Most of us think we know our friends, we would trust some of them with our lives if need be, our enemies, those we know that are likely to stab us in the back and we keep those at a distance right? You wouldn’t keep In contact with anyone that you knew for sure would tell your darkest secrets to any stranger wanting to listen, no one is that silly or that stupid are they? Unfortunately YES, YOU ARE!!
These days most of us spend a great deal of time living our life on social media. It’s a great tool of the modern age, but for the modern self defence practitioner it can turn from friend to executioner. Everything we ever type or share is digitally recorded and saved, even comments you may have deleted are still stored somewhere. How does this affect you ask though? We have all been victim at some point of something we have said or written being taken the “wrong way”, something said in the heat of the moment as a reply to a situation.
Let me give you an example. Someone on your news feed posts a story, the previous night whilst walking home from a night out someone was viciously attacked by a group of teenagers hanging around a street corner, totally unprovoked. We have all seen this type of post right? And we have all seen, and probably even been guilty of posting a “vengeful” comment on the post. By vengeful I mean comments like “I’d have beat the shit out of them” or “I’d have killed them” If you ever have made a comment like that in the past then congratulations you may very well have pre booked your jail cell in advance should you ever need to defend yourself in the future.
Scenario of the future, Your walking home one night, minding your own business, unfortunately you are confronted by a group of teens, as the confrontation develops they physically attack you, you are forced to defend yourself, causing injury to your attackers, after all that is what we are trained to do is it not? The police arrive, on time for a change. The teens are arrested and charged with assaulting you. But they have a story, it wasn’t their fault it was yours, you attacked them for no reason. So you are called in and questioned about this by the police, you deny it to the end because it never happened that way. You are allowed to go home whilst further investigations are carried out.
As a self defence practitioner, someone trained to defend themselves, you will be scrutinised more for defending yourself than some ‘Joe blogs’ that has had no training for doing the same. It’s no secret the police use social media to learn about people. An investigator investigating you over this claim that you attacked the teens scrolls through your Facebook history, all of a sudden he finds something you wrote years ago, a comment on someone’s post were you have stated that you wanted to beat the crap out of some teenagers or that you threatened ‘to kill’ the said teenagers. From this point onwards do you think the police are going to prosecute the teens for attacking you? Or you for attacking them? After all the attack on you is one word against another, but that comment you made 2 years ago is an admission of intent. Do not pass go, do not collect £200, go straight to jail.
As a practitioner of self defence, be very careful what you say online, it’s there forever to be used against you.
South West Krav Maga – Oxford Kennie Gould
