Often when I’m teaching a women’s self-defense seminar or a corporate personal safety event, I’ll be asked if women are more likely to be the targets of crime than men. With certain types of crimes such as rape and sexual assault, women are more likely to be targeted than men, but generally, men are more likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of violent offenses. However, there is one group/demographic that is generally at a greater risk of crime and being exploited, and that is the ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
There is a saying that “good” is the enemy of “best”, which is probably a paraphrase and re-working of an older proverb most famously phrased by Voltaire - “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien” i.e., “The best is the enemy of the good”. Whilst the first statement argues that being satisfied by something being “good enough”, prevents people from striving to achieve something that could be better, Voltaire’s statement is a warning against perfectionism. Insisting on the “best” (or endlessly improving) ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
In 1995 a small-time crook name McArthur Wheeler, with an accomplice, robbed two banks having sprayed his face with lemon juice believing it would make him invisible to security cameras; just as lemon juice could be used as “invisible ink” on paper, he believed that the same thing would happen on a CCTV tape. He was so confident in his belief that he deliberately looked up at a security camera and smiled. His reasoning came from the fact that lemon juice can be used as invisible ink, only becomi...(Click Here To Read The Article)
Many people are aware of the “Invisible Gorilla” experiment (Simons & Chabris, 1999). The experiment involved individuals watching a video of people playing basketball having been given the task of counting the number of passes. In the middle of the video, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walks on to the center of the screen, beats his chest, and walks of again. About half of those watching the video failed to notice the person in the gorilla suit. The experiment was an update on what Ulric Neiss...(Click Here To Read The Article)
This is not a political post, in that I believe the things I want to talk about are applicable to all those who engage in any form of mass protests/demonstrations regardless of their political persuasion. I’m a believer in mass demonstrations for forcing political and regime changes e.g., it was mass rallies, demonstrations and peaceful protests that were largely responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989, and for getting the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and Gandhi, showed/demonst...(Click Here To Read The Article)
I’ve only ever met one person with a “genuine” wooden leg, and no they weren’t a pirate. It was somebody who had been the target of a contract killing that they’d thwarted/stopped. In the process of fighting for their life a shotgun, their attacker was using, had ripped into their lower right leg requiring it to be amputated below the knee. Rather than using a medical prosthetic leg, they’d had a friend make a wooden one that they proudly wore – sometimes with cut-off jeans – as a badge of honor...(Click Here To Read The Article)
I have written in past articles about crime, and violent offending, being largely committed by young men, and that apart from a few persistent offenders, most age out of crime in their early to mid-twenties. This is one of the few things that most criminologists agree on as the statistics are extremely compelling and hard to dispute. However, I haven’t written much about why violent offending is committed by young people, especially young men. I have written somewhat about why young people stop ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
When training in a “controlled” environment, it can be easy to focus on the end result, rather than consider how we’d experience, and react to, a particular attack if it occurred in real-life. I often use a rear-strangle attack to illustrate this point. In a training environment many people will focus on the “escape” aspect, rather than recognizing that this won’t be a consideration if the attack is experienced in real-life. The first reaction will be panic, regardless of whether you are trained...(Click Here To Read The Article)
This article looks at a very specific type of UK drugs crime known as County Lines, and specifically at an offense known as “cuckooing”. However, whilst it and some of the offenses that accompany this form of drug trafficking may be somewhat unique to the UK, there are components of it, which are much more general, and easily relatable and applicable to crimes and violent crimes that are committed elsewhere. In the early 2000’s London and other major cities had found their drug markets pretty mu...(Click Here To Read The Article)
I’m at heart a grappler. I grew up practicing Judo and it intuitively made more sense to me than the striking arts I practiced at the same time e.g., I did some Karate-Jutsu, Wing Chun Kung Fu (I still remember - and can perform badly - Siu-Lum-Tao, the system’s first form) and Boxing in my teens and early twenties etc. I now understand that fighting is fighting and that the concepts used in the grappling arts have the same counterparts in the striking ones. However, for me, they were more obvio...(Click Here To Read The Article)