Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan et al make self-defence look pretty easy on the big screen. But then, they have choreographers on their side. As Otago, and Dunedin in particular, confronts violence on the streets, Mark Price looks for an easy way to dodge the pain.
It's 2am on a Dunedin winter's morning.
You're lying face down on a Princes St footpath.
Two young men are hitting you with knuckledusters.
And when they are not hitting you they are kicking you.
What do you do?
James* was in that situation three years ago.
He had been walking home alone after a late shift at work and a few beers with a mate.
He had been minding his own business.
Now he was taking a beating.
James remembered a piece of advice given to him by a friend who had done a self-defence course.
"If ever you find yourself on the ground just cover your head. Don't worry about trying to fight back. Just cover your head."
Eventually, the police came and James escaped with cuts and bruises and a certain amount of wounded pride.
People like James make up quite a proportion of those who enrol with Geoff Todd to learn about self-defence.
"A lot of people we teach come along after they have been attacked, after the event because they feel insecure and not confident.
"It's affected their life, being a victim.
"Sometimes it's not even a physical assault. It's a verbal challenge or that type of thing."
Todd's business is violence - how to avoid it, how to respond to it, how to dish it out.
His Todd Group website offers such courses as this week's Ultimate Combative Challenge, where "a ruthless commitment to winning by means of battle-proven dirty tricks is everything".
But, how much "kill-or-get-killed close combat" training does your average Dunedin pub-goer need?
Todd suggests, as you would expect, a few self-defence lessons would not hurt - how to break an attacker's hold on your hair or how to break his leg.
He also acknowledges using physical skills is a last resort and there is much that can be done to avoid getting to that point.
He believes people can start by making themselves "a hard target"; looking for the weaknesses in their own personal security.
"Basically thinking like the bad guy."
This applies not only to homes and vehicles but also to routes between home, work, the gym and elsewhere.
Going out at night, he says, requires planning to get safely from place to place without venturing into "high risk areas".
"Sometimes that's as important as the physical skills."
James could have avoided his regular early Saturday morning walks along Princes St but takes the common Dunedin view that he "should" be able to walk the streets whenever he wants to.
His two assailants eventually went jail.
"That made it feel quite a lot better. ... I would have been really, really [annoyed] to know that they were still out there on the street."
For a time, he took taxis home but "it was something I wanted to confront psychologically".
"So I just did it. I started walking home again."
Although he no longer lives in Dunedin, he has kept track of "bashings" in the town and notes "quite a few" happen in the area around Manor Pl where he was attacked.
Police area tactical response manager Inspector Alistair Dickie agrees the area is one of the riskier parts of Dunedin.
"It's a dark area and there's probably a range of undesirables who live in that part of town."
He says police keep track of where assaults occur and he warns that intoxicated people walking alone are at risk of being targeted by "young groups" in the "outer CBD area".
Geoff Todd operated a business in the 1970s and 1980s providing "doormen" for Dunedin nightspots - the Shoreline, the Hotel Taieri, the Taipei, Sammy's and the Hatchcover.
He believes better laws have reduced violence on licensed premises and now the trouble is between venues.
"Anything you read in the newspaper seems to be more between - walking along the street or going to get food in the early hours - not necessarily in the venues."
He believes violence now is more likely to involve weapons and drugs.
"I also find that there seems to be a lot less respect for authority or for other people today than there was back then.
"Today, people are a lot more open and opinionated ...""Keeping your mouth shut" is one of the ways Todd believes people can "defuse" violent situations.
"Obviously, if you try and talk to someone who's already under the influence or highly agitated it can incite the situation if you say the wrong thing."
The added benefit of staying silent, he says, is that speech "slows your reaction time down".
"You want to keep all your senses alert like your sight obviously, your hearing, your sense of touch. And with your feet on the ground: you try to remain upright, stable and ready to run away.
"Those things are very, very important."
Mr Todd says he teaches people, including the military, how to control their stress levels by controlling their breathing and then their adrenaline levels and heart rate.
"Two things that are common in high-stress situations are audio exclusion and tunnel vision."
Audio exclusion, he says, is when a person who is in danger cannot hear someone yelling a warning such as "he's got a weapon".
And, when people had tunnel vision, "they are fixated on the perpetrator and they may not see his accomplices or see the window that they walk through or a car they walk out in front of".
"We all face the same reactions to fear and stress and if you are not taught how to keep them in check, then you lose your fine motor skills and defending yourself physically becomes more difficult."
Mr Todd recommends staying at least 2m from an aggressor if at all possible.
He says one of the things people need to overcome is the instinct to stretch out their arms towards an aggressor.
"People tend to reach out when someone's trying to grab them and give the attacker something to grab rather than covering themselves up and making themselves a smaller target."
James says he had no conversation with his attackers before they struck from behind.
"It was completely unprovoked. I hadn't said anything to these guys. They were just looking to lay into somebody."
James did not regard himself as a "scrapper" but with nowhere to run, decided he would "have a go".
"So I had a few swings, but with two of them and brass knuckles they knocked me down in pretty quick time."
Geoff Todd: "If they get attacked, people throw all sorts of punches but most of them have never trained in boxing before".
"They've seen it on TV or watched it as a sport and all of a sudden they have to break out into whatever they can to defend themselves with.
"But there's a huge difference between someone that trains for that and someone that's just going on self-preservation."
Mr Todd says self-defence skills can be taught one by one.
"You teach one method to prevent someone getting hold of you which would stop them grabbing your hair or your neck or your shoulders or your wrists or your arms.
"So you don't have to think, "what should I do?"
"I've heard ladies tell me this over the years, when I'm teaching them anti- or counter-rape, that their father or grandfather or brother told them you just knee them in the groin or poke them in the eyes.
"But we all know sexual predators are not that stupid.
"They are going to position their knee so their groin's protected.
"So rather than teaching skills that have a higher risk of failure you would teach just the primary option."
Pressed to explain what he means by a primary option, Mr Todd goes on to detail the technique of breaking an attacker's leg.
"People can hold you in a lot of different ways but you are still going to have your legs and feet and shoes there."
Mr Todd says there is "definitely more interest" in self-defence training but he advises people who are interested to ensure they sign up for a course that suits them.
And, he says, there are also many people who operate on the principle that being caught up in violence will not happen to them.
[* Not his real name]
WHAT YOU CAN DO
At what point is physical self-defence deemed excessive? Can you, for instance, hit someone over the head with a bottle to stop them punching you?
"Delicate one, that one," Insp Alistair Dickie says and refers the ODT to two sections of the Crimes Act.
Section 48 - Self-defence or defence of another
Anyone is justified in using in the defence of himself or another such force as, in the circumstances, he/she believes reasonable to use.
Section 62 - Excess force
Anyone authorised by law to use force is criminally responsible for any excess, according to the nature and quality of the act that constitutes the excess.
Self-defence instructor Geoff Todd believes self-defence law, and what constitutes "reasonable force", is vague.
"Even if you are defending yourself in a high-risk violent encounter ... you could find yourself potentially in trouble for those actions.
"No-one thinks about it at the time because obviously there's no time. They just have to deal with the immediate.
"But the consequences are wide-ranging and they affect a lot of other people, their families and so on."
And Todd says the consequences go beyond just the law.
"You may injure yourself, twist an ankle, or you may do your attacker a serious injury and then there's consequences for that as well.
"There are always risks. Anything can go wrong.
"It's not like going into a martial arts tournament, where there are referees and judges and rules.
"There are no rules, judges or referees. You are talking about hard surfaces, the kerb and channel, windows, vehicles. It's a very different situation to training in the martial arts."
