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।