the assailant demonstrate intent? Did his or her words, actions or body language lead you to believe the assailant had the intent of attacking you?
Did the assailant have the means to attack you?
Assailant Factors
In addition to being able to prove that you were in imminent danger of being assaulted when you defended yourself using physical force, the courts are likely to examine additional factors surrounding the assailant when determining the appropriateness of the level of force used. These may include the following:
1. Age. Age can play a factor in a number of ways. For example, an elderly person who is confronted with a much younger assailant in the prime of adulthood may need to use a much greater level of force to defend themselves. Conversely, it would be expected that if it were the reverse situation, the able bodied adult should not have to use as much force to defend themselves. Children would also be likely to receive more lenience should they use more force against an adult in an assault.
2. Size. This is one of the clearest assailant factors to determine in that all a person needs to do is look at the attacker and defender side by side. Naturally, a relatively small person who encounters a larger assailant may need to use greater levels of force in order to defend themselves successfully.
3. Gender. In general, women tend to be both smaller and weaker than men. There are, of course, exceptions, so keep that in mind if you are a six-foot-three female body builder. As a result, a female defender who is assaulted by a male assailant may need to use a greater level of force in order to successfully defend herself.
4. Skill. The skill level of the defender and the assailant also enters into determination of acceptable use of force. The defender facing an assailant whose skill level is clearly higher than that of the defender may need to use a higher level of force to defend themselves, and vice versa a defender with decades of martial arts experience may be expected to use exercise greater control and restraint.
5. Disability. People with physical disabilities are much more likely to be injured during a physical assault and would likely need to use any means at their disposal in order to successfully defend themselves.
Explanation of the Totality of the Circumstances
In addition to the assailant factors, the courts will look at the big picture of an assault scenario to determine whether the level of force used in response was acceptable.
Imminent Danger: The assailant is known to be armed or has shown themselves to be dangerous in some other intentional way.
Special Knowledge: The assailant is known to have special skills that pose a greater threat.
Injury/Exhaustion. The defender is injured or exhausted.
Multiple Assailants: The defender must face more than one attacker.
Ground Fighting: The defender faces multiple tactical disadvantages (i.e. body weight, debris, communicable disease, weapons, multiple assailants, decreased environmental opportunities.
Footnote
* As with any statistical information, this must all be kept in context.
CHAPTER 2
How to Stay Safe on the Ground
Safety is our primary concern in ground defense training. This is true whether you are developing your skills on the mats or applying them for self-protection in a real street situation. This chapter covers a variety of principles and training practices that will help you learn what you need to stay safe on the ground, while maintaining safety for you and your training partners on the mats.
The Tenets of the Can-ryu Jiu-jitsu Core Curriculum
Before we cover the concepts that are specific to ground defense, it is important to understand the tenets under which we teach the core curriculum of Can-ryu Jiu-jitsu. These serve as guiding principles for what we teach our students for self-protection. These tenets all address the underlying idea that when attacked, people often undergo an adrenaline dump as they face that which threatens them, and that affects the way they move, think, and react.
1. Simplicity. Our style’s core curriculum is meant to be easy to learn. A student should be able to understand and learn the mechanics of a defensive technique in less than 3 minutes. If there are physiological reasons why a particular move is not practical for a person, the technique should be modified in such a way that it is usable or they should be shown a completely different technique that makes more sense for their body type. But ideally, our core curriculum is formulated to be comprised of techniques that will work for the greatest variety of body types and attack situations. The reason for this is that the harder something is to learn, the less likely we are to use it when under the affects of an adrenaline dump. Of course, the longer you train a technique and commit it to muscle memory, the more likely you are to use it when under attack, but if the technique is easier to learn in the first place, you are that much more likely to develop that tendency.
2. Commonality of Technique. We strive to use similar types of techniques in similar defensive situations. The purpose of this is to prevent brain stalls, which can occur under the pressure of an attack as a person tries to “think” of what to do. If the defensive technique that is taught is the same for all the different minor variations of the same attack, it reduces the chances of this. Also, when you train to defend against all the different variations of a type of attack with the same type of defensive technique, you spend more time committing that technique to muscle memory, making it more likely that you will use it when attacked.
3. Usage of Gross Motor Skills. In the interest of making our core curriculum easier to learn and apply, we emphasize the use of gross motor skills over fine motor skills. Gross motor skills are skills that use the larger muscle groups of the body. All gross motor skills come from things we learned from infancy to early childhood, including walking, crawling, maintaining balance, reaching, hopping, etc. By using defensive techniques that employ larger muscle groups, we are drawing on physical skills the body is used to using, ones that have been reinforced since our early physical development. This makes them easier to learn and use when under an adrenaline dump. The body already has a tendency to resort to movements it has already learned, so we are taking advantage of that by using gross motor skills for our defensive techniques. Fine motor skills, on the other hand, require a lot more training to get the movements ingrained in our subconscious minds. That is not to say they cannot be effective (we do include a variety of fine motor skill techniques at higher levels of training in Can-ryu), it just takes longer to develop the muscle memory to make them second nature. Gross motor skills include techniques like open hand strikes, eye gouging, scratching, biting, etc.
4. Awareness of Additional Threats. In all the defensive techniques we use in our core curriculum, we emphasize a constant awareness for the potential of additional threats to our safety. This means that we teach students to look around and be aware as though someone else may attack, even when they are defending against one person. This extends into other types of threats that may be actively or passively introduced in a defensive context including weapons and environmental hazards. This is an important skill to develop because our natural tendency is to tunnel-vision when under an adrenaline dump, causing us to focus on what we perceive to be our primary threat. Without training awareness, a person can be vulnerable to changes in circumstances and surroundings when in this psychological state.
The Importance of Making Exceptions
Bear
