Often, when people with little understanding of what real-life violence looks like - because they have been fortunate enough to never experience it first-hand - try to imagine incidents, situations and scenarios, they build their “models of violence”, from the media, the movies, and third-party anecdotes, imagining that common armed criminals such as muggers, are at some point looking to, “complete the task of termination”, rather than simply exit the environment with your wallet. A rich diet of action movies, and extreme news stories, can distract us from the reality of violence – which is more likely to comprises of pushes, shoves, grabs and punches, than assassination attempts. In this article, I want to look at some of the elephants in the room that often don’t get discussed in self-defense classes, and some common misconceptions around violence.

There is a tendency when teaching techniques to remove the context e.g. a knife defense gets taught, without an explanation as to why somebody is making the attack in the first place – when we introduce the attacker’s motive into a scenario, we can understand much more about the when, where and whom of assessing risk. One of the other five situational components, that features in a violent confrontation, is relationship i.e. what is your relationship with your assailant? It is often implied – or sometimes explicitly stated – in self-defense scenarios that our attacker is a stranger, however this does not reflect reality, where we are statistically more likely to be assaulted by someone we know; and when we look at particular demographics such as children, this is especially true. There is a value to teaching “Stranger Danger”, and other similar programs, but we are fooling ourselves if we think we are addressing the danger of sexual assaults on children, when they are far more likely to be committed by family members and their friends. If our child safety programs don’t reference this, it would be wrong to think of them as being truly comprehensive.

Even when we are presented with the facts and statistics, it is all too easy to think that they don’t apply to us. In a now-famous study concerning how we apply statistics to ourselves, there was a survey that consisted of a number of factual statements, where participants were asked to state their opinions, thoughts and ideas about them. One of the statements/questions was, “The average life-expectancy of a US Citizen is 88 years old. How old do you expect to be at your time of death?” Nobody answered 88 or younger, everybody believed that they would beat the statistic; that it didn’t apply to them. We can argue to ourselves that we, personally are most likely to be assaulted by a stranger, however we are part of the statistics that say this isn’t the case. We do a huge disservice to our female students, if we present rape and sexual assault scenarios in the context of strangers, making surprise attacks from the rear; when in fact most rapes involve people the victim knows, and occur in their home or somebody else’s.

Most violence happens face-to-face, and is preceded by dialogue. A subjective study will confirm this. How many verbal altercations and disputes have you seen, versus physical fights? How many physical fights have you seen – from the starting point, not having walked in on – that didn’t start first with a verbal confrontation? Do sneak and surprise attacks happen? Of course, and we need to train for them, however we also need to train to deal with violence from “conversation” range, and from the standpoint that there are things we can do to better our chances of surviving such altercations during this phase of the fight (the Pre-Conflict Phase) e.g. controlling range, bringing our hands up in a placating manner, attempting to de-escalate the situation (if it’s spontaneous in nature), etc. If we train from the perspective that people just attack/punch us, out of the blue, and that’s what is most likely to happen to us, we aren’t training for reality. Most violence is low-level, that occurs spontaneously, and can usually – with the correct training - be de-escalated. One good way to stay on track and make sure we are training realistically, is to introduce “motive” into everything we teach; why is the person targeting us, why have they chosen to be violent towards us? Is it something we’ve done? Is there something they want? If every time we teach or learn a technique the motive of the attacker is introduced, we will quickly see if we are creating contrived, and unlikely scenarios.

When we consider that most violence happens face-to-face, and is preceded by dialogue, and recognize that the person who initiates the physical confrontation will have the advantage, we really have to teach and/or practice pre-emptive strikes and attacks. If you are in fear for your safety, and your attacker is in a position to cause you harm, then you are being assaulted, and you have the right to defend yourself (under US law), and that includes being the one who makes the first strike. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is school, and the guilty person is the one who “started” it. If you have the opportunity presented to you to make the first strike, and put your assailant in a position where they are the one who is reacting, don’t pass it up. Be aware of what would constitute reasonable force in such a situation, and don’t pass up on an opportunity to disengage, and get to safety, because you’ve been lead to believe that in every situation you need to fully incapacitate your assailant – not being there is, in most cases, the safest strategy. If you believe that your attacker might eventually pull themselves together and come hunt you down, you’re most likely confusing yourself with Jason Bourne.

Reality Based Self-Defense, means basing what we teach on reality – how real-life altercations actually occur, not simply what we imagine them to look like. We should not be trying to create realities which don’t exist or are unlikely, just because they “could” happen; anything could potentially happen, and we need to put aside our flights of fancy, to be grounded, and to teach, train, and practice for the real-life situations we are actually likely to face.