Views Of Self Defense
Gershon Ben Keren : 02/01/2008As an instructor, I’ve found the New Year to be the time when many people think about taking up a martial art or self defence system. Perhaps, motivated more from wanting to do something they’ve never done before rather than from addressing an issue of personal self-protection that has suddenly been highlighted to them over the festive period. However, this year with the murder of two teenagers on New Years Eve/Day hitting the London headlines the motivation to learn how to defend your self rather than trying something new for 2008 may well be the main motivation.
I find that new students who come to learn how to defend themselves, approach the subject according to a perceived hierarchy of needs. There first concern is to be able to defend themselves against a single unarmed attacker, then against a single armed attacker, then against a group and then against an armed group. Their thinking being, deal with the simplest problem (one unarmed attacker) and then move on to the more complex ones e.g. armed attackers, multiple attackers etc.
They also often come to a class with the notion of learning how to win or beat their aggressor, with the end conclusion of any confrontation being them standing over their attacker(s) having knocked them unconscious or damaging them enough that they are unable to continue the fight. A picture that is presented by all martial arts movies and appeals very much to our ideas of right and wrong, of justice and punishment. It is also a picture that convinces us that we have been empowered.
Our understanding and feeling towards violence is something that we experience very early on in our lives e.g. we may have seen our parents argue (or worst) when we were small children or we may have experienced bullying or seen other bullied when we were children at school. We do not have to have experienced violence directly to have strong feelings and emotions towards it. Even a child who is a bystander to an incident of bullying/violence will try and understand how best to survive the incident e.g. join in physically, offer the bully/aggressor encouragement, walk away etc. The playground is a great educator on how to survive violence. The one feeling though that both the bullied and the bystander share is that of impotence: the inability to do anything to change the situation. All of us can probably still remember a person(s) we were scared off at school and who we knew we would be unable to deal with.
Above all it is the feeling of impotence, that we take into adulthood, which motivates us to learn how to defend ourselves i.e. to be able to change the situation. Martial arts and self-defence systems are potentially able to empower us to defeat and vanquish the bully or aggressor, turning the tables so that they are on the receiving end for a change.
The person(s) we are afraid of however are usually no longer the people we interact with on a daily basis; we have little fear of the recreation area/dining hall etc at work. Social convention in the workplace prevents the acts of violence of the playground, even if there are individuals who would like to engage in such. We fear now the people; the media warns us against e.g. gangs of youths in hoodies, the large man walking behind us late at night etc.
However we still look at our need to defend ourselves in playground terms i.e. defeating one person in a one on one fight. We don’t think about how to defend ourselves against the man who asks us the time and then pulls a knife or the gang of teenagers, who will think nothing of using a knife etc, yet these are the attacks, which are more common. The days of being asked outside to fight the ‘leader’ are back in our school days, when everything was about jockeying for (or proving or establishing etc) position in a certain social environment i.e. who was top-dog on the playground etc. Unfortunately, we still think of the need to defeat one unarmed person, who has asked us to fight as the first self-defence need, we have to meet, despite it becoming less and less likely, with us more likely to have to face a knife or several attackers or one who disguises his intention to attack.
As the ante has been upped are approach to self-defence has to be different. We can no longer afford to think about winning but instead about surviving. There may be individuals out there who possess far less technical ability than me and in a one-on-one fight I could annihilate them however if they were to attack me unaware or chose to use a blade they would make much of my technical superiority useless. This is why they chose to attack in such a way. The days of the ‘fair fight’ are over.
Where I might before have chosen to engage and destroy I now need to think of disengaging and escaping. The chance that a knife might be pulled or an accomplice will join in means I cannot concentrate 100% on the attacker who I (initially) face. Do not get me wrong, I do need to know how to finish someone but that can’t be my first thought. My first thought has to be how to escape the situation (not just the attacker/aggressor).
Even if I face just one attacker, who I may know is unarmed (in all honesty this is something I will never know for sure), I need to think about disengagement as I never know how the situation will develop. In a fight I was involved in as a mid-teen, in a supposedly fair fight (square go) between a friend of mine and somebody else a third-party kicked a knife along the floor to my friend’s opponent.
The over-riding strategy of any street conflict is to disengage and survive rather than fight and win. This may not be the story that the new student wishes to hear but it is the most truthful one.
Regards
Gershon
P.S. as always feel free to comment on anything using the contact page
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