- What happens if you are in a fight or altercation (in a social violence context)
1. Pre-fight
- There is a ritual people go through before a fight starts. Learn these signs so as to avoid and deescalate
- Posturing: the person will act in certain ways to assert dominance and to signal he is ready to rumble
- Shouting, cursing, pacing around.
- Throwing out insults to puff himself up and to reduce you in his and other people’s eyes.
- Dropping the head to protect the neck and to prepare for aggression.
- The purpose here is to intimidate the other person and is done unconsciously.
- If the person takes a stance toward you, beware! They are ready to fight.
- Steps of the pre-fighting stage:
- Verbal arguments and posturing and intimidation
- Psyching self up for the fight
- More posturing and angling to intimidate.
- Getting up in the person’s face and they are ready to fight.
- If you are at this phase, you need to get out immediately.
- The shove or push.
- The fight has begun at this point and you cannot get out of the fight scenario
- Verbal arguments and posturing and intimidation
- You want to do all you can to defuse and deescalate the situation during the pre-fight stage!
2. Physical confrontation
- At this stage, the fight is on and it is near impossible to avoid violence and physical harm
- Even if you “win” the fight, you will be hurt to some degree.
- The point to all this material is to AVOID getting to this point.
- Fighting is illegal, and you can get hurt and get into legal trouble, so you want to avoid fighting at all costs.
- Sometimes, you may have done all that you can to avoid the situation and you find yourself in a fight, what are some tips to help you in this situation:
- Most likely, your attacker is experienced in fighting and is a violent person.
- Take a good defensive stance with one foot forward (take a step back with your right, for example) and put up a guard.
- Try to keep your wits about you during this fight time.
- Your hot center of the brain is activated and you will be in instinct mode.
- Try to be rational and get out if you can.
- Strike the attacker with open handed strikes
- Palm heal and shuto strikes.
- Punching a person can break your hand
- Open hand strikes allow for gripping and holding and controlling the person.
- Do not go down to the ground on purpose
- Other people may start attacking you as well.
- When on the ground, you focus only on that one person and you lose sight of other threats around you.
- Sometimes the person takes you down and then you must fight on the ground.
- Do not show off
- Do what you need to do and stop.
- Strike the person, knock them down, and then step away with your hands up saying you don’t want to fight.
- Stop fighting as soon as you can so as not to further injure the person because that will get you in further trouble with the law.
- Think about what other witnesses are seeing: do they see you as showing off and being a jerk or do they see you as trying to avoid the fight and to stop fighting as soon as possible.
3. Health and legal considerations of violence
- Use of force for self-protection law in PA.
- Avoid fighting at all cost.
- Fighting is illegal and people get hurt.
- This is a litigious society and people will sue you if you hurt them in a fight.
- You can also go to jail for fighting, and jails are not where you want to be
- Very dangerous place.
- Anytime you are in a fight, you risk serious injury and even death.
- Fighting affects more than just yourself and the other person.
- You can get so injured that you cannot care for yourself or provide for those who depend upon you.
- You can hurt or kill the other person and affect those who rely upon him.
- Avoid fighting at all costs.