How We Keep Missing the Point

For as long as the conversation around women’s safety has existed, we have managed to make it about everything except the one thing it should be about: the crime.

We have made it about clothing. About curfews. About what women should and should not do. About martial arts and kickboxing. About the colour of the training room walls. And most recently, about whether the instructor standing at the front of the room is a man or a woman.

At every turn, the spotlight has been pointed at something peripheral. Something that feels relevant but, when examined honestly, has no bearing on whether a woman will survive a violent encounter.

Meanwhile, the actual crime, the way it works, the psychology behind it, the patterns that make it predictable and therefore preventable, sits quietly in the corner, unexamined and unaddressed.

This post is about redirecting the spotlight. About putting it where it belongs. On the crime. Because when we finally focus there, everything else starts to make sense.

What a Criminal Sees When He Looks at a Woman

Let me share something that I wish every woman and every corporate decision-maker understood.

When a criminal is scanning for a potential target, he is not looking at what she is wearing. He is not wondering whether she took a karate class. And he certainly is not thinking about whether her self-defense instructor was male or female.

He is evaluating four things.

Awareness

Is she paying attention to her surroundings? Or is she distracted by her phone, her thoughts, her conversation? A distracted person is a vulnerable person. They do not see danger approaching. They do not process warning signs. They are already half-defeated before anything happens.

Confidence

How does she carry herself? Does she walk like someone who knows where she is going and who she is? Or does she look uncertain, hesitant, lost? Criminals read body language instinctively. Confidence signals difficulty. Uncertainty signals opportunity.

Isolation

Is she alone? Is she in a poorly lit area? Is she separated from potential help? Criminals need privacy to operate. They look for situations where the target is cut off from assistance.

Compliance Likelihood

This is the most important one, and it is the most misunderstood. The criminal is assessing whether this person will comply. Will she freeze? Will she submit? Will social conditioning prevent her from screaming, fighting back, or causing a scene? The criminal is betting on yes. And in the majority of cases, because of how women are socialised, he wins that bet.

Notice what is absent from this list. Clothing. Physical fitness. Martial arts training. The gender of the instructor. None of these enter the criminal’s calculation. He is operating on psychology. And unless the training addresses psychology, it is operating on a completely different playing field from the crime it is supposed to prepare for.

“The criminal is playing a psychology game. We keep trying to win it with karate. That is like bringing a textbook to a chess match. You need to be playing the same game. And the game is psychology.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

The Three Phases That Every Woman Needs to Understand

I have been teaching this framework for decades, and I continue to be amazed at how rarely it is addressed in mainstream self-defense programs. Crime operates in three distinct phases, and genuine preparedness requires understanding all three.

Phase One: Pre-Crime

This is the phase where most personal safety is actually determined, and it is the phase most commonly ignored in training.

Pre-crime covers everything that happens before a physical attack. The criminal’s target selection process. The approach strategy. The testing behaviour, where the criminal tests the target’s boundaries and compliance through small, seemingly harmless interactions before escalating. Awareness skills that allow a woman to identify danger early. Boundary-setting techniques that interrupt the criminal’s approach sequence. Environmental awareness that helps a woman position herself strategically.

A woman who is trained in pre-crime awareness will avoid the vast majority of dangerous situations before they ever escalate. She will recognise the warning signs, trust her instincts, create distance, and remove herself from the situation. No punches needed. No kicks required. Just knowledge, awareness, and timely action.

Phase Two: During-Crime

This is the phase that most self-defense workshops focus on exclusively. And even here, most get it wrong.

The during-crime phase is not about performing martial arts techniques. It is about managing extreme fear, breaking through the freeze response, making decisions when cognitive function is impaired, and creating opportunities to escape.

Under real stress, fine motor skills deteriorate. Complex combinations become impossible. Heart rate spikes. Vision narrows. Hearing distorts. What works in this state is simple, gross motor movements that do not require calm thinking or precise execution. And even those movements require the brain to be functioning, which is why freeze response management is the foundation of during-crime training.

The goal during a real attack is never to win a fight. It is always to create enough time and space to escape. This is a fundamentally different mindset from martial arts, where the goal is to defeat the opponent. Self-defense is escape. Martial arts is engagement. Confusing the two gets people hurt.

Phase Three: Post-Crime

This is the forgotten phase. Almost no self-defense workshop covers it. And its absence leaves women dangerously unprepared for what comes after an incident.

Post-crime covers immediate safety actions: getting to a safe location, contacting help, communicating what happened. It covers evidence preservation: what to do and what not to do to protect physical evidence. It covers legal knowledge: what are the woman’s rights under the POSH Act, the Indian Penal Code, and other applicable laws? Where can she file a complaint? What protections are available?

It also covers psychological recovery. Understanding that reactions like guilt, shame, fear, anger, confusion, and numbness are normal trauma responses. Knowing when and how to access professional support. And critically, developing strategies for preventing re-victimisation, especially in ongoing situations like domestic violence or workplace harassment, where the danger is not a single event but a repeated pattern.

“If your self-defense training starts and ends with the physical confrontation, it is covering the narrowest sliver of the crime cycle. Pre-crime is where prevention happens. Post-crime is where recovery happens. Miss either one, and you have left your employees prepared for the least likely scenario and unprepared for everything else.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

Why the Gender of the Instructor Does Not Matter

Now that we have established what self-defense is actually about, let us revisit the question of the instructor’s gender.

Pre-crime awareness requires knowledge of criminal behaviour patterns, target selection psychology, and social conditioning dynamics. None of these are gender-dependent skills.

During-crime response requires expertise in fear physiology, freeze response management, gross motor response training, and escape strategy. None of these are gender-dependent skills.

Post-crime recovery requires understanding of legal frameworks, evidence preservation protocols, psychological trauma responses, and support resource navigation. None of these are gender-dependent skills.

At every single phase of the crime cycle, what matters is the instructor’s knowledge, experience, communication ability, and professional sensitivity. Not their gender.

A male instructor with deep expertise in crime psychology will produce better outcomes than a female instructor with a background in kickboxing. And a female instructor with deep expertise in crime psychology will produce better outcomes than a male instructor with a background in karate. The variable is not gender. The variable is always expertise.

The Domestic Violence Reality Check

Whenever the comfort argument comes up, I think about domestic violence. Because domestic violence is one of the most common, most devastating, and most overlooked forms of violence against women. And it exposes the weakness of the comfort-based approach completely.

A woman facing domestic violence cannot choose a comfortable aggressor. She cannot request a female abuser. She lives with a violent man. She shares space with him. She may share children with him. She has to talk to him, negotiate with him, manage his moods, and protect herself, every single day.

The skills she needs most are: the ability to assess threat levels in real time, the courage to set boundaries with a dangerous male, the capacity to plan and execute a safety strategy, the strength to act even when terrified, and the knowledge of her legal options and support resources.

Every single one of these skills can be practised and developed in a training environment where a professional, respectful male instructor is present. In fact, the presence of a male instructor creates a unique opportunity to practise engagement, assertiveness, and boundary-setting in the presence of a male figure, within a safe and controlled setting. This practice is not a side benefit. It is directly relevant training for one of the most common danger scenarios women face.

A training environment that eliminates all male presence does not prepare women for this reality. It avoids it. And avoidance, in the context of domestic violence, can be the difference between safety and continued harm.

“A woman who has practised speaking firmly, setting boundaries, and holding her ground in the presence of a respectful male instructor is better prepared for every real-world scenario she might face than a woman who has only ever trained in a space carefully cleared of men. Training should mirror reality. And reality includes men.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph

The Legal Dimension

For corporates, the legal perspective is also worth understanding. Specifying gender as a requirement for a trainer, when gender is not essential to the service, raises questions under multiple legal and policy frameworks.

• Indian Constitution (Articles 14, 15, 16): Equality, non-discrimination, and equal opportunity in employment.
• Equal Remuneration Act (Section 5) and Code on Wages (Section 3): No gender discrimination in recruitment for similar work.
• POSH Act: Requires quality training. Does not specify trainer gender. The Act opposes gender stereotyping.
• BFOQ: Gender as a job requirement is valid only when essential to the job. Teaching is not one of those cases.
• DEI Policies: Most corporate policies prohibit gender-based discrimination in all hiring and procurement.
• ILO Convention 111: Prohibits sex-based occupational discrimination. Ratified by India.
• CEDAW: Opposes gender stereotyping. Comfort-based gender requirements are stereotyping. Ratified by India.
• ESG Standards: Non-discrimination assessed under the Social pillar.
• Companies Act, 2013 and SEBI Guidelines: Fairness and non-discrimination in governance and procurement.

The legal landscape consistently says the same thing: gender should not be used as a professional filter when it has no bearing on professional competence.

What Actually Matters

Let me bring this back to the simplest possible truth.

Self-defense is about surviving crime. Crime does not care about the victim’s clothing. Crime does not care about the martial arts style taught in the workshop. Crime does not care about the instructor’s gender.

Crime cares about psychology. About awareness. About vulnerability. About compliance. About whether the target will freeze or act.

Training that addresses these factors saves lives. Training that focuses on peripheral details, however well-intentioned those details may be, does not.

Choose your self-defense program based on whether it addresses the crime. Not based on whether it addresses the optics. Your employees are counting on you to know the difference.

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“Self-defense was never supposed to be about gender, or about martial arts, or about what anyone is wearing. It was always supposed to be about one thing: giving a human being the knowledge and the inner strength to survive a crime. The moment we lost sight of that, we started failing the very people we are trying to help. It is time to refocus.”

– Specialist Franklin Joseph