Two young women were attacked in South Boston, last Saturday at 1 o’clock in the morning. One of them felt a civic duty to write a letter to Fox Boston, so that other women in the area could be aware, that there are two muggers, who are armed with what appears to be a fake gun, operating in that neighborhood. Below is an excerpt of the letter.

“We are two young professional women, who love living in Southie.  Our aim is not to spread fear, but to make people, especially young women, aware of the assault and the fact that walking in twos may not deter these males as they are bold and may jump you both.  Both of us took self-defense courses in the past and while helpful, we still did not see or hear these guys until they were on us.  We were lucky and managed to get away with minimal scrapes and some bruises.

We want to urge you to be careful and would feel incredibly guilty if we heard it happened again and we did not say anything.  I am sorry we don’t have better descriptions of the males, but they were wearing hoodies; it was dark; and they attacked us from behind.”

The young women’s account, demonstrates why self-defense/martial arts training alone should not be relied upon to keep you safe; and that without honing your self-protection skills, you will probably be found wanting, when it comes to dealing with violence. Self-defense is what you do when you’re attacked, self-protection/personal safety includes strategies, tactics and skills, to help you predict, prevent, identify and avoid violence before it occurs. If you don’t have these skills and this knowledge, it is unlikely that an attacker will give you the opportunity to apply and employ the self-defense techniques you have learnt. Self-defense training and the practice of physical techniques alone are not enough; and whilst it may not feel like you are doing much to protect yourself by learning how predatory individuals, such as muggers and rapists, work, in fact, you are doing everything. Actively training your situational awareness may feel like a grind, however without it, you are likely to get caught in a disadvantaged position, where all the odds are against you. This article is not about judging either these women or the self-defense programs they took, but rather demonstrating why it is essential to develop skills beyond the physical.

I do a fair amount of work with corporate clients. Many initially contact my company because they want to provide self-defense training to their employees – something I applaud them for. However, when they first contact us, their idea is to put on a seminar where the emphasis is on teaching their employees physical self-defense techniques. I understand this, because they are generally not aware that other forms of personal safety training exists i.e. they believe that physical self-defense training is the best way to ensure their employees stay safe. Some also have the expectation that an hour to 90 minutes will be long enough to not only cover all the essential techniques that a person will need to know, but that they will also be able to develop the necessary skills and mindset to make these techniques work in a real-life situation. Unfortunately, there are many self-defense programs out there that support this idea, and so I don’t blame them for holding this opinion. These two young women seem to have also bought in to this myth; that attending/completing a course would tick the necessary box, and that they would come away with the ability to defend themselves.

I’ve never seriously played tennis, but I know it would take me more than a few hours’ practice to prepare me for Wimbledon. I am not sure where the myth started, that a few hours of training in self-defense would be enough to prepare you for dealing with a real-life violent encounter, however it appears from this letter, that this is what the writer expected. Once again, I don’t blame her for holding this view, as we in the self-defense industry are often guilty of perpetuating this myth; we so want people to train, that we simplify what we are training people to do and overcome, so that they aren’t put off (this is one of the reasons I run a free women’s program – so that I can be honest about what real-life violence looks like). In last week’s blog, I wrote about the importance of not creating training situations and scenarios where the only possible outcome for the student is success. If you want your students to “feel” safer this approach works, however if you want them to “be” safer, they need to be put in situations where they are tested, and may fail. People do genuinely learn when they fail. The writer of the letter believes that her self-defense training wasn’t up to the job. I agree with her. It is likely that she was convinced that the course she took was enough, and she probably enjoyed enough successes that she felt she was capable and prepared.

Let us just say that she had invested the appropriate amount of time and effort in her training, that she’d been convinced that completing a few hours training wasn’t enough, and she’d dedicated a couple of hours a week for a number of years to practicing techniques and developing physical skills, etc. would she then have been able to defend herself, in this situation? Probably not. She was caught completely unaware, rushed from behind, and taken to the ground by an armed assailant. Even if you’ve trained for such a scenario, action generally beats reaction, and hitting the ground hard often takes time to recover from. However, if you were able to identify the attack, even just a few seconds before it was made, you’d have time to prepare and deal with it, and a different outcome may have been possible, in fact you may even have avoided the assault entirely.

I agree with the writer that walking with another person is little/no deterrent to dealing with a pair of armed assailants, however it should also not be taken as an inevitability that either one or both of them would end up being assaulted by these men. This in no way is intended to blame them or make them responsible for being attacked; both had done what they believed and were probably convinced was necessary to avoid becoming a victim. If either one of them had understood that walking down a street at 1 AM held its own risks that needed to be mitigated against, and had been exposed to/learned the processes that predatory individuals engage in, they might have been aware of the individuals that spotted them, carried out surveillance on them, synchronized their movement to them, and then attacked them. This takes training, and the adoption of a certain mindset, to be sure - however the idea that violence is inevitable and unpredictable is a false one, and one that we should dismiss altogether. This fatalistic notion prevents many from engaging in training that would be more than helpful and investing time/effort in learning how to protect oneself.

When you get into a car and drive, you are well aware of your personal safety, e.g. you check mirrors before you pull out, you adjust your speed to the traffic, you judge the time you have to either make a light or not, etc. The decisions you take all consider your personal safety and yet when you walk down a street, because the threats and dangers are not so immediate or apparent, you switch off. It seems a strange dichotomy that many people have; that they can imagine the consequences of a car crash, but rarely think about the consequences of being assaulted. Physical self-defense on its own is not enough, we need to adopt personal safety thinking into every aspect of our lives. I am not one who says that you shouldn’t walk down a street at 1 AM in the morning, I just believe that there are safe and unsafe ways to do this, and that with appropriate training it is possible to mitigate the risks you face, and prepare for the possible dangers that may exist.

I feel regret that I am part of an industry which presents the idea that a few hours training is enough, that all you need to do is tick a box rather than adopt a mindset, etc. Those of us who teach and deliver training have a responsibility to be realistic, and present a comprehensive approach to personal safety/self-protection and self-defense.