Often if the attacker

needs more information he will initiate
an exploratory approach, coupled with disarming dialogue. It
is also used as a secondary awareness assessment -the
attacker wants to see if you are switched on, wants to make
sure he is safe before he attacks. If at this point, or at any
point after victim stalking, the victim appears switched off,
the mugger may initiate his threatened attack without further
priming. Unless the attacker is a real pro he will show signs
of adrenal reaction in the exploratory approach that you will
sense. Listen to your instincts.
If the attacker feels that the chosen victim is switched onto
the attempt and his secondary assessment is negative, he will
often abort and find a more vulnerable victim. If he feels that
the chosen victim is switched off he may initiate the
attack/threatened attack whilst the victim is engaged in
answering his disarming question -this may be any thing
from asking directions to asking the time. Often the
disarming question will switch off those that are switched
on. An experienced attacker will use deception to take down
any defensive fences that his intended victims may have put
up.

Prior to attack

a stalking of the chosen victim often occurs,
like a cheetah stalking an antelope. This is a part of priming.
If necessary the victim will be followed in the hope that
he/she will heighten their vulnerability
mentally/environmentally by walking into a park, down a
quiet street/entry etc. If the victim is followed from a
shopping mall the attacker often waits for him/her to put the
shopping in the boot of the car or even strike as he/she
enters the car. It is at such times that even normally vigilant
people drop their guard, and even though it may only be for
a second, this is all the attacker needs.
When you have your hands full of shopping and are trying to
get the kids into the car you may not notice that you are
being followed. Often the attacker covers the whole of a car
park without being noticed. His attack is then so swift that
even other people in the car park do not notice what has
happened. When you are off-loading the shopping and
getting into the car, be very aware. As soon as you are in the
car, bang the locks on immediately.

Below are the

ritualistic steps of the latter. If you can spot the ritual in the
early stages you can avoid attack. Attackers look for
victims, and the ideal victim is in Code White, mentally
and/or environmentally: those daydreaming or detached
from the herd. Selection often occurs in sparsely populated
locations, the mugger wanting as little fuss as possible in the
execution of his attack. He favours the quiet
park/street/entry etc. This does not mean that people are safe
in highly populated areas like shopping malls or busy
streets. Very often the mugger stalks such places for
victims, after selection following them to a
safe attack zone like the car park. It is thought that Stephanie
Slater, murdered by Cannan, was stalked in just such a way.
Cannan spotted her in a shopping centre and followed her to
the car park, which was his trade mark, pouncing as she got
into her car.

There appear to be four different kinds of mugger:

1)The 'snatch and run' mugger, who literally rips your
handbag/briefcase from your shoulder/hand and runs
away at speed, or even drives away on a bike.
2)The blind side mugger who suddenly appears
out of an entry without any apparent warning
3)The defiant mugger who attacks without ritual or
fear of the law or consequences, usually because you
have walked into his patch or have inadvertently
crossed his Path and he wants whatever you have got
4)The professional mugger who plans his
attacks and uses deception as a 'way in'.
Environmental awareness is the best way to avoid the first
three, but a thorough understanding of attack ritual is the
only real way of avoiding the fourth.

We now move

on to the professional attacker who works for
profit and covets compliance. He does not want to fight. To
make his job easier he employs guile as opposed to force,
this coming via deception. As with all predators, he seeks
people in a victim state, or Code White. He is usually very
different from the archetypal, celluloid attacker that we have
been programmed to expect. This is the case with the most
disarming of predators. They rarely look like potential
attackers. The archetypal stocking-faced robber with a cosh
and a swag bag is far removed from the real world villain
who is more likely to be dressed in a smart suit and tie.
As With most attacks the professional attacker follows a
ritual,
understanding this is the pre-requisite to threat avoidance.

Like a cancer,

confrontation should be caught and treated as
early as possible -the longer you leave it, the graver it will
become. It is easier to treat a small malignancy than a fullygrown
tumour. If a verbal challenge is thrown down, you
should rise with the threat to Code Orange where a potency
assessment may be made. If an approach follows you should
automatically rise to Code Red, this being 'fight or flight'.
The approach may be made across the bar of a public house,
on the street, in a traffic incident, it may be some one getting
out of their car and approaching your vehicle. At this stage
you should have already utilised your 'flight' option and be a
hundred yards down the road. Where 'flight' may not be
plausible you may take advantage of the aforementioned
Four D's, if this technique works for your attacker then it can
work for you. As the famous Japanese strategist Miyomoto
Musashi said in his Book of Five Rings; 'What is true for one
is true for a thousand and what is true for a thousand is true
for ten thousand.' In other words, if it works against you it
can also work for you.

Returning the verbal challenge

Retaliation, however justified, will be seen by your
aggressor as an acceptance to fight. From my experience, if
you do not make a hasty retreat at, 'actual challenge',
especially if you do counter verbally, more threats and a
possibly attack will result. A non-counter and immediate
exit on the part of the victim usually results in the challenger
aborting, perceiving the response, or lack thereof, to be an
embryonic victory. Therefore, if a verbal challenge is thrown
do not counter.
If you are approached and are unable to escape, then you
must prepare yourself for fight or flight. If you are in a pub
and you sense trouble, it is my advice to leave that particular
pub and find another that feels less threatening. An ounce of
prevention is better than a pound of cure. At and before eye
contact you should have been in Code Yellow, this will have
given you awareness, not only of the potential situation, but
also of the 'ritual'. In such situations knowledge is power.

Eye contact challenger

Firstly, In the case of the eye contact challenger, if you sense
a rowdy individual/s walk tall and hold yourself confidently.
Even if you do feel daunted, act confidently -after all 'when
ignorance is mutual, confidence is King'. Confident people
are very rarely chosen as victims for attack. Whenever
possible, avoid eye contact where you sense aggression, but
do not bow your head, this can be seen as a sign of weakness
and may draw the attacker in for the kill. The challenger's
ritual can be crushed before it starts by simply avoiding eye
contact, if you are switched on you will have noticed him
from a mile off and avoidance will not be a problem. This
may take some discipline, it is often difficult not to stare,
because you feel almost drawn to something that you should
not look at. Practice by sitting facing the Tv and trying to
avoid looking at it for 2 minutes. You might not find that it
is not as easy as you thought. If you do not make eye contact
then you have avoided a situation.
If eye contact has already occurred, break the engagement
immediately and quickly separate yourself from the
aggressor by as great a distance as possible. If this proves
fruitless and aggressive verbal exchange ensues, do not
retaliate, just walk away, a verbal counter may act as a
catalyst. If you do not or cannot decamp at this stage and are
approached, prepare for 'fight or flight'. Only fight if there is
no other option open to you.

In the case

of the cursory glancer, it is advisable not to hold
eye contact. If you are sure that it is just a cursory glance
and not a challenging stare (it will usually be very obvious)
just
smile, perhaps say, 'hello' and then break the eye contact.
This will probably leave him thinking; 'Oh I must know him,
where do I know him from?' The ritual is then broken at the
very first stage. If he does ask you what you are looking at,
just apologise and say that you thought he looked familiar. If
he asks you if you want trouble say 'no'. This will usually
end the confrontation because he will feel as though he has
won and wander off to his cave. This will be hard if you are
a male with an ego to feed, but a lot easier if you are a
confident person that does not need to hurt people to prove
your masculinity. Women rarely have a problem with
submissiveness. Unless a woman has been brought up with a
weak male role model it is not normally in her nature to be
the 'protector'. If the latter is the case, she may have
developed male characteristics to balance the loss in her
environment, one of those characteristics being the ego. If
you are still approached put up a 'fence' (to be detailed) and
prepare for a physical encounter.

Perhaps the police

are frightened of the consequences of
honesty, believing the general populace do not have the
intelligence to handle lawfully defending themselves. One
PC, (I have actually heard several reports of this happening
at police-run courses for nightclub doormen), told one of my
friends, that he could not legally attack first and must wait to
be attacked and then counter-attack, with reasonable force, if
he wanted to stay within the law. Now, forgive me if I
overreact here, but that is not just bad advice, it is untrue.
The law allows pre-emptive behaviour, as long as it fits with
the circumstances: you truly believe that you are about to be
attacked. I will deal with this in more detail in a later
chapter.

Violence

is a serious game, so don't walk into it with any
romantic ideas of how it is going to be. It is always ugly and
always frightening. I have never stood in front of a man that
I wanted to fight, never had perfect conditions and never
thought 'Yeah, I' m ready for this'. Every fight for me has
been more like, 'I don't want to be here, I don't need this, is
this going to be the one that gets me killed or jailed?' Having
said all that, and having meant it, if it is going to 'kick off', if
you are sure and there is no other way don't hesitate, never
allow anyone the opportunity to attack you first. If you can't
walk away and you honestly belief that you are going to be
attacked, attack first and then get away. The police won't
give you this advice, even though it is well within the law,
because they probably feel that to sanction violence is to
invite it in. They don't want some murder suspect turning up
on the front cover of the national newspapers saying, 'I only
did what PC Dick told me to do.'

This is the complete ritual

but occasionally, depending upon
the victim's response, the attacker may jump steps. For
instance he may move directly from the question to the
actual challenge, so an early exit is always advisable. I am
aware that we are going over old ground here, but it stands
repeating. Try and use a physical response only as a last
resort. A young man walking down the street alone will think
nothing of ignoring a group of barracking men across the
road. However, put the man in the same situation and add a
female companion, and that man will be ready to argue and
fight the world to defend his manhood -even though his lady
is begging him not to get involved. These insults mean
nothing and should be ignored. As I said earlier 'it's not
personal!' Lads, the ladies are not impressed when you walk
into a fight that you could have walked out of. I have been
involved in many hundreds of fights and can categorically
state that it is the stronger man that can walk away, so please
walk away, the time to fight is when you are given no
alternative. If I have a fight I want it to be for a better reason
than, 'the guy was staring at me'. If I end up in court on a
manslaughter charge I don't want the judge to be saying to
me, 'You killed this man because he spilled you beer Mr
Thompson?'

To avoid and/or escape the fight scenario, you need to
understand the 'cursory glancer'. These are his ritualistic
steps:
-You may catch the eye of someone across a
crowded room or a street, the look lingers.
-He asks the question, 'Who are you looking at?'
-A physical approach follows.
-He reiterates the question, 'I said, what are you
fucking looking at?'
-He then generally progresses to an actual challenge or
attack. 'Do you wanna 'go', then?'
-Often the assailant will attack at 'actual challenge'.
If he does not, as a pre-cursor to violence, he will
often drop into single syllables that act as subliminal action
triggers to his attack. Words like 'Yeah', and' or 'So' are often
employed just before attack. The single syllable is a sure
sign that the interview is nearing an end and the introduction
of physical violence is imminent.

Again,

as in the nightclub, he'll
be stalking, looking for eye contact. If you are in Code
Yellow, you can spot these signs from a mile off.
There are two main kinds of eye contact that may escalate
into violence:
1) The cursory glance
Someone accidentally catches your eye, or you his. The
glance becoming a stare, and progresses to a verbal
exchange. This is the Pre-cursor to violence. Often, when
you make eye contact with someone and it becomes
increasingly obvious that you do not know each other, the
ego clicks in and goes to work. The initial accidental eye
contact becomes a fullyfledged staring contest. The eyes,
being a sensitive organ, cannot hold a stare for too long
without the occurrence of soreness, watering or blinking.
Not wanting to blink first, because it might be construed as
a 'backing down', the one with the sorest eyes throws a
verbal challenge, ('You fucking looking at me?) to hide the
fact that he needs to blink. If the verbal Challenge is
returned ('Yeah, I am looking at you! What you gonna do
about it?'), then the fight is probably on.

No matter who is

trampling on their roses, pissing on their parade,
metaphorically kicking the dog when he is down -you will
become the object of that pent-up aggression, because you
spilled their beer, cut them up in the car, looked at their
girlfriend or simply because you were there. That attack is
very often brutal, sometimes fatal. Being in Code Yellow
will allow you to detect and subsequently avoid these
philistines and these incidents in the primary stages, again if
you don't know the language you can't talk the lingo.
In the bar or the street you can often spot the gratuitous
attacker, he'll have a bad attitude -probably propping up the
bar or stalking the dance floor -his elbows pushed out from
his sides as though carrying buckets of water. He'll have the
customary curled upper lip and will probably be very rude to
anyone that moves within a few feet of him. If he's walking
down the street he will do so with an overconfident bounce..
If he's with others he'll probably be very loud, garrulous and
erratic in his movements. He may also be mean and moody
with a very aggressive gait.

This fashion

for mindless violence often starts with as little
as eye contact. In a volatile environment this can be
construed as a subliminal challenge to fight. Many of the
fights I witnessed in my time as a nightclub doorman began
with the' eye contact challenge'. You don't have to do any
thing wrong to be attacked by this genre of attacker, you just
have to be there. Please don't make the mistake of looking
for the logic in the
attack, there is no logic, the will be no logic and to look for
it will only add confusion and indecision. In those seconds
of indecision you will have been robbed and beaten -there is
no logic.
Most assaults of this nature are, in my opinion, due to
displaced aggression. You may trigger off this aggression
and become the object of that aggression. Something is
pissing these people off in their sad lives.

To notice rituals and entrapments you
have to be switched
on and have your eyes wide open otherwise you will suffer
the fate of those before you.
If the intent is robbery or rape the dialogue is often
disarming or incidental, 'Have you got a light please?' or
'Can you give me directions to Smith St please, I' m a little
lost?' The attacker is looking to 'switch the victim off' before
attack. In the case of the gratuitous assault where the intent
is attack for attack's sake the dialogue is more likely to be
aggressive, for example, 'What are you looking at?' In either
case the dialogue is employed to gain and distract attention
before attack.
Generally speaking, the greater the crime, the greater the
deception. At the bottom end of the scale the gratuitous
attacker will engage his intended victim with aggressive
dialogue, such as, 'I'm gonna batter you, you bastard!' Whilst
at the top of the scale the rapist or murderer will prime his
victim with anything from a gentlemanly request for
directions to, as in the case of killer John Cannan, sending
his intended victims, (usually women he had spotted in the
street and followed or just met) champagne, flowers and
dinner invitations -the ultimate primers for rape and murder.
The more cunning attackers drop into the thespian role with
Oscar-winning perfection.

A part of understanding the enemy is deciphering the
language of the street. Much of the attacker's dialogue is
used, again innately, as a trigger for violence and to engage a
potential victim's brain before assault. Positive interpretation
of this 'speak' will unveil signs of imminent assault -literally
giving you a countdown to his attack. The ritual alters
according to the category of attack, as does the dialogue. I
have to make the point before I go on, that none of what you
are reading here is or will be of any relevance if the victim is
switched off. Deceptive dialogue and cunning entrapments
are hardly necessary if the victim is walking across a field at
night or down a dark alley in a sparsely populated area.
When this is the case.- as it very often is -most assaults will
be physical and violent almost immediately. The ritual is
only used in a bid to trick an intended victim or heighten
their vulnerability. If the intended victim has already placed
him or herself in a victim state, then they'll be attacked
without any warning.

Most attacks are preceded by stalking and dialogue
entrapments. The 3 second fight is not commonly known or
talked about, but most attackers use dialogue as their leading
technique. I find that many instructors of self-defence are so
concerned about the physical 'tricks' that they forget about
those vital seconds leading up to assault. It is those that
handle pre-fight most effectively that tend to be victorious
when a situation becomes 'live'. In fact, if you are switched
on to the attacker's ritual you will not usually even be
selected as a victim. This is absolutely the most important
factor in 'real' situation and yet it is one area nearly always
overlooked by other defence gurus. One aspect of the ritual
is the aforementioned four D's, which involve body language
as well as the spoken word. This dialogue is often called 'The
Interview' (which I will discuss presently). If you can spot
the ritual, you can stop the crime.

Generally the attacker

of today is a cowardly person who
either fights from the podium of alcohol/drugs or attacks
from behind, possibly with the crutch of a weapon or an
accomplice, or both. Excepting possibly the rapist, who
often works on the basis that he believes himself physically
superior to his victim, most attackers work with the aid 9f
one or more accomplices. As formerly mentioned they are
looking for VICTIMS, those that are in Code White or are
detached from the herd. If you practice target hardening,
these people -due to their proverbial 'yellow' streaks -will
not cross your path. If they do and you fight back
ferociously with well-aimed economical attacks, they will
often abort, though I have to reiterate a physical response is
the inferior tactic. If you do decide to employ physical
techniques, make sure that you know your way around the
fighting arena or you may just add anger to the attacker's
artillery by daring to strike him. If you strike, you need to
know that it will inflict damage enough for you to effect an
escape.

It is often a lot easier to avoid a fight if you have an
understanding of the attack ritual. As we said earlier:
understand the enemy or you are fighting in the dark. If you
know why, where and how an attack is likely to happen, it
stands to reason that the acquired knowledge will help you to
avoid such situations, or prepare for them.
There are, of course, lots of different types of attackers and
attacks. Some choose to rob, some choose to rape, whilst
others instigate gratuitous violence for no other profit than
malice. Some assailants are cold-blooded in that they
meticulously plan their attacks before they set about
executing them. Many are opportunists who will only
commit an offence if a 'safe' situation arises in their
everyday lives. Men, women and children are being attacked
indiscriminately, even in highly populated areas, where the
frightened and seemingly unsympathetic general public hide
under the veil of, 'It's nothing to do with me', or 'I don't want
to get involved.' However when you have a judicial system
that seems more in favour of the attacker than the victim this
reticence is often understandable.

'Fucking bodyguards, all a load of wankers!'
I turned away from him and got my drinks.
'Listen, forget it. I was just trying to be nice to you.'
As I walked away I heard him sneer, 'Fucking bodyguards,
all a bunch of wankers'. Sharon patted me on the back and
said, 'Well done'. She knew that two years earlier the guy
would have been knocked unconscious, along with anyone
else that stood in to defend him. But now I was practising a
different art. For those that might be interested he tried the
same thing on with my friend Griff, who was actually an
international bodyguard. Griff smashed his nose into the
toilet urinals -he wasn't as patient as I was.

'How you doing mate?' I asked very
nicely.
'You a bodyguard?' he replied aggressively. We were at a
private party for a large security company who hired static
security men and bodyguards.
actually I'm not,' I replied honestly.
'liar!' came the very rude response.
I nearly lost the plot at this point because the guy was
overtly aggressive and it was obvious that he was looking
for a fight. I lined him up to knock him out and remembered
where I was and that I was trying to practice avoiding fights,
I' d been in over three hundred and had seen enough
bloodshed for ten lifetimes. I was very firm, slightly
annoyed.
'No I' m not a liar, I am not a bodyguard.'
'What are you then?' Still aggressive.
'I'm a guest'.