CHILD SAFETY

Thinking back a few decades, I was a hardnosed state parole agent working different urban and rural territories throughout Pennsylvania. By definition, since we got the offenders who had been sentenced to a max of at least a deuce (two years), we usually got the worst of the worst, those offenders with the longest records, and those who were the most resistant to counseling, therapy and whatever else we tossed at them. Still, with our caseloads throbbing with robbers, drug dealers, thugs, strong-arm specialists, and even hit-men, the offenders whom most parole agents thought posed the most immediate danger to the community were the predators who preyed on young children and small adolescents incessantly.

I retired a few years back after about 34 years, the last 20 as the lead Use Of Force Instructor for the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, and, although I still conduct numerous PPCT Instructor Seminars for law enforcement, military, security, corrections, probation/parole personnel as well as civilians, I turned my attention to designing a training system that could teach our children how to defend themselves against the predators who still plotted daily and lurked almost everywhere simmering with a relentless desire to abduct, molest and slay our sons and daughters. I immersed myself into researching the instructional options and what I learned were a few principles I guess I already knew:

So, when I talk about teaching children personal protection skills, I need to be clear that these principles and skills are very different from those taught in the typical martial arts studio or dojo. Survival Techniques and Intervention Concepts for Kids/Parents S.T.I.C.K.) is actually a sub-category of the COMET-Kids training system, committed to teaching simple Avoidance, Escape and Evasion Skills and Techniques to small children and adolescents. STICK is designed around specific, task-oriented skills researched and refined around the specific demands or situations a child-victim might find him or herself in if menaced or attacked by a sexual molester or child abductor(s). STICK is not martial arts, and although martial arts have value in many situations, they more often than not fail under the critical (survival) stress of a spontaneous, close quarter surprise attack where the child’s heart rate spikes from a resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute (BPM) to well over 250 BPM in a few seconds. Under this high-stress circumstance, martial arts, which rely mostly on Complex Motor Skills, almost always fails because an escalated heart rate activates the Sympathetic Nervous System, which causes a deterioration of our ability to employ Complex Motor Skills after the heart rate soars quickly by 145 BPM, the limit for Complex Motor Skills. To make a tedious, complex and elusive medical explanation of this phenomenon fairly simple, the child, once attacked will experience the following mental and physiological phenomenon, all of which are incompatible with the effective use of the martial arts:

Comet-Kids’ STICK program, then, is not the martial arts. It is the Fighting Arts. The Fighting Arts are basically a few, simple, easy-to-perform, easily-retainable Gross Motor Skills designed to perform a cluster of survival moves in specific, predictable “combat” situations. In this context the Fighting Arts for children (STICK) are:

“If you have to think, it is already too late---“ John Hall, Founder, Kid Escape.