How to Deal with Harassment

Lauren Taylor: Hi, I am Lauren Taylor from Defend Yourself. We are working on self-defense today. And right now we are going to work on how to deal with harassment. Now lot of people think about harassment will can I just ignore it and the answer is yes. You can ignore it but there a lot of times when ignoring is not the safest thing to do. So you want to have other choices. Some of those times when it might not be the safest things to do or when walking away and ignoring it is not a safe option, there is nowhere else to go, there is no one to get help from around you another possibility is as Sarah talked about a minute ago they may be testing you to see if they can do something more intense, move onto an attack. And a third possibility is that there a person you see everyday, say there is someone at school, there is someone at work, yes you can ignore it and you can walk away but you going to have to deal with them tomorrow, so you may want to set a limit. If you decide to set a limit, you want to use those three channels, your voice, your body and your face, all together in sync to give a consistent message. If they don’t respect your message, if they don’t respond to your message, you are going to repeat yourself and you are going to get more intense. So, now we are going to show a couple of scenes how you put that together to deal with harassment. In this scene, Sarah is going to be a street harasser and I’m just walking down the street. Sarah T: Wow! You look good. Lauren Taylor: Don’t talk to me like that. Sarah T: Hi miss, excuse me. Lauren Taylor: I said I don’t. That’s disrespectful. Please don’t talk to me like that. Sarah T: I am impressed, you are a sexy lady. Lauren Taylor: I don’t appreciate it. Don’t talk to me like that. Lauren Taylor: In the second scenario I’m the harasser. Hey Sarah how is your weekend. Sarah T: It was fine, how was yours? Lauren Taylor: Good, good. What you do? Sarah T: Alright, I just hung. Now you know the usual. Lauren Taylor: Did you go on any date; is anything interesting, anything juicy? Sarah T: I don’t think that’s appropriate to talk about. Lauren Taylor: Come on, what’s the matter? I just -- you are such a gorgeous woman, you don’t have anybody. I just – Sarah T: Well, thank you. Take your hand off me. Just, just step back, step back. Lauren Taylor: I thought you liked me, I like you – I’m not being -- Sarah T: Could you please take a step back Lauren. Look I just don’t think that’s appropriate to talk about in work. We can talk about work things, so let us leave off my personal life out of it. Lauren Taylor: Okay. Lauren Taylor: In the third scenario, we are going to talk about dealing with family, which for a lot of people can be the most difficult. In this scene, Sarah is going to my Uncle Herbert and we are at a family gathering. Lauren Taylor: Hey Uncle Herbert, how are you? Sarah T: How are you? Lauren it’s so good to see you. Lauren Taylor: Yeah. Sarah T: You have really grown up. Lauren Taylor: You look too; it’s really good to see you too. Sarah T: Good. Yeah. You, also very nice girl. Lauren Taylor: I’m growing up and so I don’t like people putting their hands all over me and stop, yeah. It’s really good to see but I don’t want you to put your hands all over me. Sarah T: Serious, I’m fine, bye. Lauren Taylor: Now Sarah just showed you know that I was getting a wonderful response from the person. They may do what we call a parting shot, call you a name or say something wrong with you or say your hypersensitive, that’s okay, you have to define your success for yourself. For me, it was that I didn’t want Uncle Herbert to put his hands on me and so that worked. That some ways to deal with harassment. Next, we are going to talk about how to hit and what to hit with.