theory classes (blow the dust off). Though I am sure they are only talking about the criminals that got caught. As one Police Science professor put it to me "we only catch the dumb ones". The smart ones avoid prosecution until they run out of luck. That means the percentage could very well be higher. Can we speculate on 5%, 7%, 9%, or even higher ? To this end we have to understand that these people in our society are also motivated to achieve their desires. Whether their desire or the means to fulfilling that desire is abhorrent to Society at large is in many ways......irrelevant to them. It doesn't take a statistical genius (that I am not) to realize that we are living in a society with a significant portion of people who consider us to be "lunch". That's scary.

OK so lets tighten our holistic circle of understanding a bit more. We do things to achieve our personal goals (work, shop, school, leisure). Now a known and a speculated unknown percentage of our Society realizes that our behavior may provide them with an opportunity to aggrandize themselves at our loss. Distilled: criminals prey on other people. More appropriately they prey on perceived weaker people than themselves.

Therefore, as people living in a Society where others may be willing to take advantage of us for their own gain we have to begin to concern ourselves with how not to allow this to happen (another stressor). To steal a cue from my Instructor Steve Kardian there are 3 things we then do (or should do) to not become a target:

• Awareness: we start to understand what we have that makes us desirable to a perceived criminal, we learn or theorize on who our "enemy" might be, we study our surroundings to understand what will protect us and what won't, we study the people around us, while some of this is correct - some of what we also believe is incorrect.
  
• Avoidance/ Passive Action: we take precautions that we believe that will make us safe, we change our behaviors, where we go, who we go with, we may take a self-defense course, carry a weapon or self-defense implement, make contingency action plans, devise escape routes and catalog resources (911 - for at home or on the road, Mall Security - for shopping, etc).
  
• Escape (or Fight) / Deliberate Action: Author and psychologist Lt. Dave Grossman lays it down as to what really happens when confronted with a high stress situation - based on his research we will do 1 of 4 things: run, submit, pretend to fight - called posturing, or really fight. All of this is based on our prior experiences, prior training, prior physical and/or mental conditioning, and what we have been able to plan for.

Everything we do and continue to do to make us safer from those who desire to prey on us is considered to be target hardening. Organizations (business, law enforcement, miliary) do this all the time. People do it too - but don't often realize it (locking your doors and avoiding dark alleys are examples). Ultimately, we want to make ourselves hard targets for criminals. In future posts I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of what we can do to make our lives and our world a safer place. This will be what my blog is about.

Stay Safe!