If she was running towards you looking like this, you'd run away too..

Hi mates! The following was sent to me recently and, although it is short, shows that Situational Awareness means more than just watching out for yourself. It could also mean being able to come to the aid of another woman.

As with most cases, and particularly this one, the criminal wasn’t some Lex Luther crime genius, but rather a dumb opportunist who thought he could attack a woman while she was with her child because that made her an easy target…. He obviously wasn’t counting on her receiving assistance from a passerby!  

“Hey Terry, here is a story a woman told when I attended a local PD RAD course.  She was in the parking lot of the local Mall and witnessed an attack on a mother putting her child into her car.  This woman lost it, took off her shoes and ran toward the car, screaming, then threw her shoes at the guy.  He ran off, but due to her awareness she was able to give the police a description and he was arrested a short time later at the fast food joint where he worked. The putz had his uniform on during the attack.  If they could all be so stupid!”

If you ever face a similar situation and find yourself in a position to come to another woman’s aid, make as much rucus as possible on the way in – but dial 911 as you do. You can always begin giving information to dispatch in regards to your location, etc. if he doesn’t flee immediately.

Plus it means you are looking right at the guy as you give his description. You would not believe how tough it is to be accurate in your post event description of someone, especially with your adrenalin pumping!  

Of course, in this case, giving an eye witness run down about the attacker was nice and easy as he was wearing his work uniform…beautiful! 

As a Mother, you could be at particular risk for attack due to your propensity to focus your attention on your children, rather than your surroundings. You are highly unlikely to be attacked inside a store or a mall. But once you leave the high traffic area inherent in those locations and begin your trip to the parking lot, you are much more at risk.

Look UP! Look AROUND!

If anything seems wrong or out of place go back inside! You are most at risk on the fringes of populated areas caught in a sort of no-mans land between the store and your car. Now you should move your awareness level up into the High Yellow category and start thinking like a predator – where would you attack YOU?!

Think about it…

Keep the stories coming and even though you may never come to the aid of another woman in practical terms, you never know how many you might be helping by promoting awareness of the latest or oldest tactics used by criminals.

Cheers, Terry.

It was a bad day to be an empty bottle of detergent...

The following incident was sent in by a Situational Awareness Seminar Alumni who manages to single-handedly reiterate the importance of women being suitably well-armed.

In this particular case she was able to diffuse a potentially dangerous situation when some asshole thought it was okay to start threatening a woman – only he found out it isn’t okay very quickly!

This lady arrived at a four way stop; she had come to an actual stop and had the right of way when she turned right. The only other guy at the junction at the time didn’t stop at all, ran through the stop sign on the opposite side of the road and turned left behind her, his horn blaring the whole time. With hand gestures being thrown around left, right, and Chelsea, my seminar attendee did what she thought was right and pulled over to let him pass. Avoiding a confrontation with this guy, if he was that mad, was a good idea. 

 Unfortunately, she did the right thing in trying to let him pass, but he thought this would be an opportune moment to give her a piece of his mind.

Remember – she has done nothing wrong. Howevr, he jumped out of his car yelling at her, basically giving her every indication that he was madder than hell over some imagined infraction. He left his 7 year old child strapped into the car seat in his vehicle in order to accomplish this…parent of the year anyone?!  

Maybe his over blown sense of self-importance guided him to believe that all other vehicles should get the hell out of his way when he is on the road. I’m sure as he saw a woman driving a nice truck, he took it to mean he could do whatever he wanted.

I wonder if he would have jumped out of his car and been that aggressive if the driver of the other vehicle was a 6′6″ linebacker? I’m guessing probably not, but guys like him get really brave when it comes to threatening people he considers to be smaller or less able to defend themselves against this sort of aggression.

That was a mistake!!!

He was yelling at her all the way up to within a few feet of her truck, posturing and puffing his chest up. It deflated awfully quickly when he saw her place her .357 revolver on her dash board.

His hands immediately went up in the universal signal for surrender – maybe he has French ancestors…. And the situation was resolved. He trotted back to his car and went about his day.

As did my new hero.

I say this at every seminar I give; you can do everything right and nothing wrong, pay attention to your surroundings, not go out of your way to attract trouble, even do your best to avoid it completely, and it will still find you. Be prepared to be your own first responder. If there is a way to diffuse a potentially dangerous situation and escape, take it. But if you can’t be prepared to draw a line somewhere, and if that line is crossed then give ‘em hell!

In this case he wasn’t so angry that he was prepared to risk his life for the trouble. Which is why it is so important for a woman to very carefully review all assets she may have at her disposal and pick the one that works the best for her. In this case a gun worked wonders. In most cases it will diffuse things very quickly. If it doesn’t, well, it’s not an empty threat and the playing field is levelled. A 130lb woman can hold her own against a 6′ 4  nut job who thought it was OK to start threatening a woman.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye..

Nuff said!

Pass this along, ask your girfriends if anything similar has ever happened to them. If it has then write to me about it and we’ll include it here for all to learn from!

Cheers, Terry.

This is the position you might be fighting from and fancy moves won't work here!

We are going to pick up from last week’s Blog talking about women and what should happen in an attack – more precisely, what you should do if your attacker is trying to take you away from the scene of the assault.

If you happen to be a woman with kids, in this instance, it will probably serve you well. A Mother with her “cubs” most definitely has something to fight for.

Traditionally, victims of any disaster stand a much better chance of surviving if they have something to cling to life for. The fight for life can be many more times stronger when the person in that struggle is battling for something other than just themselves.

Your will to live can waiver when your body is wracked with pain and it becomes significantly easier to just lay down, give up, and die. We tend not to endure so well without a good reason to push through and suck it up.

Which is why, in this instance, if you are already living in the Yellow, your attacker might be in for a real surprise!

I recently read of an encounter a woman had while at home with two young kids. She had already spotted an older model red truck cruising through her neighborhood and past her house. The driver was a slightly unruly looking man in his late 20’s, but he wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination, a scary looking “bad guy”.

A short while after the initial observation he returned to her home and pulled into the driveway, parked his truck, and then approached her in the back garden where she was playing with her kids.

He was there under the pretense of offering to work pruning her trees or some other crap excuse. But he had no uniform, no clip board, and no cell phone. This last point is significant. Think about this: when was the last time you saw any one that works either for themselves, or someone else, not have a cell phone permanently stuck to their hip?

Either way, it felt wrong. After a brief exchange in which he attempted to gain her trust, she managed to get him to leave. Or so she thought. After he began heading back towards his truck she gathered up her kids and headed back into the house.

She didn’t see him sprinting back around the house before it was too late.  He grabbed the back of her neck and began shoving her into the house ahead of him. She had her 18 month old on her hip when he attacked.

You can apply this technique upside down and scared silly - which is good, because you might be... That's reality based self-defense.

She froze. Her children did not and they began screaming – loudly!

This freeze reaction is not at all uncommon. In fact, it happens a lot more often than it should, which is why it is SO important to always be living in the Yellow! It helps minimize this time span.

In this case, it was her kids screaming that broke the trance she was under. Now she was pissed. Majorly pissed. She went on the offensive and intended to do as much damage to this guy as possible. Biting, scratching, kicking, screaming, punching, clawing, gauging, anything ending with “ing” was definitely in! LOL!

She literally overpowered this jack-ass with her aggression. She used reality based self-defense to knock this guy backwards. It wasn’t clean, it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t pre-planned, but it was real. To my knowledge she’d had no reality based self-defense instruction at all.

I can only imagine what sort of damage she might have done to this guy if she had!!!

She chased him down her driveway and all the way back to his truck. He couldn’t get out of there quick enough. I mean, he literally couldn’t get out of there fast enough, because she had now picked up a large fallen branch and was beating the outside of his truck with it.

He was later caught by Police and prosecuted for the attack partly because of his injuries, and partly because of the damage she had done to his truck. There was glass from his vehicle in her driveway and skin under her nails, things that are pretty hard to refute.

In this case her children possibly helped save her life. She had something to fight for. She had a reason to not let it go too far before she retaliated and take the fight right back to him.

Survivors with a reason to live, other than just trying to avoid death, stand a much better chance of surviving – anything! 

Everything starts with a dance move...just don't ask me which one this is...I couldn't tell you!

Over the next few Blogs we’ll look at why it’s important to understand the different types of attacker, and why it’s more important to understand beforehand what your game plan is going to be if you are attacked.

What are you fighting for?

You need to know the answer to this in advance of an attack.

We’ll also look at some statistics on whether your attacker is likely to be armed, or not, and how you can plan your response around this encounter.

Plus, we’ll go into why it is important to park your vehicle in a certain way when you are out running errands, where the sun is, which way the traffic flows near your parking bay, or what should you do with your kids while loading your purchases.

All this and more coming up shortly,

Cheers, T.

It doesn't look deadly yet...but wait until she lands on you.

Although modesty dictates I shouldn’t call it so, I must say I perform a miracle of sorts: I convert the entire class mentality from one of mixed consideration in regards to violence, and direct them towards their newly empowered warrior status – one where they feel comfortable embracing their capacity to commit violence in their defense.

How, I hear you ask?

By giving them an alternative scenario in which their desire for justification is spontaneously addressed. I ask them to what lengths they might go to protect a child being attacked and dragged forcibly into a stranger’s van. Oddly enough, nearly every woman, in every group, every time, would rip a man limb from limb in defense of a child…..

That is the mindset I’m looking for!!!!

Most women wouldn’t even consider themselves capable of violence, full stop. But the truth is they may never have been challenged into thinking about what they are capable of in response to a violent encounter.

The thought of defending yourself should illicit the same vehement response as the thought of defending a child.

During an attack is way too late to start wondering what you might be able to stomach doing because:

A.  In the time it takes for your brain to overcome the shock of the attack, he could have hurt you enough that you are incapable of defending yourself (this scenario applies specifically to anger rapists who are prone to excessive amounts of violence at the initiation faze of their attack).

B.  If the initial assault is performed by someone that you know (and statistically speaking this scenario is most likely) you will be inclined to try a less violent counter measure first.

C.  By implementing less violent defensive tactics first, you will be escalating your tactics in relation to his. A tit-for-tat self-defense strategy is exactly what you don’t want! If you feel threatened, react in accordance with the way you’d react defending a child being victimized the same way.

D.  You will have lost the advantage of surprise. The surprise to the bad guy is that a normally mild mannered, easy going woman, is more than capable of exacting an incredible amount of violence upon him in a short space of time; if she is in the right frame of mind.

A WOMAN IS MORE THAN CAPABLE OF HURTING A MAN IF SHE HAS PROPERLY PRE-PLANNED & DECIDED SHE CAN BEFORE AN ATTACK.

Sometimes just knowing how much trouble you are in can help. And sometimes, not so much.

Proper planning (part of the seven P’s mentioned in my last Blog) is applicable to life in general, but in this instance it applies to mentalpreparation and planning.

What are you prepared to do if you are attacked in a parking lot by someone intent on taking you somewhere else?

You need to have decided this beforehand. Not during the event.

In contrast, you might already know you would sensibly give up your purse, gold watch, diamond ring and even your vehicle, to a robber (as long as your kids aren’t already in it and we shall cover this, too, at a later date).

This point of giving up things without a fight also harks back to one of my previous Blogs about where you draw a line in the sand. At what point do you stop being compliant during an assault or a robbery?

You might decide to be compliant throughout either case and do nothing from start to finish.

As long as you have made the decision to be compliant ahead of time you will stand a much better chance of not suffering with extreme long term debilitating mental anguish as a result.  I’m not saying it won’t be hard to live with, but there is a vast amount of mental freedom in choice.

If someone chose to eat fatty food, exercise little or none at all, and then die from a heart attack – well, that was their choice, wasn’t it?  Obviously the fear of death itself wasn’t the issue or they would have changed their lifestyle.

But if someone attempts to threaten or take your life, then it is in the loss of that freedom to choose what, or who kills you that becomes such a catalyst for long term mental illness.

The oft repeated mantra becomes,

“Why did this happen to me?” Or,

“Why did they do this to me?” Or worse yet,

“Why didn’t I do more to stop them?”

It is when something like that occurs and no pre-planning mental preparation was considered, that the situation simply unfolds and you seem powerless to deal with it. You just freeze. You react contrary to everything you believe yourself to be. 

Sometimes a guy needs to know when to stop talking....

You are simply so shocked by the fact that it happened to you at all, that you continue to feel like a victim long after the assault has ended.

I would also like to point out as part of my Situational Awareness Seminar we advocate already having some sort of Victims Advocacy group contact information already in your contact list. This is because victims of assault, sexual or otherwise, show improved mental recovery rates when they had a representative of the group by their side when they gave statements to law enforcement. Top tips girls!!

And no it’s not morbid to have Pre-Planned for this contingency – it’s bloody smart Proper Planning!!

 Next week we will start having a look at whether it’s best for you to be compliant if he’s trying to take you away from the initial assault location or not. Should you fight back? Would you fight back? Send me your thoughts and comments.

We’ll also have a look at the parking lot scenario in regards to being with your kids if something like this happens – what’s your plan? It should have started with some simple observations in regards to the parking lot itself, before you even park. And then how you park can be a factor, which way you face, what type of vehicle you are in, even which way the sun is shining – all can help play a small part in decreasing the likelihood of being a victim.

Cheers, T.

PS http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48204,00.html citizens are being asked to pay attention and call the Feds if they see things out of place to aid in the fight against terror.

But first this: Child abduction is probably the least likely event to actually happen in our given scenario. Predators are driven by opportunity, location, and vulnerability of a child: this you can control by maintaining your mental alertness at level Yellow, and by continuing to read this Blog for more information on how to keep you and your family safe from the most likely threats. 

If scratching his eyes out doesn't work....

One of the reasons for this is your own bias. Whether you like it or not, you have a predetermined idea in your mind about what a “bad guy” will look like. Anyone that doesn’t fall into that category will simply slip through nearly unnoticed. These people never look like bad guys. THEY NEVER DO. They only give themselves away to regular folks when those regular folks are living in the Yellow and paying attention to the signals!!!

Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that I keep refering to men, bad guys, etc., because 9.5 times out of ten it is a man.

By the way, as a guy I think this sucks , just as most of you probably do. I frequent a variety of parks with our three kids, but I tend to go to less heavily trafficked locations (fewer kids), usually much to the frustration of my kids! I don’t do this just to make their lives miserable, although I’m sure they might disagree with me. Haha. I do it to minimize distractions for me. It also makes it easier for me to get a read on the other parents, or more accurately the other men, if there happens to be any.

Yes, I’m aware of how sad this is, but I’d rather take the responsibility of acknowledging the possible threats to my kid’s wellbeing than pull the blanket over my head and hope for the best while existing in some sort of lala land…

Even writing this down I feel like I’m overreacting; that may be because I’m a little paranoid. However, I’ve made my one screw up losing Cora at the Mall of GA.  Nobody targeted her, I just misplaced her for a few seconds. My job as Dad is simple – not to let that happen. I don’t place my trust in complete strangers, casual acquaintances, or friends I haven’t seriously vetted.

As parents you don’t have that luxury, either. You are going to get one chance to get them to adulthood as normal as possible – don’t screw it up!

I understand that as a Mother, looking after and raising the kids means you have made sacrifices. One of the first to go was you as an individual person. Kids don’t give a rats ass about what you used to do as career. Now you’re the person who wipes their nose and cares for their various ailments. The fact that you haven’t had a “grown-up” conversation in the last three months is irrelevant to them.  Catching up with your friends might be as close to therapy as you are going to get the two times a week you meet up with them; but if your child is taken from you while you are distracted by this session with friends, then real therapy is going to be what you will need.

Pay Attention. Think tactically: If you were a predator, when would you try and take a child? Which choice makes most sense tactically:

A:  A woman in the grocery store parking lot where she is more aware of her surroundings, distance, and individual instincts?

B:  The Mother chatting away ten to the dozen at the park playground with her girlfriends?

Situational Awareness is also about thinking like the sorts of people that may mean you or your children harm, and considering for a moment, how they might accomplish their goals.

It is in these uncomfortable moments as parents, when we pull the blankets off our heads and have a good unobstructed view of the world around us, that we are better able to predict when we are truly vulnerable and when we are not.

Distinguishing between the two doesn’t always minimize stress. But it will allow you to decide ahead of time when it is warranted and when it is not. You cannot walk around constantly fearful of every situation you might find yourself in.

Just present a Big Dose of Crazy to the attacker. Just remember this only works in public places....

The key is to be able to recognize when your heightened awareness is justified, and when it is not. Then, when you are off the clock, so-to-speak, you really are off the clock – or as I tell my Seminar attendees, you are in a low Yellow condition, as opposed to a high Yellow condition.

Speaking of being aware and paying attention to your surroundings check out this News Clip in reference to the New York Times Square incident:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4176296/new-yorkers-stop-terror-threat?playlist_id=87937    Vigilance pays off in Times Square.  Think it doesn’t apply to you???? Or that your keen eye can’t change history????

Tomorrow we’ll pull a few observations together as far as your personal security is concerned and discuss limiting your exposure to bad guys by implementing the 7 P’s:

Proper

Pre

Planning

Prevents

Piss

Poor

Performance!

Cheers, Terry