The legal and pycological factors for defending “PUSHES and SHOVES”

Firstly, you must realize that “shoves” by legal definition are “assaults” or more properly, “battery” and therefore criminal acts. Any unwanted touch is an offense so you do not have to legally or morally endure them.  There is no threshold of contact; no one has the right to touch you in any threatening way.

Many people may not be clear on this and the law enforcement bureaucracy is in no rush to disseminate the notion.  They feel that they have enough to do without the citizenry also expecting them to charge and prosecute every person who pushed another (we’d have to station patrolmen on every elementary school playground if we wanted to stop pushing). Nevertheless, your body and peace of mind are legally sacrosanct and inviolable; you are under no legal obligation to tolerate “rude and undesired physical contact”.

The very concept of “self-defense” begins with this idea but in recent years our culture, governments and law enforcement bureaucracy have been willing to make compromises in this area for the sake of expediency.  Who cares if a few people go around punching you in the face, that is not nearly as important as not clogging our courts and jails or making sure police have enough time to do the truly important things,(like writing their quota of traffic tickets). Easy to come to this conclusion as long as it is not your face being smashed or your child being repeatedly bullied at school because teachers couldn’t be bothered to intervene.

More and more these days, it seems like some bureaucrat is always ready to sacrifice your physical well-being or dignity for their idea of the common good (or is it social control?). In an era where the government wants more and more control over you they seem less and less concerned about protecting you and downright hostile to the idea of you doing it yourself. This is not a good thing, your body and mind are the most valuable things you are ever going to have and we must protect our rights to defend them. Therefore, when it comes to “shoves” you are on your own, they may not be “lawful” but what can you realistically do about it?

The main problem, from this legal perspective is the idea of “reasonable force”.  While you do have the right to defend yourself and not let people push you around, you do not have the right to use more force than necessary and in the context of “shoves” this can probably be interpreted as not using more force than is being used against you. “Shoves” are often perceived as so low on the force scale that finding a reasonable response can be frustratingly difficult to do.

This is where striking based self-defense systems have a real problem and another reason why they cannot adequately prepare you for reality and are forced to ignore it.  If you strike someone for pushing you, then you have to be prepared for a full blown fight, they may not have actually wanted to take it to the next level and fight but you have made it a major ego issue and now they feel they must fight. On the other hand, this may have been the plan from the start, by goading you to strike first they can now claim self-defense.  Moreover, if you actually manage to “take the person out” with your striking barrage then you may have opened yourself up to the legal ramifications of being the person who “struck first” and possibly injured the other party.  At this point the law enforcement bureaucracy may get involved.  Therefore, we can see that striking based self-defense can cause more problems than it solves and often leaves us in “no win” situations.

This leads to the “ignore it and it will go away” mind set. The most misunderstood and potentially dangerous problem with not being able to defuse a shoving confrontation is the likely hood for the aggressor to escalate the amount of force he is using.  Most people do not understand how often or why this happens; understanding it is simple if we understand the psychological motivations of the aggressor.

Basically, an aggressor with a high potential for violence will use the shoves as a “probe” or “test”.  He is in affect probing you for weakness and if you show enough of an inability or unwillingness to defend yourself he is much, much more likely to attack you.  Remember, no one “likes to fight” although many people would have you believe this.  However, many people do like to bully others and use violence but they are looking for an easy victim, a “soft target” if you will, they are definitely not looking for a person with the potential to hurt them back.

Therefore, they must go through a “selection process” to determine if the victim is “safe” to victimize or attack. For example, this is the identical process that the research shows most sexual assaults on women go through.  The rapist begins with low level intrusive touching to determine if the victim will resist him.  If she is sufficiently compliant he will escalate his aggressiveness until it becomes a full blown sexual assault. (Let me clarify the above, in Canada “sexual assault” is the near euphemistic legal term that replaced the term “rape” but that is what we were discussing here, a violent physical and emotional attack not someone grabbing your ass at the bar….

This kind of escalation of aggressive behavior is universally observed in both animal and human behavior. Therefore, you are going to see a lot of it and must be able to recognize these behaviors for what they are.  Think of a barking dog, it stays at a certain distance and barks at you, how you react can be the most determining factor in what that dog will do next. If you run away, the dog will run after you and possibly bite you but if you aggressively advance on the dog it may very well turn tail and run.

The dog does not want to “fight” it wants to be dominant.  For better or for worse humans behave the same way in the vast majority of cases. I have personally observed this basic human trait in countless situations that involved belligerent and aggressive males and have used it to defuse their aggression without having to take it to a physical level.  The aggressor may not even realize at a conscious level what he is doing when “probing” you, this can give you an advantage since it reveals his intentions early. 

Many people understand this at an instinctive or intuitive level but many may not and it is important to be clear that this is not just another unfounded opinion but is well documented and backed up by the facts. To return to the example of sexual assaults against women, case after case, study after study has shown the same thing, that the more you fight back the less likely the sexual assault is going to succeed.  I think this is important to emphasis because of that growing agenda that some elements of our society are pushing especially to children that they must not fight under any circumstances. It is yet another paradox of self-defense, that nothing stops a fight better than being willing and able to fight.

Therefore, you must not allow an aggressive person to begin pushing you (at this point you have already miss handled or misinterpreted the verbal phase that is certain to precede any physical contact. This means you have already given him or her psychological permission to increase their harassment from verbal to the lowest physical level-this sequence is as predictable as day following night.) The problem with trying to defuse things during the verbal phase, while it often works, particularly aggressive people may still begin pushing to test that verbal resolve because “anyone can talk”,(particularly if they perceive that they have a physical advantage).

With all this being understood, we can see that the difficult part is countering the shoves in a way that clearly sends the message that you are not a “soft target” without being overly aggressive or physical which can escalate the situation as well. It was this understanding that led me to develop and field test my “anti pushing” methodology. This methodology covers the entire force calibration concept and gives you a wide range of options which are perfectly suited to the situation. While based on the proven principles of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu these techniques are both a departure from the usual curriculum but also perfectly dove-tail with the classic methodology.