Content Warning: This post deals with topics related to violence and personal safety.
The following is a transcription of a video in which Dr. Annalijin Conklin offers the first of many helpful safety tips. Dr. Conklin is a professor at the University of British Columbia and a long-time martial artist.
[on screen] This resource is meant to provide tips so that individuals may be informed on how to keep themselves safe. However, we do not endorse any notion that victims are ever to blame. If you have been hurt in any way, you are never to blame. We stand with you. We believe you. To learn more about resources: boltsafety.org
CONKLIN: Hi everyone, my name is Dr. Annalijin Conklin. I am here today because I’ve been doing martial arts since the age of eight and have twenty-five years of active practice experience. So I’d really like to use this opportunity to share some safety tips that hopefully will be beneficial to you.
So for the first safety tip, something that resonated with me a long time ago when I took a self-defense workshop, and a practice that I’ve incorporated in my life is whenever I’m in a place that’s really quiet, like a residential street or it may be downtown but it’s kind of dark, it’s not really well-lit, there’s not many people around. The tip that I would suggest is that you walk in the middle of that road. Don’t take the sidewalk. The sidewalk, you’re more vulnerable because if someone is waiting, say, between some cars or between two objects on the side of the road that are very close to the sidewalk, you’re at much higher risk of really being attacked kind of without any warning.
So I’ll try and communicate this concept through a little drawing. So this is my road, and I’ve got cars parked on the side of the road here. And really a sidewalk’s gonna be really quite narrow on both sides. And depending on where you are in the world, some people might have houses that go all the way up here to the edge of that sidewalk, so you really only have a narrow passageway. That’s very true in Europe. If someone is hiding between two cars that are parked between a rubbish bin and something else, and they’re kind of wedged in there, and if you’re coming along on that sidewalk, you really don’t have any time or opportunity to escape. Now, obviously the first thing you wanna do is escape, right? So how can you enhance the ability and the opportunity for you to be able to do that? Well, it’s by walking down the centre of that road. Just kind of from this image, you can already see that if I’m walking the centre of that road, because it’s deserted and it’s quiet and there’s no one around, someone has to at least take one, maybe two steps to get to me. Close enough to grab my arm or my legs, to take me down. Those two steps, or those two seconds, can mean kind of either you are able to escape or you get stuck in a really difficult situation, and that can make all the difference. So it’s creating ways that you can kind of enhance the opportunity by which you can escape, and this will give you that kind of two extra seconds to kind of know what’s coming up.
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