So how do we prevent this?
A lot of this is building the awareness.
So we have to understand what are the situations in which this can occur and
avoid those type of situations.
Another thing to do is to avoid making personal details available.
So if you're staying in a hostel or a hotel don't put your name on the door and
don't make this kind of information of who you are, and where your working, and
what your hours are, and what your movement is.
Try to keep this as a minimal.
And these are some common survival skills that you can put together for
yourself, and one of the ways you can do this is kind of doing what if situations.
Visualize yourself in various situations where you might be attacked or
might be compromised, and what can you do and how can I get out of that?
How did I get into it in the first place?
These are all things that you need to think through, what these
potential things are, and what's the right thing to do in these situations.
So as we mentioned before, your intuition is really powerful.
Trust that intuition, prepare yourself, practice your skills and
people survive attacks if they're prepared and they act with conviction.
This reduces your chances of being injured or even killed.
When a situation occurs, you know what you're going to do because you've
rehearsed it so many times already with your brain.
So here are some of the things that can commonly be done.
Active resistance is where we usually put our energy.
Drawing attention to yourself.
Screaming, shouting, whistling, alarms, fighting back,
throwing things, all of these things are effective.
In fact, some people have just said, throwing things and
then running as fast as you can may be your defense.
There are also areas that are sensitive.
You attack these, with your knees, with your arms, with your hands whatever you
have available, and that can at least gain time for you to get away.
And then finally you don't gain anything by staying around.
There are some situations where probably passive resistance may be effective.
If you know somebody very well and you feel like you have negotiating power on
them in some way then you may succeed then but
in most situations the actual resistance probably the most effective.
So another point is to get to a safe place as soon as you can.
Now, one of the things that's often suggested, is as you drive a long or
as you're moving along for some other purpose,
just keep an eye on the margins and say, if I had to escape from here,
if I had to be off the road, if I had to be off this path, where would I go?
What would be the safe place to go?
And if something happens to you, it's important to report this.
This is sometimes difficult to do emotionally and
otherwise, but unless there's an incident report with the police or
with the authorities, it's very hard to take action against this in the future.
And then finally, the point is don't accept any personal blame.
It's not your fault, that's not the way that you were thinking, or
you were dressing, or you were doing things.
That's not your fault so
don't go down that road thinking I might have brought this on myself and so forth.
That's not good thinking in these situations.