There is a story about a kung fu student who was walking down a street when the horse in front of him went crazy and kicked out. Using his kung fu training, he blocked, sidestepped, and was able to avoid a kick that might have killed him.
He was understandably upset when he told his sifu, who immediately expelled him for being reckless. The curious student decided to follow his teacher, waiting to see how he would react. Many days and nights he kept his vigil, but his patience was rewarded. Eventually, he saw the same horse becoming agitated as the teacher walked towards it. He was at first dissapointed when he saw his teacher cross the road and give the horse a wide berth. Then, he understood the meaning of kung fu.
I don’t know if the above story is true (spoiler; probably not) but it is very popular. You’ve probably heard several different versions of it, but the message is always the same – the wise/best martial artist avoids danger altogether rather than Jackie-Channing it with his fists of fury.
The thing is, martial arts are about fighting. That is the bottom line. Sure, you can use them for some higher purpose; to bring self discipline, to find enlightenment, to protect the weak and vulnerable from hordes of viciously one dimensional oppressors with weak chins. But that stuff is all a by-product of your training. Your actual training is on how to fight; how to hurt people, pure and simple.
(If you are up on your daoism you’ll know that you can technically find enlightenment in anything – what is important is the self discipline it takes to master a skill.)
What that story outlines is that “self defence” is a very different thing from fighting; and it bugs me to see the two conflated and confused. Not just because it is ignorant; mostly because it is downright dangerous. To quote Kurt Osiander; if your self-defence involves fighting then its usually because “you f****d up a long time ago, now you’re gonna have to work really hard”. Anybody who is really practicing self-defense should be crossing the road, not fighting the horse; it’s way easier and all it takes is a little know how.
I tend to use a tripartite classification when it comes to self defence. Things are split up into Risk Avoidance, Risk Management, and Crisis Management. Fighting is only a solution when it comes to Crisis Management, and even then it’s only part of the time.
Risk Avoidance:
There are certain things you can do to avoid being put at risk at all, but you have to be sensible. The only way to truly avoid all risk is to live in a hermetically sealed dome and cut yourself off from civilisation. In the real world, everything you do has an element of risk which is unavoidable. What you can do is avoid excessive risk taking.
A great example of this is police advice to foil burglary; don’t leave valuable items on display and make sure that all doors and windows are securely locked. The only way to avoid the risk is to not have a house or stuff altogether, but taking some relatively simple steps can lessen the level of risk to which you are exposed.
Likewise, simple steps can go a long way in other aspects of life. If you’re travelling abroad, travel with friends. If you’re going out on the town, stick to populated places with plenty of lights and security – and conversely try to avoid areas that are known for being rough. If you’re drinking, drink in moderation – alcohol often plays a role of some kind in committing offences, just over half of all incidences of violence with injury are thought to involve alcohol.
There is nothing magic about this side of keeping yourself safe; by doing these things you are playing the numbers. Hopefully this is as far as you will ever need to go.
Of course sometimes things do happen, even if you have taken every possible precaution. This (and I can’t believe I have to spell it out in the 21st century) does not mean that if or when something happens it is your fault for not taking more precautions, or skipping one, or simply forgetting one. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need locks or security guards. The fact that we have these precautions doesn’t take away from the monumental ass-hat-tery of the people who made them necessary in the first place. They are still responsible for being crappy people to steal things and start fights, what you are doing in risk avoidance is trying to reduce the odds of them stealing your stuff or attacking you.
Risk Management:
Personally, I would argue that this is by far and away the most important stage in any self defence practitioner’s arsenal. Since you can’t totally avoid all risk, and very few people come balling out of nowhere ready for a fight, this middle stage – how you handle the weird, awkward soup that is human interaction – is your best chance to take control of a situation and prevent it from becoming a truly bad one. There are several strategies open to you at this point – the main ones are:
Co-operation
If somebody wants your wallet or phone, give it to them. Better yet, throw it in one direction and walk away in the other. Things can be replaced, you can’t.
This, of course, has its limits. It’s one thing to co-operate by throwing away your wallet. It is another thing entirely to let yourself be tied up and transported to a secluded spot by a potential attacker. In Meditations on Violence, Rory Miller makes the point that allowing a violent or threatening attacker to transport you to a secondary location is probably never the best strategy. Nothing good is going to happen once you are there, and if the attack is inevitable it is probably better to have it somewhere that is not of the attackers choosing.
This, or course is difficult to decide in the real world, as events usually escalate gradually. Miller recommends establishing cues in your mind. Deciding on lines which you will not allow to be crossed for any reason. This makes it easier to formulate the appropriate response if one of them is ever crossed. For example, if before hand you know your reaction to being mugged is to hand over your wallet and replace your credit cards, whereas your response to being moved to another location is to kick off and do your best Tony Jaa impersonation, these cues and their associated responses will help you feel more in control, and will help to break the paralysis of choice that can set in under pressure.
Distraction
Derren Brown tells the story of a time he was walking home from a gig, and he encountered an aggressive drunk, who greeted him with the age old “What the F*** are you looking at?”.
Gulp.
Being Derren Brown, he resolved the situation by using misdirection. He replied “the wall outside my house is not four feet high”, and then went on a little monologue about Spain and the height of the walls there. This confused the drunk, who went from being aggressive to being passive.
Believe it or not, there is some science behind this. Heightened states of emotion make people more suggestible; and anger and aggression are both heightened states of emotion. Teachers learning behaviour management are taught to employ similar distraction techniques to calm angry students. Don’t engage directly with any question you are asked; any answer you give will be wrong, and it allows the aggressive party to steer the conversation. Start be refocusing their attention, preferably on something in the local environment, and then use reassuring tone and body posture to gradually de-escalate the situation whilst continuing with your distraction topic.
Of course, this works best when someone is being aggressive near you. If they are being aggressive at you, it’s far more difficult to deflect that attention, so perhaps it’s better to use
De-Escalation
Remember when your mum told you that you could “just walk away” from the school bully? It didn’t really work, but the idea is a solid one. If you’re not there, you can’t fight. De-escalation is the precursor skill so that you can walk away safely.
The first step in de-escalation is obvious: don’t escalate things!
Some exchanges start with verbal abuse and threats. Don’t respond in kind. (This will get you into a cycle of rapid escalation, which is what we are trying to avoid). One option is to ask open ended questions, and turn the threats into a discussion.
“You’re a such-and-such!” “That hurts! Why do you think that?”
Bringing an emotional level may evoke empathy, and dissembling over the cause of any grievances may work as a distraction technique.
The acronym TACOS reminds you of the five things to avoid when trying de-escalation
NEVER
Threaten the aggressor
Argue with the aggressor
Challenge the aggressor
Order the aggressor around
Shame the aggressor
A lot of confrontation is born out of power struggles and the need for respect. By avoiding these things, and trying to do their opposite, it may be possible to talk an aggressor down by showing them that you are open and receptive, respectful, and above all not a threat to them or their perceived status. Of course, this can be difficult to achieve whilst still remaining confident and assertive. The best advice available probably comes from Rory Miller, George Thompson, and Patrick Van Horne, all of whom go into a great deal of depth on these strategies.
Escape
Run. If it doesn’t look like a situation you can manage or de-escalate, get out of there – at speed if necessary.
If there is an obvious avenue of escape, and you don’t think your aggressor will pursue you then this course of action is quite simple. Walk or run away. Escape the situation and make sure that you are safe.
Sometimes escape may be possible, but your route is blocked by an aggressor or you have good reason to think they will give pursuit. This is when escape starts to merge with crisis management and you may have to adopt a strategy known as the “stun and run”. The basic aim of this strategy is to disrupt and temporarily disable your aggressor with a powerful attack and then use the window of opportunity that this creates to get the hell out of dodge.
If your technique involves going to the ground or a sustained combination, it isn’t right for “stun and run”. This is not the time to demonstrate your killer gogoplata or chain punching. It is also not the time to experiment with that thing you half remember from that one self-defence seminar… was it a palm heel and knee strike? If you are a practising martial artist, you should have a few techniques that are your go to moves, (your Toki Waza), now is the time to burst out the reverse punch or Uchimata you’ve spent tens of thousands of reps honing.
The key thing is to create an opportunity to escape, so the techniques have to be decisive. This can be difficult for sport martial artists who are used to pulling their punches or following their opponents to the ground. (For self defence you don’t want to overcommit to a throw – if it doesn’t work do something else!) If you get bogged down you will be trapped in a fight; even if you’re winning you don’t want to be there.
There is an ethical consideration here – if we are initiating the attack, are we the bad guys?
I think the answer is a resounding ‘no’. Iain Abernethy has addressed this point in an essay on the maxim that “there is no first attack in Karate“. To my mind the heart of the argument is that if somebody is acting aggressively towards you and has shut down all of your attempts to de-escalate or leave the situation, that is already an attack. Their actions are placing you in a situation where you are made to feel vulnerable and have prevented you from leaving that situation. If you are already backed into a corner with somebody threatening violence, then you are a mug to let them throw the first punch.
Gichin Funakoshi put it slightly more elegantly in Karate-Do Kyohan:
“When there are no avenues of escape or one is caught even before any attempt to escape can be made, then for the first time the use of self-defense techniques should be considered. Even at times like these, do not show any intention of attacking, but first let the attacker become careless. At that time attack him concentrating one’s whole strength in one blow to a vital point and in the moment of surprise, escape and seek shelter and help.”
Crisis Management
As you can see, we’ve already exhausted a lot of non-martial-arts options before we get to crisis management. In order to be in a position where you actually need to use your martial arts skills you should already have failed at risk avoidance and management. If that’s happened because you have been careless, then kung fu your way to freedom by all means, but perhaps work on your awareness and people skills for the future.
Sometimes, however, risks simply cannot be avoided or managed, and that’s where crisis management plays an active part. Perhaps you can’t escape; maybe the stun and run hasn’t worked, maybe the threat is in your house, or you have to act to protect others from harm. Whatever the reason, it’s now time to dust off your black belt and deliver an ass-kickin’!
But actually, can you respond appropriately? The law in England states that one is
“entitled to use reasonable force to protect himself, others for whom he is responsible and his property”
So you have two considerations here, one tactical and one legal;
a) How to engage your aggressor in such a way as to minimise risk to yourself and those you are protecting
(note: there is no such thing as “winning” a self defence scenario!)
b) What force is ‘reasonable’ in pursuit of that goal?
For a) you need to know the answer to a raft of questions:
Can you perform your favourite techniques in your everyday clothes? On an uneven surface? In a confined space? In the dark, or when temporarily blinded? Seated, standing, or from the ground? When adrenaline or shock are hampering your fine motor skills? When you’re exhausted?
What is the most appropriate strategy?
Is there one assailant? How do you neutralise him whilst causing minimal harm?
Does he have a weapon? Do you know how to disarm it?
Is there more than one attacker? Do you have appropriate skills to engage a group?
What if they all have weapons?
All of these questions are pertinent to our training, and should be getting covered in your club’s “self-defence” syllabus. These skills are the crossover point between martial arts and self defence, and if you are not able to answer them then it is perhaps worth considering the answers yourself, or raising the point with your instructors.
The main take away here, though, is that even if your are training well, and can answer all of those questions in your sleep, and are confident that should the need arise you will be able to defend your family from vengeful ninjas, that still doesn’t constitute good “self defence”. Good self defence is building those habits which help you de-escalate confrontation or avoid it altogether, and learning how to put them into practise so that all of the martial arts training doesn’t have to be called upon.
Civilian Combatives 