Three Decades of Watching the Wrong Conversation

I have spent decades studying crime. Not martial arts tournaments. Not fitness trends. Crime. How it happens. Why it happens. Who it happens to. And most importantly, what determines whether someone survives it.

And over those decades, I have watched the public conversation around women’s safety go through three phases, each one managing to miss the point in its own creative way.

First, we blamed the victim. What was she wearing? Why was she out so late? Why did she go there alone? As if a criminal’s decision to commit a crime was determined by a woman’s wardrobe. This phase was cruel, and thankfully, professional spaces have largely moved past it.

Then came the martial arts phase. Companies started booking karate instructors and kickboxing trainers for their women’s safety workshops. Women punched pads, learned combinations, posed for photographs, and went home feeling like they had accomplished something. The problem? Martial arts and crime survival have almost nothing in common. Martial arts operates within rules. Crime has no rules. Martial arts requires years of practice to be effective. Crime gives you seconds to respond. Martial arts does not teach you what happens in your brain when real fear hits. Crime exploits exactly that.

And now we have arrived at phase three. The gender phase. Companies no longer ask “What does your program cover?” or “How does your training handle the freeze response?” They ask: “Do you have a female instructor?”

At every phase, the conversation has been about everything except the crime. And as someone who has spent his career studying crime, I find that genuinely concerning.

What Criminals Actually Care About

Let me tell you what a criminal cares about when selecting a target. This is based on decades of studying criminal behaviour, victim accounts, and crime pattern analysis.

A criminal is looking for vulnerability. Not physical weakness necessarily, but psychological vulnerability. He is looking for someone who appears distracted, unaware, hesitant, or unlikely to resist. He is looking for someone who will freeze rather than act. He is looking for someone whose social conditioning will make her second-guess herself before responding.

Here is what a criminal does not care about:

• What the woman is wearing.
• Whether she knows how to throw a roundhouse kick.
• Whether her self-defense instructor was male or female.

These three things correspond exactly to the three phases of misdirection I described above. At every stage, we have been focusing on something the criminal does not even think about. And at every stage, we have been ignoring the things the criminal is actively exploiting.

“The criminal is studying psychology. We are debating the instructor’s gender. He is three steps ahead of us because we refuse to have the conversation that actually matters: how crime works.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

The Psychology That Actually Saves Lives

If I could get corporates to focus on just one thing, it would be this: the psychology of crime. Not the physical combat. Not the logistics of the workshop. The psychology.

Here is why.

Pre-Crime: Why Most Attacks Are Avoidable

The vast majority of crimes against women are preceded by identifiable warning signs. Criminals rarely attack without preparation. There is a selection process, a testing phase, an approach strategy. If a woman is trained to recognise these patterns, she can interrupt the crime before it happens. She can change her route, create distance, draw attention, or remove herself from the situation entirely.

This is not physical skill. This is psychological knowledge. And it is the single most effective form of self-defense that exists.

During-Crime: Why Physical Techniques Usually Fail

Here is a truth that most martial arts instructors will not tell you. In a real attack, fine motor skills deteriorate. Stress hormones flood the body. Heart rate spikes. Vision narrows. Complex techniques that were practised in a calm classroom simply do not execute under extreme stress.

What does work? Gross motor movements. Simple, instinctive actions. But even those require the brain to be functioning, which brings us to the real problem: the freeze response. When the brain perceives a life-threatening situation, it can effectively shut down the body’s ability to act. This is not cowardice. It is neuroscience. And unless training specifically addresses it with techniques for breaking through the freeze, no physical skill in the world will help.

Post-Crime: The Phase Nobody Teaches

What happens after the incident? How does a woman preserve evidence? What are her legal rights? Where does she go for help? How does she deal with the psychological aftermath? How does she prevent re-victimisation, especially in ongoing situations like domestic violence?

Almost no self-defense workshop covers this. And it is one of the most critical phases of the entire crime cycle.

None of these three areas, pre-crime, during-crime, or post-crime, requires a specific gender to teach. They all require specialised knowledge, communication skill, and professional sensitivity. And those qualities are found in the instructor’s training and experience, not in their biology.

The Domestic Violence Test

Whenever I hear the argument that women need a female instructor to feel comfortable, I think about domestic violence. Because domestic violence is one of the most common and devastating forms of violence against women, and it exposes the weakness of the comfort argument completely.

A woman in a domestic violence situation is dealing with a man. Every day. In her own home. There is no option to request a female aggressor. There is no option to avoid male interaction. There is no comfort zone available.

She needs the ability to assess danger in the presence of a threatening male. She needs to manage her fear response while engaging with a male who has power over her. She needs to make decisions under pressure while facing someone who is physically larger, emotionally volatile, and potentially violent.

If her self-defense training was conducted in an environment carefully purged of male presence, it did not prepare her for this reality. It may have made her feel good in the moment, but it did not build the specific resilience she needs for the specific danger she faces.

A professional male instructor, operating in a safe and respectful classroom, provides something a female instructor cannot: the opportunity to practise engagement, assertiveness, and confidence in the presence of a male figure. That practice is not incidental. It is training.

“A woman facing domestic violence cannot choose to interact only with women. She faces a violent man every day in her own home. If her training never asked her to engage with a respectful male instructor in a safe room, how has it prepared her for an aggressive male in an unsafe room?”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

The Legal and Ethical Framework

For those who need the formal perspective, here it is.

Specifying gender as a requirement for a self-defense instructor, when gender is not essential to the job, conflicts with the following.

• Indian Constitution: Articles 14, 15(1), 16(1), and 16(2) on equality and non-discrimination.
• Equal Remuneration Act, Section 5: Prohibition of gender discrimination in recruitment.
• Code on Wages, Section 3: Prohibition of gender-based discrimination.
• POSH Act: Mandates quality training, not gender-specific trainers. The Act opposes gender stereotyping.
• BFOQ Standards: Gender is only a valid requirement when essential to the job. Knowledge-based instruction does not qualify.
• DEI Policies: Most corporate DEI frameworks explicitly prohibit gender-based discrimination in hiring and vendor engagement.
• ILO Convention 111: Prohibits sex-based occupational discrimination.
• CEDAW: Opposes gender stereotyping. Comfort-based gender requirements are a form of stereotyping.
• ESG Standards: Non-discrimination is assessed under the Social pillar.
• Companies Act and SEBI Guidelines: Fairness and non-discrimination in governance and procurement.

This is not about making anyone anxious. It is about helping corporates see that their well-intentioned decision has dimensions they may not have considered.

What I Want Corporates to Ask Instead

Stop asking: “Is your instructor female?”

Start asking:

1. What is your expertise in criminal behaviour and crime psychology?
2. How does your program address the freeze response?
3. Do you cover pre-crime, during-crime, and post-crime phases?
4. Is your training based on real crime data and scenarios?
5. How do you address the social conditioning patterns that prevent women from defending themselves?
6. What is your approach to building genuine confidence versus surface-level comfort?
7. Can you share verifiable client outcomes and references?
8. How do you create a respectful and professional learning environment?

These questions will lead you to the right instructor. Every single time. And the right instructor is the one who will actually keep your employees safe, not the one who checks a demographic box on a procurement form.

The Focus Must Return to Crime

We have spent too many years looking at everything except the actual problem. The victim’s clothing. The martial arts style. The instructor’s gender. All distractions from the only thing that should matter: the crime.

Crime is the enemy. Not discomfort. Not unfamiliarity. Not the presence of a male professional. Crime.

When we finally focus on that, we start making decisions that actually protect women. And that is all any of us should want.

“I am not asking corporates to stop caring about their women employees. I am asking them to care more effectively. Care enough to look past the easy, comfortable decision and make the one that will genuinely keep their people safe. That is the highest form of care there is.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph