Days Against Violence
With sports personalities against violence
Tobias approaches the teenager. "What are you looking at, stupid?" he yells.
The 14-year-old boy backs away with his mouth open and obviously flabbergasted. Tobias keeps pushing it: "I want to know why you were looking so stupidly at me! Do you want a picture of me or something?"
Were this situation real, the teenager would have been in trouble now. Because Tobias Kleinhans not only towers over him by two heads, but also weighs a good 30kg more than the student.
Luckily however, Tobias is wearing a t-shirt with the Wing Tsjun International logo.
Together with Sabrina Volker and Thomas Simon, he belongs to the training team chosen by Wing Tsjun Chief Instructor Dai-Sifu Thommy Luke Boehlig to carry out week-long violence prevention classes called out by the Langenfeld city council in Germany.
How this came about:
From August 25th to 29th, the town of Langenfeld organized the "week against violence" as part of the family festival.
As prominent martial arts practitioners of the area, Boxing champion Torsten May and WT professional Sifu Boehlig were invited to carry out actions concerning prevention of violence throughout the town's schools.
Sifu Boehlig's team has a history of 14 years of teaching self defence classes in schools and preventing violence.
The class:
The first module began every time with the analysis of a physical conflict. From contact look, over to the verbal contact phase "What are you looking at, stupid?", the shoving phase and all the way to the physical struggle, everything was analysed and enacted.
The students were shown ways to de-escalate in each of these phases and to avoid a fight.
Then the terms "self-defence" and "assistance in an emergency" were defined and examples were presented to illustrate them.
It was emphasized that the approach to a struggle is different from the very beginning, depending on whether it was a male provoking a male, or a female.
The instructors informed their students that unfortunately most violence directed at girls and women is still exercised by men, and they enacted a situation which could lead to sexual harrassment or rape.
Students were always surprised to learn that the majority of sexual harrassments occur at home and are caused by relatives or acquaintances. Enactments and examples were given in this area as well.
The second unit taught students to use their own resources; self-defence techniques were on the agenda. The entry phase was enacted as a harassment scene from which the training partner had to free himself first verbally, then physically. Afterwards, techniques for freeing oneself from different kinds of chokes, clinches, head and armlock grips were shown, and they were absorbed and applied having loads of fun.
In Scotland, Wing Tsjun Scotland has organised and taught hundreds of classes in both primary and secondary schools . Please contact us if you are interested in hosting self defence and violence prevention courses.