School safety, security, and violence prevention resource

It doesn’t take much to be a great Safety Coach, be you a parent or teacher. All it takes is to give a child your time and attention. If you are a parent or a teacher considering being a Safety Coach, why, hell, by definition you care. Care a lot, so, like I said, it’s a cinch. Relative to the safety and survival of your children, I believe being a Safety Coach is more important than sending them to a skilled, professional but emotionally distant trainer, like, err, me. Trust me on this: What you do, say and share with the youngster can contribute tons more than what I might teach them in a two to eight hour course.

Parents/Teachers/Coaches, by playing Tactical Games with their kids, can make the school and neighborhood environments so much less of an Ideal Hunting Ground for sexual predators by maximizing your children’s Survival Capacity by participating with the child in these loving activities. By doing this, I believe, you will grow children who know they are loved, which research shows plays a significant role in the safe return to the school and home of children who have been approached by dangerous predators intent on abducting, molesting, and most likely, killing them.

Yep. What I said is true. Parents/Courage Coaches should inculcate the mantra that the child is loved and he or she must always remember that. In an encounter with a predator, he/she at the core must do everything he/she can to return to the family. Corny as it sounds, children who survive an encounter recount this image as central to their survival.

The ubiquitous Time and Space Continuum forces me to move on to the title of this post. Safety Coaches certainly are capable of coming up with their own ways of teaching survival skills, but, if I can, I have a few suggestions on how to promote the necessary survival skills, some of which are:

Ø Tactical Breathing

Ø Verbalization

Ø Tactical Movement (movement, breathing and verbalization “unfreezes” a panicking child who may have frozen like a deer in the headlights when attacked)

Ø Thinking Under Survival Stress.

Ø Fighting (A key principle Safety Coaches must stress over and over is to Stay in the Initial Crime Scene. Therefore, the term “fighting” is tactical and includes anything that extends the amount of time the child stays in the original environment and increases the possibility that witnesses will intervene).

Ø Running (is an extension of “Tactical Movement.” Running includes maintaining eye contact with the predator; serpentine movement; using barricades; and people and places a child should run to

WHAT IF GAME. Play this mind-building game with this caveat in mind: Keep it fun. Don’t use frightening words and images, if possible. In the next post I will suggest a few “What If Questions.” Keep this fairly brief, maybe 3 or 4 What If situations. Write the questions out ahead of time. There is no right or wrong answer. Obviously some answers are better than others, but each one should get your support. No matter the answer, though, you should discuss it with the child, including praise for how he/she came up with the answer, and, of course, some tactful suggestions for the child to consider. You can think of your own questions, perhaps like: Okay, Pete, a nice looking older man stops his car as you are walking home from school. He asks you to come over and look at a picture of his puppy that he lost. He even shows you a leash. What do you do, Pete? The value of this and other similar games is that it inculcates these scenarios in the child’s mind and implants tactics that he may rely on in real situations.

DYNAMIC SIMULATIONS/SCENARIOS. Scenarios, when played out correctly, are easily the most effective ways to teach your children attack countermeasures in a fun and safe environment. Children who have survived attacks have reported that their parents – and, in one case, a teacher – role played different scenarios similar to their real-life attack with them. Once again, make sure your scenarios or role plays stress movement, talking at the Bad Guy, eye contact, and, if necessary, fighting.

Many scenarios should feature situations that should not require fighting. If an adult, who is not on the child’s Safe List (Safety Coaches need to talk with the child about people who are always safe, like the parents, if this is true and some relatives, if it is absolutely a fact that they are safe. Any other adult who gives the child The Creeps, or who simply is not on the Safe List, should trigger tactics of disengagement) approaches on foot, or perhaps in a car should trigger (in the scenario and/or real life) the child evacuating the area and telling the parents when he or she arrives home (and/or the teacher in a school situation).

Times up. Next post. More games, et al. Until then, Stay Safe.

Hammer

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