The digital witness: Why it is time to update the fence for self defence.

 

“It’s better to be judged by twelve than carried by six”. This is the mantra of many a combatives guy. It is the macho answer to give when surrounded by your peers in a bar discussing the twenty different types of pre-emptive strike that will either explode a knee, pop out an eyeball or collapse a larynx. All valid techniques in their own right and each could be as deadly as described.

 But do you really want them to?

I am not suggesting you roll over and play dead, or allow yourself to become the victim of violence, but I do not want you to become a victim of your own violence either.

 Is fifteen years for manslaughter or a six stretch in prison for GBH while your family are left alone with little income, possibly losing the family home, and having to get by on benefits and the charity of others good self-defence?

When the day of reckoning comes maybe a year after the event where sleepless nights are the norm and the constant stress has led to regular anger outbursts at your loved ones and a loss of appetite. Will those thoughts that you have alone in the dark be enough to bring you a not guilty?

The newspaper headlines coupled with the vilification from work colleagues and community as your CV no longer gets you that job interview and doors you don’t even know exist yet are slammed in your future face.

 Did you train for this? While you were ripping and gouging and stamping with your mates at the club did you train the very real aftermath that will come?

 This is the problem with tradition. We sometimes forget that functionality relies on a contemporary interpretation of the principles to align with the modern-day world we live in. It is no longer enough to just see and repeat. Now we must adapt, challenge, and format for the modern world.

 Let me give you an example. Hundreds of years ago a warrior……no, scrap that. Less than thirty years ago a martial artist wrote a seminal work. His teachings changed the very face of martial arts, and his name was firmly and rightly entrenched in UK martial arts royalty. Yet he, I am sure if you asked him today would question the insistence on doing things exactly the same way now as he would recognise the world is a different place.

His name is Geoff Thompson, and the book was released under the title Bouncer, later to be changed to Watch my back. In it we learned of the pavement arena and the realities of unsanitised violence.

 Many like me looked to it as a beacon of martial light full of promises of a braver future where finally the arts would unshackle themselves and become relevant and applicable to the environments of the day. Others saw it as heresy and were quick to denounce this upstart lout with his uncouth language and lack of respect. He polarised a generation for a while, but yet here we are, just a few short decades later entrenched in the dogma of the fence circa 1992 unwilling or unable to see that the landscape is a very different one from the one portrayed in those books.

This is in no way a critique of either Geoff’s work or Geoff as a person. Before anyone makes the leap and assumes I think I know better let me just get that in. Physically his teachings more than stand the test of time, and I would never say otherwise. What has changed is the world around us.

Let us take the fence and the use of the pre-emptive strike as an example. Many people teach this ad verbatim in precisely the same way it was taught then. But there are some major differences between then and now.

I call it the digital witness. You may know it as CCTV.

When Geoff first released his book in the early 90’s smartphones with cameras had not been invented. The first of these was released in 2000 but didn’t hit the western world until 2002. We didn’t see the first Iphone until 2007, that’s 15 years since the original book release. YouTube was launched in 2005 and Facebook went live in 2004. Both many years after the principles of the fence were first laid down.

If we couple this with the world pre 2000’s and look at the history of CCTV we can begin to see very clearly that being caught on camera in those days was far less likely and if you have ever read the books, prone to “malfunctioning” often. Being filmed by passers-by and shared across social media was an impossibility back then, so of course it was never factored into the training.

 Now it is very different!

 We now exist in a world where the SIA (security industry authority) states that there is an estimated one camera for every eleven people in the UK. This is from a study taken in 2013 that stated we spend £2.2 billion a year on surveillance, so it can be safely assumed to be much higher now. Official Police figures state the average Brit is caught on camera over 70 times every day meaning that almost everywhere we go and almost everything we do is now likely to be filmed. Even more so if it looks like it might make good social media content. Who hasn’t seen a brawl video being shared all over Facebook?

This for me means we should be adapting our training to accommodate the ever-changing threats. It is no longer enough to hit and run without fear of consequence. Now we must consider the electronic eyes second-guessing our every move as this is now the modern pavement arena. When training we should consider how will my actions look on camera, how would someone seeing this on a small black and white screen interpret my behaviour? Will my body language and demeanour shout victim or aggressor?

 In this modern era of smartphones, personal tech, CCTV, and the internet we should look to adapt our methodologies to incorporate these changes and assess if the training we practise represents the world of today.

 Years ago, it was enough to just deal with the threat in front of you, now part of the threat is how those twelve we mentioned at the start feel about your actions as they watch the video back and judge your actions from the safety of a warm room.