"But I'm a pacifist."

You are face to face with a violent thug intent on harming you. Your pulse races. Your breath comes in ragged gasps. Your vision narrows to a tunnel. Your fine motor control goes haywire. You are trembling. Your cognitive function returns to the Stone Age. Your emotions go off the Richter scale.

Now: Make the most important moral choice of your life.

What you will do in the event of an attack is largely a matter of training. Physical, mental, and spiritual training are essential for the practical reason that our minds go blank when an emergency strikes. As every combat soldier or firefighter knows, what you have trained to do comes back in a flood as actions, without time to think.

Millions of years of evolution cry out during an emergency for one of three things: flight, fight, or freeze. The more you know about this process, the better able you will be to make the right decisions for you, whether that is nonviolent resistance, nonresistance, or vigorous self-defense. If your moral choice is nonresistance or nonviolence, you will need to train your autonomic reflexes so your body won't betray your ethics in the heat of adrenalized reaction.

Understanding how criminals choose victims and how to recognize when you are being 'interviewed' for victimization are critical skills for getting out of situations before they escalate to violence. Knowing conflict-resolution and prevention techniques are imperative. But so is knowing what to do when conflict resolution fails: when the thug has your stereo and your wallet and is still coming after you.

Women are trained to cooperate and this makes us especially appealing targets for criminals. That training in cooperation is often what surfaces when our minds go blank in an emergency. Many queers of all genders face violence early in our lives and so recoil from the thought of using force ourselves. But using violence in self-defense is not the same as using violence in attacking an innocent person. You are deserving of protection and only you will always be on hand to provide it.

Get the training you want to have, not the training criminals want you to have.