Self-Defense Training in Boston

Whilst self-defense is used colloquially to refer to any system that teaches a person how to physically defend themselves when attacked/assaulted, the term/concept really applies to a legal concept i.e., the right to defend yourself when assaulted within a framework of legal constraints e.g., a person must be in imminent danger, they must be able to demonstrate “innocence”, and they can’t use excessive force etc. These are important considerations to take into account as failing to do so could result in a criminal charge/conviction and/or possibly having to be the defendant in a civil case. In many self-defense cases in Boston and Massachusetts, it is left to the courts to decide if a self-defense claim is credible. Something that many people forget about making a claim of self-defense is that it is the admittance of using violence. The caveat being that it was necessary to do so, within the confines of the law. This is why personal safety/self-protection training is so important as it can avoid the need for physical interaction/escalation.

This means that effective self-defense training is ultimately about disengagement rather than about “winning” the fight. When a person is no longer in imminent danger, they will lose their claim of “self-defense” if they continue to fight. Many people don’t realize that once they disarm somebody of a weapon such as a knife or gun, they don’t automatically get to use that weapon against their assailant regardless of whatever that person’s intent was e.g., in an active-shooter situation, if the shooter has been subdued/controlled and is no longer a viable threat nobody has a right to shoot them, even though their intent was to kill everybody they encountered etc. Self-Defense doesn’t concern an individual’s perspective regarding what they see as “fair”.

Our Krav Maga training takes the legal framework within which a person must operate into account throughout all our training. We don’t teach using the philosophy of “it’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six”, because solutions to violence aren’t binary. The law doesn’t include provisions for what could have happened e.g., they could have had a gun, they could have had a knife etc. but instead takes into account the facts and evidence of the incident. With the amount of CCTV and camera phone footage which captures violent interactions, if involved in an incident, attempting to “speculate” on what could have happened can be extremely hard to defend e.g., if the other person’s hands were visible throughout the conflict/fight, a person’s claim that they thought they had a knife are far from credible etc.

The self-defense system we use/teach is Krav Maga. Originally a military system we teach a version which has been adapted for civilian use e.g., it contains many “break-away” style techniques, and solutions that are applicable for civilian contexts, such as a verbal dispute in a bar, versus a battlefield scenario etc. As well as our self-defense training we incorporate personal-safety/self-protection training into everything we teach i.e., it is far better to be able to predict, identity, and avoid violence than to deal with it physically. This is at the heart of both the regular Krav Maga classes we offer just North of Boston at our dedicated training facility as well as the corporate personal safety training we offer in Boston.