During the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was a real focus in the martial arts and reality-based self-defense on “street fights” i.e., would the system you were training in prepare you for a street fight. The term street fight was ill-defined, and was generally interpreted as a sparring match that took place not in a dojo but on the street, with two combatants squaring off in a consensual manner etc. There was an attitude that violence needed to be engaged with rather than avoided, and that “fights” would resemble the format of how we trained and sparred; real world violence basically replicated and reflected our training, where two people squared off and then looked to beat the crap out of each other. There were never any ambushes, there were never any realistic weapon attacks (knife attacks were always singular, large and telegraphed), multiple attacker situations weren’t addressed, and unless you trained in a grappling system groundwork was minimal or non-existent etc. What most instructors envisaged about a “street fight”, was that it was basically an MMA fight on the street – you would be able to see your opponent, know when the fight was going to start, and there’d be a clean finish to it. If truth be told few instructors understood how the “street” operated/operates. In this article I want to look at the “street” and “street fights” from a slightly different perspective, which might hopefully give us a better understanding of what this type of violence actually looks like.

Without being overly dramatic, when you leave your house, and step out in public, you are a visitor to another domain. The street is probably not a place where you live, hang out and socialize, but rather an artery/pathway that allows you to get from one destination to another where you do these things. When you are out in public you are sharing space(s), with people who live and do business in them – and walk to the beat of a different drum. When you move through these spaces your movement differs to those who are homeless or looking to score their next hit. Most of the time we are so busy or unaware that we don’t notice these individuals, until they notice us, and decide to include us in their business. The times we do notice them is when the statistics change and we find ourselves in locations and/or at times, where there are more of them, than there are people like ourselves. When this happens, we have no baseline upon which to judge whether we are in danger or not e.g., we probably can’t differentiate the “usual” drug addict from the potentially violent/psychotic one etc. I am not advocating that we spend time doing ethnographic research amongst such communities in order to understand them better, but rather that we should take a reality check, and recognize that when we are in public spaces, there are people who understand them much better than we do. We are simply visitors into their world, and there are times that it is worth remembering this. We may like to think of ourselves as savvy players who understand how things work, however more often than not, we aren’t. In truth we can’t be, as different locales have different ways of operating e.g., the homeless communities in Boston, may represent a different ecology from those of Los Angeles – there will be commonalities but there will be differences as well, due to differences in public services, policing and the drug scene etc. This is why talking about the “street” as if it is a homogenous and universal setting makes little sense, especially where violence is concerned.

One thing that is rarely addressed by self-defense professionals/instructors is the fact that when you are confronted by an aggressive and potentially violent individual who lives their life on the “streets”, is that you are stepping out of your comfortable world into theirs. Whatever rules and conventions your society operates along are no longer relevant. Do you know how to and/or have you previous experience communicating with such individuals? Because, most violence starts face-to-face, and is preceded by some form of verbal exchange. If you are socially awkward in such situations, and don’t know how to communicate outside of your comfort zone, you are likely to be victimized. Because many instructors themselves don’t know how to navigate these types of situations, their self-defense purely focuses on the physical e.g., what to do when somebody grabs you, rather than how to handle the incident in such a way that somebody doesn’t want/feel the need to grab you etc. By always training from the perspective of being physically attacked, this type of training and education can be avoided. The true fear of violence usually comes not when you are attacked, but in the moments when the grim realization that you are in the presence of somebody who wants to harm you, finally hits home. It is often easier to deny and dismiss this reality than to accept it e.g., it is easier to keep walking away whilst being followed, dismissing and denying the reality of your situation than to admit to yourself what is happening, and turning to confront and deal with the potential threat/challenge – admitting to yourself that you are in a world that operates to a completely different set of rules than the one you live in is perhaps the most daunting proposition when looking at confronting violence e.g., that there are dealers who will set homeless addicts on a middle class person walking in their neighborhood, with the promise of a free hit if they make the violence entertaining etc. 

It is easy to tell ourselves that we always avoid bad neighborhoods and the people who live in them but that’s not always possible e.g., our car might break down in one, or where we work could border one etc. Understanding that those who operate on the streets work to a different rulebook, and that the way they engage in violence may be different to what we expect and train for is an important part of our training e.g., where I went to university it was common for gangs of twelve to fifteen years old’s to target a lone student, and through weight of numbers, drag them to the ground ad kick them into unconsciousness. Are you prepared for such an attack, and would you feel comfortable punching a twelve-year old in such a scenario? Recognizing that there are times when we will rub shoulders with those who have a different set of codes and values to us is imperative if we are going to be able to deal effectively with all types of violence.