You bring up another good point – *how* and *where* should one learn violence prevention? I actually agree with you that martial arts teachers might be the wrong people to attempt to teach this subject since their area of expertise is different.

On the one hand there are weekend courses on how to defend yourself if you are attacked by a knife/gun/rocket launcher/tank or whatnot. Students coming to these classes want to learn some cool moves to show off. They don’t want to be told that they should not be there in the first place. If a teacher told students that it is pointless to charge the tank with a spinning kick, his students would consider him less competent than the one who told them how to punch through the hull and kill the people inside with a projected Chi attack. So the honest teacher would disappear from the market, while the Chi master would prevail.

There is a certain danger in this type of classes that people end up believing that what they learn is useful for “the street”. If they just stay at home, feeling competent to fight if need be, there is nothing wrong with that. But if they seek out high-crime areas and start to play Batman with their newly acquired “skills” …

I don’t claim to have a simple answer here. But you also link to Marc McYoung’s website at several points which has lots of good advice on how to avoid getting in a mess in the first place. Which is probably a good starting point for those who are seriously interested in protecting themselves.

But beyond that, the question still remains how you might find a good teacher? It’s probably not easier than finding a good martial arts teacher if you want to learn martial arts. That’s quite difficult – you also have a nice blog entry on this one.

A good “violence deescalation” teacher would probably need to teach you social competence beyond just those situations which can come to blows. In the aforementioned example of the high-school bully it was your initial hesitation to take action that led to the physical assault. As you correctly pointed out, advice people give in such a situation is often ineffective and can aggravate the problem rather than alleviate it.

This, in turn, is similar to the “how to fight a tank” teacher. We feel competent in dealing with bullies, when, instead, we are not ready for this situation at all.

Assault prevention training is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Furthermore, is it not a strength of the average martial arts instructor, and I don’t like to see instructors violating their own sphere of competence, indoctrinating their vulnerable students with oversimplified self-defense tips. In the context of a martial arts class, “just run away” is bad advice. (And if you study martial arts for years and still cannot fight, why assume you are a competent sprinter with no practice at all?)

On the other hand, I do agree with you that there is nothing wrong with learning both. However, I probably disagree with you on the importance of either step (but I may also just misinterpret your statement, see below my comments on bullies). I claim that learning to avoid violence is more important than learning how to deal with it. If you are in the latter situation you obviously failed at the former, so the former is what needs improvement.

I also read your article on “Bullying and Harassment Prevention Tips” and I must say that I really like it. In the comments section you talk about how you handled different situations. However, what you did there is in most cases exactly what I would call “preventing escalation”. Your responses have been very effective at a) stopping the bad behavior, and b) avoiding physical violence. With the possible exception of the “In high school” incident where you may have reacted a little too late to prevent violence.

In all the other cases you show that you are very capable of reacting effectively and thus stopping bad behavior early on.

This article is informed by Geoff Thompson’s research and analysis. He writes:

Whenever I talk about the need for self-protection, invariably someone will say, “You’re scaremongering.” Yet every day on our television screens we are confronted with grim statistics of deadly car crashes that warn us not to drink and drive. Even the relatively obscure danger of carbon monoxide poisoning is more publicized than [the threat of] violent crime.

Last year (1996), in London alone, 50,000 people fell victim to violent attack, in comparison to a national total of only 16,000 estimated casualties caused by [drunk driving]. So who’s scaremongering? I make no apologies if this book shocks those who are living in denial.

Bullying does not stop at the schoolyard, and bad behavior goes unreported and unpunished every day, in every country in the world.

Do you know the places you would most likely get robbed? Have you informed yourself about these things together with the threads that you likely face? If you have not yet done so and do not actively try to avoid such situations, don’t you think it would be a worthwhile investment of your time to learn this?

The “schoolyard bully” seems to be an even worse excuse for getting into a fight. First, people start Martial Arts as adults. In most countries an adult would get locked up pretty fast if he used physical violence. In fact, provoking someone to hit you, then call the police and let them arrest him is what some people do to get rid of others. Personally, I think it is preferable to not be the one “winning” the fight and being rewarded with prison for it.