I recently came across a quote from an american Police officer and it went something like this, “The offender doesn’t fear the law or the justice system and so you must make them fear you.” Although I can’t recall the exact quote, the clear message of self empowerment through learning to protect yourself resonated with me. What I took from it, is that everyone needs to take responsibility for their own personal safety and the safety of their families. The fact is that our law enforcement officers aren’t generally on the scene until after the crime has taken place. Furthermore, the attacker knows this and generally isn’t thinking clearly or is under the influence and couldn’t care less anyway.
Does’t it make sense to equip yourself with the tools to possibly avert or deal with an assault situation if unfortunate enough to be faced with one?
We fit our homes with alarm systems and add security steel mesh doors and security mesh grills to our windows. Why? Because we want to take every precaution we can to prevent our home from being broken into. And rightly so. But isn’t burglary illegal? Of course, but it happens every day regardless.
Numerous physical and sexual assaults occur every day, so why is it that the same precaution to protect ourselves is so often overlooked? Is it the old ‘It won’t happen to me!’ thought process?
Let’s have a look at the key findings from the ABS.
This release presents information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2013-14 national Crime Victimisation Survey, which is the sixth in the annual series.
The survey collected data, via personal interview, about people’s experiences of crime victimisation for a selected range of personal and household crimes. The survey also collected data about whether persons experiencing crime reported these incidents to police, selected characteristics of persons experiencing crime, and selected characteristics of the most recent incident they experienced.
At the national level, the results showed that:
Personal crime:
In the 12 months prior to interview in 2013-14, of the 18.5 million persons aged 15 years and over in Australia:
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- 418,200 (2.3%) experienced at least one physical assault
- 538,500 (2.9%) experienced at least one threatened assault, including face-to-face and non face-to-face threatened assaults
- 65,600 (0.4%) experienced at least one robbery
- Of the 17.6 million person aged 18 years and over, 48,300 (0.3%) experienced at least one sexual assault.
Australians were more likely to experience face-to-face threatened assault than any of the other selected personal crime types. Physical assault was the second most frequent personal crime type experienced in 2013-14.
These statistics exclude any assaults which occurred during organised sport or in sporting play or incidents of sexual assault or threatened sexual assault that involved physical assault.
Getting back to the quote and particularly the part that says “You must make the offender fear you!” It is our own efforts in taking responsibility and ownership of our personal safety by at least learning some basic self defence skills that may ultimately be the difference between being just another victim or sending a clear message to the offender that “If you think this is going to be easy for you, you are mistaken!”
OK, so the next question is, can three hours of self defence training really help me? Well, I like to put it like this. If you have never used a computer before and decide to take a short general course, you will come away learning how to start and shut down your computer, access the internet, send an email etc. These are the basics that help you to at least now use your computer. This may even now inspire you to further your knowledge and learn new skills that will allow you to use all the advanced features of the computer and what it has to offer. At the very least, you now are able to use your computer and understand the dos and dont’s. It is no different to learning self defence. You will learn learn how to deal with an initial confrontation, how to try and diffuse and if required, how to come out on top. Will you be a proficient fighting machine? Probably not. That would require additional training of course. But at the very least, by taking ownership of your own safety and taking the time to learn some basic self defence that actually works, you will have now given yourself a fighting chance by knowing what and what not to do.
Combat Defence Systems offers not only membership based training but self defence training workshops. If you are interested in giving yourself a fighting chance, email info@combatdefencesystems.com to register your interest in our next self defence training seminar.
Certified JKD Instructor: Gino Vallelonga
Email: info@combatdefencesystems.com
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