Why aren’t we teaching women self-defence?

Women all know that queasy shock of hyper-awareness when a man on the street or the Tube or bus begins to behave in a threatening way. It is a moment in which an action plan is hatched and, in the vast majority of cases, that action plan is to try and disappear. Walk, do not make eye contact, say not a word and hope for the best. If he has you captive, for instance on a Tube carriage, ignore, ignore, ignore. Grimly stare ahead. The goal, after all, is to escape, not to inflame. But all too often this is not effective.

The reality is that women feel afraid because we know three things: we know we don’t know how to fight. We know we are physically weaker than any would-be attacker. And we know that men know all this. We therefore understand that if we are attacked, it is entirely the attacker’s whim whether to rape and kill us, and that all we can do is try to be some tricky combination of neutral and pitiful.