The following is an excerpt from an article by Gershon Ben Keren.
Unfortunately, we still think of the need to defeat one unarmed person, who has asked us to fight, as the first self-defense need we have to meet despite it becoming less and less likely, with us more likely to have to face a knife or several attackers or one who disguises his intention to attack.
As the ante has been upped, our approach to self-defense has to be different. We can no longer afford to think about winning but instead about surviving. There may be individuals out there who possess far less technical ability than me and in a one-on-one fight I could annihilate them however if they were to attack me unaware or chose to use a blade they would make much of my technical superiority useless. This is why they chose to attack in such a way. The days of the ‘fair fight’ are over.
Where I might before have chosen to engage and destroy, I now need to think of disengaging and escaping. The chance that a knife might be pulled or an accomplice will join in means I cannot concentrate 100% on the attacker who I (initially) face. Do not get me wrong, I do need to know how to finish someone but that can’t be my first thought. My first thought has to be how to escape the situation (not just the attacker/aggressor).
Even if I face just one attacker, who I may know is unarmed (in all honesty this is something I will never know for sure), I need to think about disengagement as I never know how the situation will develop. In a fight I was involved in as a mid-teen, in a supposedly fair fight (square go) between a friend of mine and somebody else a third-party kicked a knife along the floor to my friend’s opponent.
The over-riding strategy of any street conflict is to disengage and survive rather than fight and win. This may not be the story that the new student wishes to hear but it is the most truthful one.
