When fighting you don’t need to look at something to know where a target is. In an interview, Mike Tyson was once asked where he “looked”, and he indicated to the chest area. The interviewer asked why he didn’t look at the head, and Tyson replied that, the head can’t hit you. He knew where the target was: it was located directly over the chest/torso, and he didn’t need to see it to be able to target it. There are many rookie/novice mistakes that people make when first starting to spar, and looki...(Click Here To Read The Article)
Personal experience can often get in the way of the facts. When you work in security you tend to see things from a certain perspective i.e., if you are always engaging with violent individuals, you can easily come away thinking/believing that the world is a violent place, and as a “trusted source” – someone who deals with violence – others will give weight to your perspective etc. Most people in modern society have so little firsthand experience(s) of violence that they’ll trust a martial arts/s...(Click Here To Read The Article)
In last week’s article (which can be accessed by clicking here), I looked at how mental/intellectual disabilities can significantly increase the risk of victimization. In this article I will look at the ways in which those with physical disabilities are more likely to be targeted than those without them. One of the things that differentiates physical disabilities from mental ones is that in many cases they are “external” and “visible” e.g., a predatory individual can easily recognize someone wit...(Click Here To Read The Article)
After writing an article about how older people as a demographic tend to be - as a group - victimized disproportionately/excessively, I was contacted about whether or not people with disabilities (both mental and physical) are specifically targeted for crime, including acts of violence. It’s not an area of criminology and victimology that I was/am particularly well-versed in/familiar with. So, I started to take a look at the research that exists around disabilities and victimization - this is my...(Click Here To Read The Article)
clicking here). Their model looks at how three factors - Instigation, Impellance, and Inhibition – interact to create aggressive/violent responses that result in what they termed Momentary Aggression i.e., aggression that occurred in the moment as a response to a perceived threat or injustice; something that is often referred to as spontaneous violence. In this article I want to look at how the I³ Model can be applied to a variety of real-life interactions, and how these can bring out differen...(Click Here To Read The Article)
In my final year at university, I took a module/course entitled “Psychology and Radical Economics”. It wasn’t so much by choice but as the result of a scheduling issue – to fit in the subject areas I wanted to study, I was left with a “gap”, that could only be filled by taking this course/module. It was a subject area that I felt completely out of my depth with, and a course that I barely felt I kept a grasp of, however there were only six of us taking the program, and we all bonded over our fai...(Click Here To Read The Article)
I was bullied as a kid. That experience shaped me. For a large part of my childhood I didn’t believe I had the right to be who I was. I wasn’t allowed and didn’t allow myself to have an identity, and when I tried to have an identity, it wasn’t shaped internally but externally to meet the requirements of others. When I was finally able to understand and realize who I was/am that became something extremely precious to me. Something that needed to be protected and something I wasn’t going to allow ...(Click Here To Read The Article)
In the early hours of Sunday morning, October 5th, (around 2 a.m.), a crowd of over 100 people gathered in the South End of Boston around Massachusetts Avenue and Tremont Street, blocking intersections, performing burnouts, donuts, and illegal racing, and attacking responding police vehicles with fireworks, traffic cones, and poles, with a police cruiser being set on fire in the chaos. In the same weekend similar incidents occurred in other Massachusetts cities including Fall River, Middleboroug...(Click Here To Read The Article)
Obviously, the world we live in isn’t a completely safe place and will never be so. However, since the mid-1990’s crime, and violent crime have been steadily falling, albeit with some blips along the way, which begs the question of how relevant learning to protect yourself is and will be in the future, if the trend continues. This is more of a theoretical question, than an actual one, with the purpose of making us think about the ways in which martial arts and self-defense training (including Kr...(Click Here To Read The Article)
One of the unintended consequences of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the 1994 Crime Bill, was that it drastically altered the demographics of certain communities. One of its provisions was that it mandated life sentences for offenders convicted of a third felony, even if the third offense was nonviolent, which disproportionately affected Black and Latino men, who were more likely to have prior convictions for a number of reasons, including systemic p...(Click Here To Read The Article)