For non-professionals engaged in a conflict, physical engagement has one purpose: to facilitate and create an opportunity to disengage i.e. to get away. This may involve a distracting strike (stun and run) or it could see you rendering the other person unconscious, but the purpose of each of these actions is to create an opportunity to escape. This is something that needs to be practiced when training i.e. after the completion of a technique, disengagement needs to be rehearsed – because we will replicate our training in real-life, and if this doesn’t include us moving away after dealing with an attack, the chances are, we won’t; and if our environment has been compromised we should be looking to exit it. This is the difference between practicing techniques and enacting solutions e.g. blocking, trapping, and then striking an assailant armed with a knife is a “technique”, whilst backing away, as you scan the environment, etc. is enacting a solution. The only reason you are implementing the technique is to create the opportunity for you to exit the situation. When dealing with real-world violence, ego has to be checked; your job is not to teach the other person a lesson, dispense righteous justice, show your dominance and prowess, etc. — it is to come away unharmed (or with the fewest possible injuries). Striking, is not to “punish” but to distract and/or debilitate an assailant, so you can get away. If you have broader goals than surviving – and/or helping others survive - when attacked, enroll yourself in a community program or similar, so you can make a difference. The non-professional e.g. somebody who isn’t performing a security role, or similar, should only have one goal when attacked, and that is to disengage and get away; using a level of force that is necessary to do so.

I have written about the myth of the, “better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6” line for self-defense, which suggests there are only two outcomes to violent interactions: your death, or rendering your assailant unconscious – because if you don’t, you never know what could happen, and it could result in your death, etc. There are, however, strategies that can help you stay on the right side of the law, and not have either criminal and/or civil charges brought against you for excessive force, and one is to disengage at the earliest – safe – opportunity to do so. If an opportunity to separate from an attacker is presented e.g. their legs buckle, and they start to drop to the floor, etc., and I don’t take that opportunity, I have to be prepared to say why I didn’t, if I end up being “tried by 12”. Listing all the “what if’s” that often get brought up in self-defense circles, such as your concern that they might have had a knife, a gun or another weapon, and that you didn’t want to give them the opportunity to draw it, probably isn’t going to cut it legally, unless you can show that you had some prior knowledge that they were carrying a weapon, etc. However, if your explanation was that you delivered strikes and punches to create a disengagement opportunity, then barring extreme size, weight, and strength differences, it will be hard for somebody to argue that you used excessive force.

The longer a fight goes on, the more likely you are to sustain injuries i.e. if you’re not there, you can’t get hurt. I remember watching CCTV footage of a fight in a bathroom, of a club I worked at. It started with one guy pounding another guy, who ended up covering and crouching between two urinals. Instead of walking away and accepting that he’d proved his point, his dominance or whatever his motivation was, he continued his beat down of the other person. After a point, the person who was getting punched realized that this wasn’t going to stop (it’s also worth noting that in these sustained attacks, the marginal effect of each subsequent punch often starts to diminish as the person being attacked, begins to adjust and adapt to the attacks e.g. they cover their face and take the blows on less sensitive parts of their body). Once they realized that this guy wasn’t going to pull away, they knew they had only one option and that was to fight back; and they weren’t fighting to punish someone, they were fighting to survive. With that realization, the tables turned, and the roles were reversed — the situation ended with the original attacker unconscious on the bathroom floor. If the person being subjected to the beat-down had, had a knife, things could have ended much worse for them – they may not have initially had an opportunity to pull it, but as the fight went on, that opportunity was presented to them. Another consideration is that of third parties; if the person who was being subjected to the beating, had friends who came looking for them, then the person attacking them, would suddenly be in a multiple attacker scenario. The longer you stay engaged in a confrontation, the more likely it is that things will start to go against you.

At some point in a fight, you will need to disengage, and if it’s not at the first, safe available opportunity, which opportunity is it? The second? The third? The fourth? If your goal is to punish the other person and teach them a lesson, how do you know when they’ve learnt it, or that you’ve done enough? I see a lot of video clips, that finish with an attacker on the floor, and a stomp kick to the head being delivered. If the person is on the floor, no longer a visible threat to you, and unable to defend themselves, whilst you have a clear exit opportunity, you should be prepared for the legal consequences of such an action – and all the costs associated with it. The safest strategy from both a physical safety and legal perspective, is to disengage at the first opportunity possible, and to only what is necessary to create this opportunity; which includes acting decisively with extreme aggression in the first moments.