As issues of youth violence increase, teenagers in Victorian schools are turning to martial arts training, with schools hiring private instructors to help students take control of their personal safety.
The state’s most recent crime report showed youth crime had climbed to its highest level in a decade, with police warning that the surge in violent assaults is linked to “the pursuit of notoriety or social media likes”.
Teenagers want to protect themselves
Moorabbin-based instructor Dave Friedman has operated Krav Maga Australia, in the south-east suburb of Moorabbin, with his wife Shelle since 2018 and says the increase in queries about classes partly reflects the need teenagers feel to protect themselves.
But the surging numbers of people enquiring about how to better protect themselves is also coming directly from parents of students at our club expressing concern for their kids, as well as concern for themselves from teen-aged aggressors.
As chief instructor and co-director of LiveSafe Education, Friedman visits many schools across Melbourne to share training sessions and tips for students and told EducationDaily he would love to see more schools and families treat a child’s need to learn how to protect themselves become as important as road safety or swimming lessons.
“Our workshops provide understanding, tools and strategies to build awareness, confidence and empowerment for the participants,” he says.
Friedman says the workshops cover some or all of the following (depending on which workshop and time allocation is requested):
- Avoidance Strategies:
- Making good decisions to avoid potentially dangerous environments whenever possible
- Essentially, if you have a choice between being in two different areas/environments, choose the one that is least likely to have potential danger.
- Prevention Strategies:
- Making an early decision to prevent being a victim of crime, or an avoidable accident within an environment you can’t or don’t want to avoid
- This is done through situational awareness and understanding of abnormal behaviour in the environment you are in and what may be “pre-attack indicators” or behavioural cues that someone is potentially wanting to harm you
- Understanding the difference between social violence and anti-social violence. What can and should always be de-escalated vs potential predatory behaviour where no de-escalation is achievable
- We break down situational awareness so that it is not just a buzzword, but the four sub-sections that make up overall situational awareness and how to actually understand and implement them. (everyone says “must have situational awareness” but if you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t actually help you and you cannot implement it effectively).
- Effective escape:
- Simple, practical, realistic self defence techniques to create the time or distance needed to effectively escape a situation you were unable to or didn’t avoid or prevent and get to safety
- These are not teaching participants to be aggressive, but purely to be able to defend themselves and get home safe from someone that has made the decision to hurt them.
- In everything we do we emphasise:
- They are in control of their bodies and their personal space and they decide who can touch them and who can come into their personal space
- They have the right to change their mind at any time
- They need to respect everyone else’s personal space the same way they want others to respect their personal space. In the sessions, we repeat behaviour such as asking their training partner for permission each time before doing something to emphasise and drum home this message.
Female perpetrators are also on the rise
Friedman acknowledges there has been an increase in concerns relating to the safety of female students at girls’ schools but says there also appears to be an increase of female perpetrators targeting female victims.
He says the change he wants to see – with more schools equipping students with self-defence training – will only come after challenging what he describes as the “misconception” that self-defence was “learning to punch and kick”.
Friedman says his program has a firm focus on teaching consent and personal boundaries, which aims to educate and empower the participants with autonomy over their bodies.
“A lot of it is prevention and avoidance,” Friedman says. “There’s a big difference between teaching kids personal safety and teaching them to fight.”
Helping students feel confident
At Avila College, in Melbourne’s south-east, curriculum leader Matthew Roberts says the school wants students to feel physically and mentally confident.
“This health and physical education unit on self-defence is all about giving students practical skills that could keep them safe,” he says.
Instructor Dean Kobatsiari says all-girls schools like Avila were a large part of his new client cohort.
In a survey of its year nine students at the Catholic secondary college in Melbourne’s south-east, Kobatsiari says.one in 30 girls said they had been chased by someone with a knife or knew someone who had.
He says students also reported having their property – including shows and jackets – stolen and witnessing threatening behaviour.
“They see it all the time,” he says. “They don’t feel safe.”
Kobatsiari teaches students kicking, and punching, as well as the confident body posture and language that he says might help get themselves “out of a sticky situation”.
“I base my program over these four things: to be seen, to be heard, make a distance and don’t get caught,” Kobatsiari says.
“If you can have some street smarts about where you’re walking and who you are talking to, for any sex, that could make a big difference.”
Nationally recognised instructor qualifications needed
Peak body Martial Arts Australia (MAA) has been invited to contribute to the Victorian Department of Education’s review of its policy for schools to ensure martial arts is taught safely, which is currently underway.
Some of the MAA’s recommendations include outlining the need for a nationally recognised qualification for the increasing numbers going into the state schools to teach students.
“We strongly recommend programs marketed as self-defence be reviewed in greater detail as they can endanger students, doing more harm than good,” the MMA recommendation states.
That advice comes as MMA director Graham Slater says both the content delivered and the qualifications of the instructors delivering varies considerably.
“The lack of a standardised qualification can mean inconsistency in what students are being taught – which can negatively impact their experience,” he says.
