Personal experience can often get in the way of the facts. When you work in security you tend to see things from a certain perspective i.e., if you are always engaging with violent individuals, you can easily come away thinking/believing that the world is a violent place, and as a “trusted source” – someone who deals with violence – others will give weight to your perspective etc. Most people in modern society have so little firsthand experience(s) of violence that they’ll trust a martial arts/self-defense/Krav Maga instructor, with no actual experience of dealing with violence, to inform them of the way the world works, simply because they are performing the “role” of someone who “should” know etc.

Whilst those who regularly experience violence (in a professional capacity) may be excused from viewing the world from their perspective, there are too many martial arts/self-defense instructors, without any real-world experience, who “sensationalize” and exaggerate the extent of violence out of insecurity and a belief that they need to validate their role as someone who has value e.g., the world is a terrifying place, and I’m the only person who can genuinely/honestly teach you how to navigate it etc. This is perhaps no more evident/pertinent when it comes to knife crime.

                I have had to deal with knives and edged weapons on several occasions; in a professional capacity. In most cases I was able to get the person to put the weapon down, mainly because I was seen as “security”, the person was fearful, and I could explain the potential legal consequences of their future actions in that moment etc. As emotional as a person may be at the time, many - when confronted with the consequences if they were to act on their impulses - will back down (in the UK possession of a knife in a public space can lead to a prison sentence of up to four years). A lot of this has to do with being perceived as an authority figure and should not be taken as a default strategy when confronted with someone brandishing a knife.

In the famous Stanley Milgram experiment where participants were told to deliver an extreme/fatal electric shock when someone answered a question incorrectly, they really only did so when the person asking/telling them to was wearing a lab coat i.e., they appeared to be an educated professor, administering the experiment etc. When the person asking/telling them to do so wasn’t wearing something that identified them as being educated and in control etc., the numbers were small i.e., we have been conditioned to respect authority when it is demonstrated/on show. In simple terms getting someone to put a knife down through a command isn’t going to work in all contexts, and in some it may even be seen as posturing and challenging, which will only escalate the situation.

                To get an idea of what real-life violent incidents involving knives look like we must look at them from a variety of angles using statistics and research etc. There is something that is well documented in criminology but rarely acknowledged in public discussion and that is that most recorded knife incidents are not stabbings and don’t involve life-threatening injuries. When looking at knife crime, the UK, Germany and Turkey are the countries that tend to collect more detailed public data and engage in more academic research. In the US the attention is far more focused on crimes involving firearms and the research landscape is fairly barren when it comes to knife crime, even though FBI statistics demonstrate that on average 10% of homicides involve an edged weapon. The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed a number of categories/outcomes under “Police Recorded Crime, for ‘Offenses involving the use of a knife or sharp instrument’”, for the year ending June 2025 (roughly 49,000 incidents). These included injury outcomes, homicides involving a knife, and medical treatment resulting from incidents involving edged weapons etc. Whilst incidents involving knives always involve the risk of fatality (I will be looking at “one stab” homicides in a future article), this isn’t the outcome for the vast majority of them.

                In around 70 to 75 % of incidents involving edged weapons there were no physical injuries - suggesting that knives are primarily “displayed” to intimidate and/or threaten, rather than to be actively used as a weapon. Another 20 to 22% resulted in injuries that didn’t require hospital attention; these included cuts/nicks and defensive wounds that could be treated with basic first aid. This potentially tells/informs us something about the nature of most attacks; that they involve superficial slashes and cuts rather than deep, forceful stabs. In prison settings a “shank”, that is intended to be fatal, is perhaps much more common than the knife attacks which occur in other settings. Around 5 to 7% involve hospital treatment (the most common emergency room visit involves a single slash to the face), with 0.3 to 0.5% of all knife offenses resulting in a homicide. Most hospital visits involve deeper wounds that need stitching and/or injuries that require assessment but not necessarily critical care.

Whilst our perception of violent knife crime may come from the instruction we have received and the syllabuses we have been certified to teach e.g., I remember spending a lot of time learning how to teach downward stab/“icepick” defenses on the first Krav Maga instructor course I took, as these had been a common type of attack, against both soldiers and citizens, during the first Intifada in Israel. Such attacks may be common in certain settings but are not necessarily universal. This is why I believe that any syllabus needs to balance training time based on the likelihood of certain attacks and threats, and the time needed to master the skills in order to execute solutions e.g., controlling a “realistic” knife shank, which contains recoil, takes a lot of practice however dealing with such an attack is far less common than having to deal with a wild slash to the face etc. Violence is contextual and local and for us to teach self-defense that is based in reality our training should reflect the reality/realities we face.