If you are reading this article my guess is that you’ve already bought into the idea that the world we live in contains violence, and that it is a good idea to know how to deal with it, should you find yourself in a potentially dangerous and threatening situation. However there are many people out there who either don’t believe that they are at risk of being assaulted, and/or if they are there is probably nothing they can do to identify, prevent and avoid the attack and/or physically deal with it if they are assaulted. If you are trying to convince someone of this viewpoint to start training, many of your arguments will probably have fallen on deaf ears – you may even have been labelled paranoid, reactionary and ridiculous by those you try and convince. In this article I would like to lay out some arguments that can be used to convince those who don’t want to learn how to protect themselves, that it might be time to start thinking about doing so.

Argument One: The most common types of aggressive and violent acts, are low-level, simple incidents that can largely be dealt with by non-physical solutions, rather than the worst case scenarios that people tend to fixate on. When the media reports on a home invasion, where a 300 pound Behemoth, storms into a house where there is a mother and child and systematically starts assaulting the mother, as they conduct a robbery, the question on everyone’s lips, is what could she possibly do that would have worked against such an assailant? The conclusion: nothing, and therefore it would be a waste of time to try and learn a self-defense system or martial art because it would be largely ineffective in such a situation. It’s a good argument, and one that is very difficult to counter, however the situation described is an extreme one; it’s a worst case scenario. Being mugged in a parking lot is much more common, having an aggressive stranger in a bar shout at you and push you is much more likely, finding yourself facing an individual or group who you have somehow “disrespected” is a much more common occurrence etc. but these are not the situations that the news and media report on, and so they are often not the situations that people think about. If you find yourself trying to present to people solutions for worst case scenarios, try and turn their attention away from these, and get them to consider that there are a lot of very simple solutions for the more common types of violence that they are likely to face, and that the consequences of not knowing how to act and behave in them can be equally as serious, as those faced in a worst case scenario e.g. an armed mugger can stab and/or shoot you if you don’t know how to behave and deal with the situation.

Argument Two: Personal safety is just formalized common sense. This is probably one of the biggest and laziest self lies that people tell themselves to both avoid thinking about the danger and threats that are out there, and to convince themselves that they don’t need to be trained in personal safety and/or self-defense. Every sexual predator out there, whether targeting men, women or children knows what our common sense dictates, knows how we will act in a situation, knows how to get us to trust them etc. You may believe you are a good judge of character, that everyone else who has been sexually assaulted and raped somehow lacked your common sense and wasn’t as street savvy as you – the truth is, they were just like you, and they met a skilled social predator who was able to use their ideas about how violent situations occur and develop against them. If you are still of the opinion that strangers who try and get you into your car pull up beside you, and offer you a ride etc. you are thinking back to when you were a six year old, and your parents warned you about men in white vans trawling your neighborhood. As an adult the strangers likely to try and get you into their cars will do so in much more subtle and sophisticated ways – ways which will bypass and use your common sense.

Argument Three: Lifestyle prevents risk. Many older people look back on their teenage years and their early twenties, recognizing that there were times when they were at risk, and were perhaps lucky, and then contrast it with their present lifestyle e.g. they no longer stay out late at night, they don’t frequent certain bars and clubs anymore etc. Because of this they believe that there is no longer any risk in their life that having a good job and living in the suburbs etc. means that there lifestyle is one which doesn’t puts them into contact with dangerous people. Dangerous people prey on people who believe they are not at risk because they’re the easiest and most compliant victims. You don’t have to go to them they will come to you; they will frequent the shopping malls you go to, the parking lost where you park your car, the transit stops you use on your way to work etc. If you go where there are people, predatory individuals will be there with them. It should be remembered that the crimes and acts of violence they commit are usually low-level ones, but lifestyle will not preclude you from being targeted – in fact quite the opposite.

These are three arguments I have had the most success with when people argue with me against the need for personal safety and self-defense training. Try not to be dragged into a debate on worst case scenarios and how you would handle them (the martial artist in all of us wants to…) but instead present a realistic and non-hysterical picture of what everyday violence actually looks like. Don’t buy the idea that personal safety is just common sense – predatory individuals can play us like cheap violins if we behave and act with just common sense (plus we often make exceptions for ourselves where common sense is concerned). Yes, your lifestyle now may be less riskier than what it was, but in and of itself it is no defense.