Written by Guss Wilkinson 2000
Unless you are the sort of person that goes looking for trouble, or you have a profession that puts you at risk, or you live in a particularly bad neigbourhood etc, the chances of being attacked is relatively small.
But it happens, and it can happen. Personally, in the 30-years that I have been training; I have never had to use Karate to defend myself. I like to think it is because I have learned to read people, learned to read situations and that I have become sensitive to bad atmospheres and have chosen to walk away.
Maybe it is because I am relatively small (170 cms) and that I am not perceived by anybody as a threat, I don’t know. Curiously, this is the most common question that I get asked and people seem to get strangely disappointed when I tell them!
But on rare occasions in the history of our club, members have been attacked – and what follows is a brief analysis of a couple of these cases and the lessons that can possibly be learned from them.
I will recount these stories exactly as they have been told to me. If you recognise yourself when reading this and I haven’t got it right, feel free to get in touch with me and together we can put it right.
Johanna was a 14-year old girl that started training with us in 1992 at our club in Stockholm. She was about 160cm tall, very slim and she was deaf.
It was very hard to tell that she couldn’t hear well as she was a superb lip reader and she refused to wear her hearing aids.
She trained very hard, constantly pushing herself to her limits, practised continuously at home and she ejoyed it.
She had been training with us about 10-12 months when the following incident happened:
She was at a party at a flat in the city when her friend decided it was time for her to leave and go home. Johanna decided to do the thing that friends do and walked her friend to the underground station.
They said their goodbyes and Johanna decided to walk back and return to the party. She was about half way there when she was grabbed from behind and dragged into a dimly lit park by man in his 30’s, armed with a knife.
Johanna was thrown to the ground and set upon by her attacker who hit her and proceded to try to rip off her clothes.
I can only imagine what was going through her mind at the time; the fear, the panic: the nightmare!
But she struggled like hell. She was slashed right across the face with the knife and she was cut on the wrists where she tried to block the attacks with the knife.
She continued to struggle and eventually she must have seen an opportunity. She took it and hit her attacker in the face as hard as she could, knocking him off her.
Johanna ran, and her assailant dissapeared into the night.
She was treated for her wounds and the police praised her actions. She must have hit her attacker hard as his blood was all over her clothes.
But Johanna was scared about what Helena and I would say as we had repeatedly told our students that they must not use Karate outside of the dojo.
Her parents came to us and couldn’t thank us enough for giving their daughter the idea to fight back, but our hats went off to Johanna who had decided that she was not going to be a victim. She must have felt that she had nothing to loose as she had no idea if she was going to survive the attack, whether she fought back or not.
The police never did catch the guy and Johanna had a nervous breakdown a couple of days later. She thought that she saw her attacker everywhere she looked.
Johanna never did return to training, despite the urges of her parents but she did continue to practice in front of her bedroom mirror.
It is easy when you are in the comfort of your dojo to clinically practice and examine techniques. But it is important not to forget to put these techniques back into an aggressive context and to try to imagine how the proposed attack would look and feel if carried out by a crazed individual(s). Your technique is going to be messy and that’s quite ok.
Not long afterwards, another one of our students was the victim of an attack.
Bernt was in his mid 30’s. He had trained with us for about 18-months and was a cheerful, fun loving guy who put a lot of effort into his karate.
He was slim, about 185cms and really quite strong.
It was Christmas eve and he was at a party with his friends. It was a cold and snowy winters evening and the party was in full swing. There were a few couples there that Bernt hadn’t met before and everyone was having fun, getting into the spirit of things.
Everyone had had few drinks when suddenly an argument broke out between a husband and wife in the kitchen.
Bernt intervened, went between them and with a smile on his face said, “Come on guys, cheers up: its Christmas. Come and join the rest of us!”
As soon as his back was turned, the husband got out a large knife and stuck it in Bernt’s mouth and ripped open his face all the way to his ear. Bernt fainted and as he collapsed to the floor he was stabbed in the kidneys, turned over and stabbed again in the liver.
He was rushed to hospital and remained in intensive care for a couple of weeks. I think that he remained in hospital for a around two months where, obviously extremely traumatised, spent a lot of time just crying.
He needed a lot of plastic surgery to repair his face and eventually returned to training where he continued for another year.
His attacker was charged and convicted of attempted murder but Bernt was a changed person and didn’t smile much after that. He didn’t seem to put much effort in his training anymore: he had lost his spark and eventually he quit.
I thought a lot about his situation from a self defence perspective and however I turn, twist and examine the scenario, I just cannot see what else he could have done.
No body is buttet proof. No body can be on their guard contunuously. He was in a situation where he was amoungst people he trusted and Bernt, quite rightly, thought that he could relax.
The above two cases show that when you are faced with a serious situation: whether you win or loose – it is going to affect you for the rest of your life.
Nick, my brother, tells a story of how he was at a pub in Aberystwyth while at University there. It was a crowded and noisy pub and Nick was there enjoying a drink with his friends.
There was one particularly nasty skin head type individual there who was obvioulsy bored and looking for trouble. He started to get very aggressive with Nick after Nick accidently bumped into him while trying to place an order at the bar.
Nick was sure that the situation was going to turn very nasty and he was starting to get really frightened for his safety.
Nick had done no martial arts training what so ever, but he started to think very quickly. Nick started to talk and said “You don’t sound like you come from these parts.”
The skin head replied:, “What if I don’t?”.
Nick quickly asked him where he came from to which the reply was, “Plymouth, what’s it to you?”. This guy was still very agitated.
Nick said, “ I know Plymouth.” (He didn’t and had only been there once), “I used to go to a pub called the Pig and Whistle, do you know it?” (The only pub that he had been to there).
The skin head was taken aback and said, “Yeah, that used to be my local....” and they started talking and Nick offered to buy him a drink.
They continued talking for about an hour after which time Nick returned to his friends.
Nick said that he felt so ashamed and cowardly that he didn’t just hit the guy and get it over with.
My reply to Nick was that he had demonstrated the ultimate self defence. He was able to use his quick thinking to distract and diffuse the situation, no-body got hurt and there were no other complications from a fight that could quickly have escalated and of which Nick would have been at the centre.
Not many other people would have been capable of what Nick had done.
Nick was still ashamed and started training martial arts with Helena and I. He trained for nearly 4-years before quitting and in that time he gained enormous physical confidence from his Karate skills.
He says now, that with his Karate skills, if the same situation arose today: he would be far more confident to talk his way out of a situation and would handle it the same way. But now, he wouldn’t be ashamed afterwards.
This is the ultimate goal of Karate – well done Nick!
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