|
The ethics of teaching knife techniques
I have just finished reading up on the Internet with regards to the “Umali” case, in which a bouncer was criminally stabbed in the femoral artery by a knife combat student and died. In reading about this I also read James Keating’s thought provoking article, in which he criticises those teachers that teach their art with a slant or orientation towards stabbing first and worrying about legal consequences later.
He raises many interesting and important points. How can you make sure that your students or even the people who learn your method from a book or DVD, do not misuse it in a moment of drunken stupidity? Well, as illustrated by Umali, and in a couple of similar incidents, it seems that you can’t.
Keating suggests a training methodology which is probably appropriate to day-to-day life in the USA and Europe, at least from a legal perspective. Then again, what happens when a confrontation it’s not just a drunken disagreement? What happens when some drug addict pushes a gun in your face or holds a blade against your neck? Are you supposed to think of anything other than eliminating the threat?
If an instructor of knife combatives teaches a female student Piper as it is used by the criminals down here and some moron tries to rape her and she defends herself and in so doing kills him, tough shit. Personally I feel that to be a fitting ending to rapists, paedophiles and suchlike. If, however, she uses it on a boyfriend in a heated argument, then it would obviously have been better not to have taught her at all.
What if it’s a date rape, what if a young man from a respectable family, with no criminal record, no witnesses present, decides to take what is not on offer? Now that would be a legal nightmare. Rape is a horrifically prevalent crime in South Africa. Charlize Theron did an advert for television a few years ago which offended the fragile egos of many South African men and caused a great deal of controversy: “Real men don’t rape…(pause)..A pity that there are so few real men in South Africa.” (What a woman !)
Should one then perhaps be teaching techniques that do not work immediately or that have less than an immediate and possibly fatal impact? Techniques which may fail at just the crucial moment, leaving the instructor’s student with a last thought: “Guro/sensei/ teacher, why did the stuff you taught me not work?”
Not a chance. As for getting her to think first, yes, obviously there should be a mental “Go/ Don’t Go” switch, but too much thinking in a life or death situation can be bad for your health.
All in all this is a terrible and very real dilemma. With crime and terrorism as prevalent as they are, I would have to go with teaching as effective techniques as possible, though. As for Mr. Keating’s comments on the unacceptability of using a knife on an unarmed attacker, I would certainly not be in favour of that. Unless we have a situation of a hundred kilo rapist lying on top of a fifty kilo woman, or if a little old man is being severely beaten up by several unarmed criminals. So, in the end, there are unfortunately no easy answers and all we can hope to do is to instill in our students a sense of morality, which will probably not take unless it is congruent with the morality they absorbed in their youth from their family, peers and community and hope that when it comes to the crunch, they do what is right.
In Cape Town this is not quite as big a dilemma as it appears to be in civilised First-World countries, as we are unfortunately fighting a losing battle against crime. So, as teachers of Piper we need to choose: What we teach may save our students lives or it may be misused. As things stand down here the former is far more likely to happen than the latter.
|
