Inside The Mind Of A Sexual Predator

so does he. The hair prickles on the back of your neck and you quickly cross the road, trying to put some distance between you. It doesn't work. He has crossed the road as well, and now he's closing in. What do you do? Keep walking and hope for the best, stop and wait for him to walk past. Just ignore the whole city and tell yourself to stop being so paranoid, or actually accept that you might be in danger and do something constructive, something that studies have proven could very

well save your life. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. If you were to ask Brent Sanders, doing something constructive is the only answer to that scenario you just heard. In his experience, this situation is not

likely to be anything other than sexually motivated. Brent is a former police officer who was deployed in riot control and did extensive work investigating rapes and studying the methods and psychology of rapists. For the last thirty years, he has dedicated his career to sex crime education. He has provided more than a million people with the tools and mindset to both protect themselves in a violent or escalating

situation or avoid one altogether. He also wants his students, who are mainly young women and girls, to know how the law works, to know what the legal definitions for consent and drunkenness are, and to know where to physically strike someone if you find yourself in danger. Brent lives and breathes this world. When he's not teaching high school kids about life choices, he's hosting his own podcast, Crime Insiders. Brent joins us, Now, Brent, take me back to the

start of your career. Was being a cop everything you thought it would be?

which is wild. It is it's hard to believe that now, But that also sort of coincided with more awareness around criminal profiling, and that's sort of what put me on a little bit of a pathway to learning more about that. And it was a bit of a sliding door moment where I was approached having done a talk on profiling and sexual crime here in Australia, I was approached by a woman from the Education department. This is in nineteen ninety five, this is a long time ago. I remember.

She came up with this big sort of Manila envelope. Wasn't even much in the way of emailing and things such as that, and she said, look, we're looking to team up with somebody with your background who could possibly help us put some courses together to go into schools and raise awareness around sexual crime, consent that type of thing. And she sort of gave me this very heavy envelope and I took it away. I had a look at and I thought, you know, that maybe something I could

contribute to. But that was sort of the springboard from taking some leave from the police. I did my last talk on sexual crime this morning to two hundred boys at a boys school in Blacktown. So when I started, weirdly the education part only wanted me to talk to young women, not boys, which to me was always quite bizarre. And then trying to get into schools as a male police officer at that time, I came up against a heap of resistance from groups who felt that they didn't

want a male talking to females about this stuff. I had situations where I had people physically trying to stop me get into a hall to speak to girls because I was a male. So you know, there was a little bit of resistance there, but I knew where that was coming from. It was coming from a good place. It wasn't against me so much. It was more like, well, it hadn't been done before. We didn't have ex coppers walking into schools and speaking to students about sexual crime.

So when I first started doing it, a lot of schools weren't interested. They just wouldn't touch it. And the first school that got me in in Australia was actually a private girls school in North Sydney, and because they are a little bit more autonomous where the state schools were going, well where have you been before? And anyway, that school that got me in, I've been back there

every year for twenty nine years. So after a couple of years, the Education department said, oh, we can't just have you speaking to girls, and I'm going, well, yeah, okay, probably smart. So I started speaking to boys. I speak to as many young men as I do young women.

So when I started talking to young boys, I wanted to talk about the same content, but I also wanted there to be a specific difference, and so I wanted to talk to the boys around choice, consequence, around peer pressure, around heartbeat decisions, how they can change your life, and a little bit of that was sort of going back to some of the troubles I got into as a young guy. So I spoke to boys about that. Now

more frequently they're combined, which I think is good. I just ticked over a million students that have gone through my talk, so I speak to about thirty thousand, forty thousand a year, as many young men as young women.

They know the slogans around an intimate exchange requires consent. It's like, well, yep, they all know that. But then if you say, okay, tell me what consent is, how do you know you have it? How do you know you've provided it? What if a friend comes to talk to you about something that they've gone through and they're sort of asking you, do you think I consented or didn't I? Where are you drawing your answers from on that?

So leaving the police, I thought the last thing that students would want to hear in my seminars is legal stuff. It's ninety nine percent of the questions I get are legal questions, and it gives clarity for them. So we look at a term, say, for example, like consent, then I break it into its three legal components, age, effects of our colon drugs, and whether the permission was given freely.

So we put the spotlight on those three. But I go from defining what it is to running it through real life scenarios for them and giving them really easy checkpoints around it. So rather than assuming that because all year eleven, year twelve students know a drunk person can't consent, well, that doesn't mean they know what the test is legally. They've got no idea what the test is. So they know the slogan, but they don't really know what it means.

So I explain to them how it's defined legally. Then I give them the practical application of that in a party environment or something like that. So I'm hoping that they can walk out with these key things around in that instance around consent. Consent is a very complex thing, but my job is to simplify it but still have application to the law. Talking about things like sexual intercourse without consent. I get disclosures every week, and it's usually

young women. The bulk of them say to me, look, I didn't actually know that what happened to me was a criminal offense or what the offense was until I heard all these definitions. Simple stuff like the term sexual intercourse. I mean, they all have heard the term, but the definition that they have at high school comes from a

biology textbook which bears no resemblance to the law. So just giving that piece of information, that opens up a whole lot of Oh my goodness, I've been through this, but I didn't know that when I went through that it fell into that legal category. A really common question I get speaking to young women is what if somebody does something to me sexually without my consent, but it

doesn't go as far as intercourse. Now, people know that's wrong, people know that that shouldn't happen, But respectfully, most people would struggle to tell you what that offense is and what the ingredients are of it. That's the most common disclosure I get, particularly in co ed schools, often young women coming forward after my talk saying I had no idea of that unlawful sexual touching, stuff that's happened to

me heaps without getting the malodrum about it. Each time someone does that in New South Wales carries a five year in prisonment term. I've had young women come forward say oh, that's happened to me every day at school this term.

to nineteen ninety five to today. But what we do have, as you quite rightly point out, there's a lot more knowledge, and you know people can access all of this online. That can be good bad because you don't know how reliable the information is that they're getting courses going into schools currently talking about consent things which are appalling. So

there's a lot of misinformation out there. I come from that policing background, and I've done this for a long long time, so I don't go outside of those rails. I think there is no doubt that we are seeing an increase in reporting, but I think that's indicative of an increase in people becoming more aware. Statistics would suggest there's no massive increase in incidences.

but we're never going to stop it completely. In my book, I put forward a lot of different strategies and things such as that based on the psychology of the type of offender that you're up against. I don't do that anymore.

And the reason I don't do it anymore is because I've always walked this thin line as a male presenting on the stuff anyway, as a next police officer, you know, I've always been a very very easy target for people to push back against this, you know, and that target became even bigger in more recent times because, in the eyes of many, I had the audacity to share strategies with young women to help them get out of these situations.

So I don't do it anymore now. The downside to that is that might ideologically make some people feel better about themselves because they've stopped this police officer going into schools and teaching strategies the downside is I taught a strategy for probably twenty five years to young women on how to get out of a date rape situation, and I never ever had one person contact me to tell

me that that strategy had failed. Ever. But I don't teach it anymore because I got so much pushback more recently going into schools about teaching strategy, and that was then victim blaming. So I'm supportive of all of this stuff, but I know also working at the coal Face, that some of this stuff, even if it's done with good intent, the end result is detrimental to those who I'm trying to help see.

So sometimes the best thing to do is the opposite to what we're told. See, guys aren't told to do that. Guys are told if someone fronts up to you monst your wallet, you'd stand your ground, you puff your chest out. Well, I've been in more physical confrontations and most blokes have had hot dinners, and I wouldn't do that, So I would never encourage someone to do that. Now, when we flick that over to sexual crime, why is my message different?

Because the psychology of the person who selects you as a young woman to commit a sexual offense against you, the stranger offender, he is a totally different psychological study than the person who confronts me. See, I look like i'd fight back. So if I do that, I'm actually doing what they're anticipating. Nobody is going to confront me my size and think that I'm going to curl up on the ground and with my hands in there. They think I'm going to fight back, so I to empower

them by not doing that. Now, if we look at the psychology of offender who selects you, and this is not an indictment on you, it's a reflection on why you're selected. You're selected by a sex offender because he believes, because you're female, you won't fight back. So you've got to start working from that psychology. So, on the one hand, you're quite right. There's been a generational message to girls and women handed down from their mums, which were handed

down from their mums. So now we're back over one hundred years that the worst thing you could possibly do against that unknown sexual offender, who might I add as a very rare form of sexual crime, but it's something that occupies the minds of a lot of people because it brings to life what we see in TV in the movies. Ninety nine point nine percent of sexual offenders that are depicted through those services are strangers, even though

they make up a tiny percentage of sexual crime. But I get that every woman I've ever met in my life has a desire to know what would you add actually do in that situation. So my approach has always been, Okay, well, let's look at the psychology of it. I get them to imagine, say, walking home from school on their own, car drives past slowly. Lone male offender in the car, you know, looks at the young woman, pulls up twenty minutes away, gets out of the car, which is making

the young woman feel afraid. And I get to the point of saying, this guy runs out of the car and he grabs you, and he's taking you back towards the car, and I say, what I want you to do is I want you to picture yourself in that situation, at that moment yelling and screaming at the top of your voice and physically attacking your attacker, and then I stop it there. And the most common reaction I've got over the years of doing that is the girls will laugh.

The laughter is the thought that they would actually see themselves fighting a back against a man attacker. It's like, yeah, right, as if you do that. So this is where we work from, right, because the way the girls are reacting is not through the experience of having been in the situation. They're reacting to their conditioning. So in any conflict situation you or I find ourselves in, we're not really responding to the situation. We've carried into the situation our conditioning.

If you're trained to do the right thing, that's brilliant. If you're trained to do the wrong thing, that's not great. So, okay, this guy had hold of you, dragging in toowards the car. If you start yelling and screaming fight back, what would happen to the guy? What would he become? And they all like or get more angry, So there's our first barrier. Next thing I say is if the guy does get more angry because of how you respond, will that increase

or decrease the likelihood of him physically hurting you. Now they're also a little increase. It's obvious he's an aggressive, angry person and he's violent. He's going to become more violent. Then the third thing I says, if you respond in a way that you believe will make this guy more angry and that will increase the lightlihood of you getting hurt, would you say that the situation for you as a result of that response is going to get better or worse?

That will say, well, worse. So that just explains why so many don't fight back. All I've got them to do is to tell me what they've been conditioned to believe. Now, interestingly, if you look at any studies on this, the success rate of women yelling and screaming and fighting back against unarmed sex offenders is over ninety percent. You couldn't find

a study that would dispute that. All the research, all the study, all the psychology provides the totally different information and knowledge than conditioning, because where do people get their conditioning from? TV? Movies? So what I do is I'll say, okay, let's break this down. When that guy drives past you and sees you, why does he stop the car and

get out? And sometimes I'll say, do you reckon? If I was walking down the street, that guy would stop and confront me, and they'll laugh, of course, not what do I look like I do? Or you'd look like you'd fight back. So it's interesting here, isn't it. They're saying the reason he'll drive away from you is you look like you'll defend yourself. The reason he selects them is they look like they won't and then they're told

not to. You can just see these lights going on like this, Hang on, I've been sold a bit of a lemon here, you know. I take them into the mind of the offender, and I said that offender's driving around a car looking for an ideal target. This is what they say when you interview them. You know, I'm looking for somebody who will follow the script that I've written for them, so he will select only somebody who

he believes will offer no resistance. And I'll say something like with the sex offenders I've interviewed that I've written books about and what have you. If he had a crystal ball on the dashboard of his car and he drove past you, and he looked into the crystal ball, and he could see how you would respond if he saw you yelling, screaming, running, fighting back. Every single offender I have ever interviewed keep on driving. But he doesn't see that. He sees you as being somebody who will

probably submit. Now, these girls and women are told that's the safest option. Now, it's an option if a guy produces a weapon police are trained to submit to talking about. But sex offenders in Australia hardly ever carry weapons. So it's breaking all that down. And it's not actually even me telling the audience what they should and shouldn't do. It's just presenting them with information that they didn't have. So you've got four options when that guy jumps out

of the car. You can be submissive. That gives you no chance. You can yell and scream. That'll work probably fifty percent of the time. If you combine yelling and screaming with physical confrontation, your success rates so high you'd be hard pressed finding anyone who's done it who hasn't got away.

you get to somewhere where there's people. Because these guys are terrified. They're terrified to getting caught, absolutely paranoid to getting caught, and they're totally unprepared for anything other than submission. So running is the best option. But we have to accept that there are some circumstances where young women have said I was grabbed, I couldn't run, It wasn't an option. If running is not available, the next best option, well,

what is it? Submission? That would be disputed by every study ever done on rape psychology as a strategy that anything more than make the situation worse. So anything is better than that.

written about a serial rapist. He's the first one ever studied. And as I read through that book, there were things jumping off the page at me, because they're the same as if I sat down and interviewed a sex offender today. One of the classic quotes from him is he was asked, how many women do you believe you've attacked in your lifetime? And he said, oh, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. So I committed my kim my first rate when I was sixteen, So I remember that one like it was yesterday.

I remember everything about it. He said. Since then, some days I won't attack any girls and women. Some days I might attacked two or three. Then he was asked about those that he attacked, those that he didn't, and stuff, and he basically in one of the statements he said, I can't tell you how many girls and women I've selected. He said, what I can tell you of all the women I selected, the only ones who I didn't rate

were the ones who fought back. Now, there wouldn't have been too many women who would have been told to do anything other than to do exactly what this guy wants. Following his arrest, he said he was killing his victims. The only ones I ran away from were the ones who fought back then you come forward, like you say. Joseph Thompson. Joseph Thompson was a New Zealand offender who I profiled. He was an offender in his thirties or nearly.

All of his targets were young school girls. So he was asked in an interview why do you attack so many school girls? And he just he shrugged his shoulder and says, oh, because school girls don't fight back. What do you think I picked school girls? You look at some of these other offenders that I've worked with, and they all make these same comments. There's no exception. Now, we can't say with absolute certainty what will happen every time one of these type offenders attacks every one of

their targets. But what we can do is look at all the studies, all the research from fifty odd years ago, nearly sixty years ago coming forward, and you won't find any much in the way discrepancy. Here. You mentioned Ted Bundy. The woman who gave evidence against Ted Bundy was the only one who survived.

again time probably permits us from gameless too deeply. It's because the word no challenges his belief that he was going to get what he thinks he's entitled to get. Yeah, And so if you keep saying no, it can increase the aggression in that scenario. And I get that. The thing in a date rape, though, and behind it is a belief that he believes within himself that you'll probably change your mind. See that is not a psychology present with a serial sex offender. He doesn't care less for you.

That's not on his radar. The date rapist guy, he's the word no. It's not ful no. And when that leads to aggression. It's because he thinks he's entitled to put pressure on you to get you to stop saying no and to say what yes. So when he hears yes, what happens to aggression? Will it increase or decrease? It'll decrease because he's one, right, So it's that psychology playing a part again there. So now he thinks he's one.

Now he's calmed down. You're in a much better situation to get from where you are to somewhere safer now that his defenses have been lowered. And so the component there is I don't say you don't say no. You say no, and you keep saying no until such time as you're like full, this is actually getting worse and I'm not going to get out of this saying no. Well, if saying no's making them angry, saying yes is the opposite to no. Saying yes can often make the angry

guy here. Oh hang on, listen, listen, listen. She's keen. She's keen. Pull back, pull back what you've won. So then often comes a oh sorry, sorry, sorry, yeah I got a bit aggressive there. Yeah. Yeah, Now you're in a position where you've built yourself a good platform to get from where you are to somewhere safe.

get a mention unconsent. Law consent says for you to consent, you must give your permission or change your mind freely without being subjected to any form of threats, force, violence, coercional manipulation. So that strategy is employed as a result of saying no and being subjected to what threats? Of course?

all misogynists, you're all suffering from tosk at masculine. So listen to me, because I'll get up on the walkout. Because most young men I've met in my life a decent human beings, most of them, but some of them aren't. But you can't treat all of them like they're bad. So you've got to have respet back for the audience when you're talking to them. And if you do that, then they come forward and they going, oh, this is good. No one's ever told us this, no one's ever approached

it from this perspective. And one of the things I said today, I said, now, boys, let's say you were to be with somebody having an intimate exchange at the weekend, whether that's male to male, male to female, if you're initiating some intimacy with that person, you know that they have to consent, right, And they go, yeah, of course, everyone knows that I said, okay, tell me what do they need to say or do to be consenting? And the word you get ninety nine percent of the time

is the word yes. They'll say yes. Sorry when someone says yes, that's consent, yep. I said, right, well, boys, it's eleven minutes past ten on whatever today's dat is. That will be the last time you ever connect the word yes to consent, because whoever told you that has told you that is not someone you should be taking. An I legal advice from the word yes can mean, it often does, but this blanket idea that the utterance

of that word equals consent is an absolute myth. I speak to young women every week I've said yes who haven't consented. They've said yes because they're frightened. How do they get frightened because the other person used pressure against verbally physically. So I go back to the boys and I say, boys, I have two issues with you, as young men believing that the word yes equals consent. The first one is you've chosen a word that doesn't exist in the legal definition, so you've hung your hat on

a word that doesn't even exist legally. Secondly, I think for some young men, if we mistakenly tell them that the word yes, as if by magic, means that whatever's happened up to that point is now consent. We're saying to those young men, if you're initiating intimacy and you hear the word no, let's put a bit of pressure on, because you'll make them say yes. But the law says, hang on, how'd you get them to say yes? I just put a bit of pressure on. How do you

do that? Threats force, violence, coercion, manipulation. So once the boys get that, I say that the most important that aspect of consent law is the word freely. So when you ask people what consent means. For example, if you were to ask, say to young women, tell me what consent me So, it's when I do this, it's when

I do that. Interestingly, that aspect of consent law is defined by the other person, because if you or I are investigating from a sex crime perspective, whether this young woman consented or not, we don't define her consent by the fact that she said yes.

their mind freely? Now what does that mean? Well, that means that we're now looking at this person. Did they allow them to do that freely? What does that mean? Legally? Without using threats force, violence, coercional manipulation, the Ted Bundy's, the Joseph Thompson's, they use physical violence, but date rape is far more likely to be coercive, verbal, psychological, And even that too many people comes as a bit of a surprise because we think the only thing that negates

consent is physical threats of force. No coercion manipulation sits on the same plane. Legally.

similar age who they know socially. So your questions are a really good one. Look, respectfully, it's quite rare for guys to come forward and admit to me as an ex copper that they've committed a sex offense. Yeah, it's very common for guys to come forward. A bit sheepishly saying I had absolutely no idea of the legal test for drunkenness of when if someone says yes, that's not always so they're not taking that next step so much.

and they often come forward very genuinely. I don't want to sound like a TOSSI, but they come forward just to shake your hand and say, I've never had a talk like this. No one's told me this stuff before. There's sometimes a bit of an assumption that when young people get to a certain age, as if by magic, they'll just know this. Like, you get to year twelve, you'll know how to wire up a house electrically. No you won't. You get to year twelve, you'll know the

definition of consent? Really, who's told.

the legal definition. That's one of the major contributing factors to young women I speak to who have been subjected to sexual intercourse without consent, and they didn't know until they sat in the talk, And the moment in the talk that most of them realize is when I share with them the legal definition, and it's so different to what they thought.

So if you look at the definition of sexual intercourse, so we apply that to sexual intercourse without consent, right, most people think are sexual intercourse. I know what that is. That's penole penetration for pro creation. That's the biological definition, or if you go to a religious school, it's a theological definition, and that's cool. I got no problem with that. But they're often really surprised to hear the legal definition.

And in every state and territory in Australia, the legal definition of sexual intercourse and I'm going to paraphrase it little, it's penetration to a sexual area with anything at all. So straight away, and we're only a fraction of the way through the definition. Straight away there people hear that going, oh, hang on, what no, no, no, no, intercourse can only be penole penetration or that's your biology class. Ye, wrong book,

wrong definition. So the law says a person has had sexual intercourse with another person the moment they penetrate that person to a sexual area with anything at all, any part of an offender's body, anything held or manipulated by the offender, and it keeps going. Every state and territory in Australia also goes on to say sexual intercourse also

includes the act performing oral sex. Now New South Wales, forced oral sex is legally defined or articulated in a courtroom as being the introduction of the penis to the mouth without full consent. So when you put that out in front of a couple of hundred young men, you can hear a pin drop because they're going, wow, I didn't know that. Two most common forms of intercourse without consent committed against young women in that high riskauge group

fifteen to twenty one. Number one is penetration sexually by guy using his fingers without consent. Most young women who are subjected to that are told by well meaning friends, oh my god, that's awful. That's terrible. What an asshole. Thank god he didn't rape you. That's one good thing. And that advice is given with really good intent because they're listening to their friend's story and they're running it through their definition of sexual intercourse, which comes from page

seventy six of the year twelve biology textbook. So because what happened to their friend doesn't fit into that exceedingly narrow definition, that means it's not intercourse, So it can't be intercourse without consent, so it's not rape.

it's important for young men to hear this. Yeah, it's important for young women to hear this because the language around this dumbs it down. So I know, I didn't have sex with her. I just sort of touched her

up a bit. Classic term from someone on the other side of an interview desk who's touching her up a bit means oh, yeah, she was saying no, she was pushing my hand away, but I sort of penetrated her with my finger is a bit, because yeah, she was saying no. She wasn't that keen, but I figured maybe if she might change her mind. Now you run that through legal definition, sexual intercourse without consent. I mean, even that term rape, it's an awful term.

state or territory New South Wales. The term rape was replaced by the term sexual assault forty three years ago. So it gets sort of interesting when you get into that discussion with people all these terms that they're so familiar with, but they don't actually know what they mean. You know, like drunk person can't cossent, brilliant, what does that mean? Ask year twelve students today, you're at a party. You know that there's a drunk person part of they

can't consent. What's the test to determine how drunk they are? Oh, it's a breathalyzer. What's not we do get a freaking breathalyzer from And what's the breathalyzer level that someone has to fail to not be able to consent? See, that's just a myth. So what our brain does it says, oh, I know the test for drunkenness. It's a breathalyzer. Well, it's a driving test. There's a specific test for consent. But all the young people I speak to pretty much

know a drunk person can't consent. Most of them don't know what that means. Biggest study to come out of a strong universities more recently is telling us up to ninety percent of young women in high risk gauge they senior high school that have a sexual offense committed against them last weekend, they will be too affected by alcohol or drugs to be able to legally provide consent nine

times out of ten. But ninety nine percent of students in those environments don't know what the actual legal test is.

that is identical to the test to consent. You fail them the same way. So we all know that if you've had a few too many drinks and you try to get into a pub, generally the person on their will say no, I'm sorry. It's not like you've done anything wrong. It's just they'll lose their job if they let you in because you fail the RSA. How do you fail the RSA when you're clearly showing the effects of alcoholic drugs that can be observed by any reasonable person. Now,

in that case, the reasonable person's the dormant. When detectives from sex crimes investigate, say, allegations of a sexual offense they committed at a party or something such as that the off and looking at circumstances where somebody is too drunk or drug effected to give consent, you can apply the test anyone in that room that you can clearly see is affected by a color of drugs, And the legal test is the physical effects, verbal or cognitive or combination.

This is what a judge tells a jury in a courtroom. But we've got to give this information to the kids going out to parties this weekend.

How do you know whether you have consent? How do you know if that person's had too many drinks to fail the test? If you don't know what the test is, how do you know if you've had sex intercourse with somebody? If your definition comes from a biology textbook, See so it's.

to me. You be hand one. So are you saying, then when someone changes their mind from no to yes or no to whatever, that's consent. Yeah, So okay, Well let's put that into practice. So I'll say, okay, let's appride that principle. Give me ten dollars, to which they'll say no. I'll say, well, hang on, do you have ten dollars? Yeah, well give it to me. No, And then I might get a bit theatrical and go, well, I'm going to out to three and if that ten dollars is not in my pocket, what if I start

hitting you something? And I said, I reckon, Tom, I'll get to about two, the wall beout, and you'll give me the money. Don't let anyone tell you consented. That's a robbery. You changed your mind, but you didn't change it freely. You changed it because of the pressure. I applied. Exact same principle applies to your actions towards someone an intimate exchange, So the penny starts to drop.

of inappropriate workplace conduct. There's no argument. So if we go back twenty five years to today, today's workplace is generally a lot better. The expectations are higher, policies are better, implementation of policies are better all that type of thing, but we still recognize that, for example, sexual harassment is number one. Now, sex harassment doesn't have to be male to female. It usually is, though, but nothing in policy says that sexual harassment is really just a sub section

of workplace harassment. Yeah, so it's uninvited, unwelcome, unreciprocated behavior of a sexual nature that makes somebody feel offended, intimidated human in a workspace. It's still the most common, but it is far less less common than what it once was. So we're making headway, we're making moves, But just to your point, you need to be really careful assuming that your staff that come into your workplace know all these policies because they don't teach them at school, they don't

teach them at university. And a lot of young kids that will go to UNI, they're coming into the workplace twenty three, twenty four. It's their first job. But because they're twenty three or twenty four, sometimes their employers think, oh, they'll know all this. They don't know it. So you

make a really good point. The more training that we can do, the more people are able to identify these behaviors call them out, but also regulate themselves, because there's a big push in the Australian workplace to get staff to call out harassment bullying. But you've got to make sure your staff know what the definitions of those terms are,

because most of them don't know. If people have more knowledge, the choices that they're making are more informed on both sides of the equation with regard to their conduct, but also, perhaps just as importantly, with regard to being able to identify conduct directed to them as being Hang on, now, I don't have to cop that that's harassment. That's whatever

it is. I'm going to call that out. But if you're not sure what it is, if no one's told you the definition, all the definition's wrong, you're going to sit back on your heels. It's the same principle as young women who aren't told the offense, like unlawful sexual touching and stuff. It happens the people who do it, usually young men, do it repeatedly. The girls speak to their girlfriends about it, and they're from toil. I don't worry about him. He's just an asshole. He does that

to everybody. Then they'll go in one of the talks and suddenly realize this stuff that's happening to me is a criminal offense, and each time someone does it in you South Wales, it carries a five year imprisonment to him. Okay, maybe I will speak out about it so knowledge is powered.

they can't protect themselves. So how do they protect themselves?

of years. There's not one There's not one martial art that you and I could study anywhere in the world that will teach us how to overparent attack it. So if we look at martial arts as being the sort of the Dawan of physical self defense, because it's got a thousand years of his behind it, how come not one martial arts teaches how to overparent attacker because that's

the total opposite to what self defense is. So, and this is a really important message for women to hear because generally, not exclusively, but generally, if a woman is in a physical confrontation with a male, the male will

generally be larger and probably physically stronger. So if you go into that thinking I can't defend myself because I can't overpower him, you've created a definition of self defense which not only is disputed by a thousand years of self defense history martial arts, but it's also going to stop you from doing anything. So martial arts do two things. The first thing martial arts do is they show you

how to identify your opponent's weakness. The second thing martial arts do, and people spend years and years learning it is. They show you how to exploit the weakness. That's it. That's the two things martial arts teach. And the longer you do it, the more effectively you can do that. But you don't have through martial arts to do that. So if I grab you, I'm one hundred and five kilos, you're not. You can't overpower me. That's my advantage, So

don't play to my advantage. So if you're my daughter, I would say if guy grabbed you, if you want to defend yourself, get out of your head this idea that that means that you've got to pick me up and throw me over your shoulder because you can't so identify my weakness or what's my weakness, eyes, nose, throat, groin, feet, So don't punch me in the stomach, they won't do a thing. Don't hit me ten times on the chest, hit me once across the bridge into my nose. My

nose will shatter. I can't see anything. I'll let you go. Bring my hands up to my face, and you perhaps now in a better position to employ the number one strategy of self defense run one strike, so that doesn't require power knee me in the groin, slam your heel through the top of my foot to break the meta tassels, I gou me, punch me in the throat. Now, these are all things that some of your listeners would go, well, I couldn't do that. That's what you've got to overcome.

Why couldn't you do that? Pick up a child who's six months old out of a bassinet. That child's afraid of you. They'll start screaming yep, and they'll start reaching out with their little feet in their little hands. And if a little one grabs hold of you and grabs hold it, you've got to ply them off. No one's taught them that that's a learnt response to being threatened. But what we tend to do for fifty percent of the population is when they're old enough to listen, we

tell all, no goodness, me, don't do that. Boys aren't told not to fight back. Boys are told if you don't, there's something wrong with you. So it's only fifty percent of the population has sold this idea that to defend yourself you have to overbit you know.

got to protect. You're not going to look at the size of the person, you know, and if three people jump out of the car, you'll go, well, I'll take on three of you. Or would you say, oh, three people, or you can have my son? Or would you say the guy that got out of the car he was a bit bigger than I think, so I let him take my son. You couldn't care less how big the guy was. He could have a neck the size of a rock wheeler. Good luck getting the son from the mother.

You will flick the switch, the bitch switch. You know everyone's got one. It's just tapping into what makes it work.

me how you do that, and she told me. She screamed like she all of a sudden was defending her child. And when she finished, I said, see, you can defend yourself. It's in there. You just got to be able to bring it out. And that doesn't mean that you can only defend yourself you're your child. It means it's always been there. It's there there within you, it's there within everybody. Then your reason we think it's not there is. People has told us it's not. Well, choose not to believe them.

You defend your son, you defend yourself, same thing. It's no difference, just mindset.