There seems to be an uptick in mindless violence in New York City, in particular against women.
I’ve seen a bunch of responses to this, some better than others. Several news outlets take the slant that this is something new. I disagree. What might be new is that women are targeted more than in the past. Though I don’t know if that’s the case as anecdote does not mean evidence and many of the social media posts claiming this have not yet fully been investigated.
Regardless, this has been happening for a very long time. It comes and goes in waves and takes on different forms over the decades. It happened earlier too, but the last time was about ten years ago. Back then it was called “the knockout game” and mostly targeted men. I wrote about it in 2013:
Self-defense against the knockout game
Today, it seems it’s not so much teenagers doing criminally stupid things, but adult males. My guess would be drugs and mental illness are involved, along with a criminal lifestyle that is incentivized by the intergalactically stupid bail reform NYC installed a few years ago. But again, it is early days and more data is needed to get a clearer picture.
What can women do?
- In my blog post, I gave some suggestions. But the bottom line is that if such an attack is set up well, there sadly isn’t much you can do. In an ambush, the attacker has the advantage by a large margin: he has the element of surprise in his favor and human reaction time is typically not fast enough to do much against an incoming punch as you walk down the street, going about your life, oblivious to the fact that with the next split second, you’ll be on the receiving end of extreme aggression.
- Even if you are in such a state of mind, you still have to be faster than the guy throwing a punch out of the blue. You constantly pass dozens of men as you walk down the street. They come close, pass you by, overtake you from behind, and even bump into you. Even at condition red, how will you know if these guys are just innocent pedestrians like you or a violent attacker about to smash your face in?
- You won’t have time to grab your pepper spray or anything else you might have on you as a defensive weapon. Unless it is always in your hand, the dynamics of a surprise attack won’t allow for a draw and deployment until you are already reeling form that first punch.
- Even if you do hold it constantly at the ready, unless you evade or partially deflect/absorb that first punch, you take immediate damage. So before you even realize you are under attack, you’re potentially already at a distinct disadvantage. This sucks and isn’t fair, but reality doesn’t change because we don’t like it.
- Counting on bystander intervention is like counting on the police: by the time they can help you, it’s already too late: the attacker already struck you. On average, there is a huge disparity between men and women when it comes to physical advantages in a violent conflict: he can more than likely take your hardest punch. You can more than likely not take his hardest punch. If he starts the attack with such a blow, the odds of being incapacitated are high and help will come too late.
- It is extremely difficult to instantly switch from minding your own business to fighting for your life. Barring some exceptions, most people can’t do it naturally. Developing that skill takes training and experience and even then it is not guaranteed. Given that we have had years of the public narrative being “don’t teach women self-defense, teach meant not to hit women” a significant portion of women will not have trained to be that skilled. So whatever you think might be a solution here, it is next to impossible to implement it unless you train hard to have the capability for it. A paradigm shift is in order…
- Every time I make the previous point, screaming harpies come out of the woodwork. So for their benefit: If you say women shouldn’t learn self-defense, you advocate for more of them to be victimized. Shame on you… Now I am in agreement: we need to teach everybody (which includes men) to not use violence against others. In many ways, we already do so, but violence still happens. Teaching men and women to defend themselves against it is the only way to increase their chances of survival. Rooting out violence like this is at best an extremely long process. In the meantime, what happens to the women who are attacked? The ones you don’t want to give the tools to defend themselves. They become victims and you advocated for it. Re-shame on you…
- We teach people not to steal and punish them for it, but they still do. So we teach citizens to lock their doors and not leave any expensive items visible in their parked cars. Or not leave their phone on the table at a bar or restaurant and then go to the bathroom. You can argue that we shouldn’t have to teach that and I agree; we shouldn’t. But unless you can snap your fingers and forever stop people from stealing, ever again, telling citizens not to do these things is advocating for more theft. The same applies to self-defense. The reasoning is exactly the same. Alas, we live in a postmodernist world where reason and logic are seen as inherently inferior to feelings and ideology. To which I respond: reality is the wall upon which ideology breaks itself.
We live in a chaotic, violent world. We always have. Throughout human history, violence has been an integral part of it. Avoiding it and knowing what to do when it comes your way is a part of being an adult. A large part of being an adult is doing things you don’t like or want to do.
This is just another one of them.
