HeckNo If you end up on the ground: what the evidence says
- The ninety per cent figure is about arrests. Nobody has published one about assaults.
- Doing something beat doing nothing, by a lot. Pleading did worst.
- Guard, bridging, shrimping: taught with confidence, tested by nobody.
- If you freeze, it is involuntary. It is not consent and not failure.
WHERE THEY SOUND MOST CERTAIN
The part nobody has tested
Of everything in this course, the ground is where instructors sound most certain and where the evidence is thinnest.
A number you will hear, which is wrong
“Ninety per cent of fights go to the ground” is repeated in almost every martial arts school on earth.
Where the number comes from.
It comes from a 1988 review of Los Angeles police arrests, in which 62% of arrests ended up on the ground.
Not assaults, not women, not ninety.
It was never a study of assaults. It was never about women. And the figure has drifted from 62 to 90 somewhere in the retelling.
“Ninety per cent of fights go to the ground.” Where did that number come from?
Answer: A review of police arrests
Police arrests, in Los Angeles, in 1988 — and the real figure was 62%, not 90%. What it counted was officers taking hold of someone to get handcuffs on them. It was never a count of assaults and never a count of women.
The origin of the “90% of fights” claim: a 1988 review of Los Angeles Police Department arrests, in which 62% of arrests ended on the ground.What is actually known
Rapes were completed 88.1% of the time when the woman took no self-protective action, and 54.5% when she did something — almost anything.Tark & Kleck, 2014 — resistance and injury in the US National Crime Victimization Survey.
It holds for almost anything she did.
That holds across nearly every kind of resistance, forceful and not, physical and verbal.
The compliant responses did worst.
The responses that come out worst are the compliant ones: pleading, bargaining, trying to reason with him.
Of the things women did, which came out worst?
Answer: Pleading, bargaining, trying to reason with him
Reasoning with him. Rape was completed 88% of the time when she did nothing and 55% of the time when she did something — almost anything — and the compliant answers sit closest to doing nothing. Nobody is saying she should have fought.
Tark & Kleck, 2014 — resistance and injury in the US National Crime Victimization Survey.The injury usually came first.
Resistance is also not what gets women hurt. Where a woman was both injured and fought back, the injury usually came first.
It is not what the data shows.
The fear that fighting back makes it worse is the most common reason women give for not doing it.
THE QUESTIONS NOBODY ASKED
What is not known, at all
No study has ever asked whether resistance works differently once you are on the ground.
The largest analysis tested five things that might change the odds.
Whether she knew him, whether he had been drinking, where it happened, the time of day, how many attackers there were.
Not the one this lesson is about.
Position is not among them, and the survey it drew on does not record it.
Nobody has checked any of it.
No study has ever tested guard, bridging, shrimping or trap-and-roll as escapes from an assault. Not one. What is taught about them is instructor consensus.
How many studies have tested guard, bridging or shrimping as a way out of an assault?
Answer: None
None. Not one trial, not one outcome study, for any named ground technique. It may all be sound — but it is taught with a confidence nobody has earned, and now you can ask where that confidence comes from.
Even the premise has no source.
Two peer-reviewed sources, published twenty-eight years apart, both state that women are usually forced to the ground during an assault.
Neither gives a reference for it.
One of them does so in a section headed “Evidence Based”.
WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DID
What trained women actually did
Two studies followed women who had completed a self-defence programme and were later attacked. In the first, thirty-eight women got away; every account describes striking.
In the second, no ground technique at all.
Four hundred and forty-five graduates were followed up, and no ground technique appears anywhere in what they reported doing.
Where that programme spends its hours.
The programme in the first study gives the ground 41% of its hours.
The two things worth carrying
The strength gap between women and men is about twice as large in the arms as in the legs, at every age from five upward.Nuzzo, 2023 — sex differences in muscular strength across the lifespan, pooled from decades of measurements.
Legs, wherever you end up.
Whatever position you end up in, the answer is more likely to involve your legs than your arms.
Freezing is not the exception.
Of women at an emergency rape clinic reported significant tonic immobility during the assault; 48% reported extreme immobility.Möller, Söndergaard & Helström, 2017 — tonic immobility during sexual assault, 298 women at an emergency rape clinic, Stockholm.
You cannot move. Your body has stopped answering. What is that?
Answer: The commonest response there is, and not something you chose
It has a name — tonic immobility. At one emergency rape clinic, 70% of women reported it and 48% reported it severely. It is involuntary. Courts look for signs of a struggle: the absence of one says nothing about what you wanted.
Möller, Söndergaard & Helström, 2017 — tonic immobility during sexual assault, 298 women at an emergency rape clinic, Stockholm.If you freeze, you have not failed, and you have not consented. It is involuntary, and it is the commonest response there is.
This app cannot coach you on the ground. It has no way to see you there, nothing reliable to measure, and no evidence to measure you against. If this is the part you want, find a class with a real person in it — and now you know what to ask them.
Sources
- Tark & Kleck, 2014 — resistance and injury in the US National Crime Victimization Survey.
- Nuzzo, 2023 — sex differences in muscular strength across the lifespan, pooled from decades of measurements.
- Möller, Söndergaard & Helström, 2017 — tonic immobility during sexual assault, 298 women at an emergency rape clinic, Stockholm.
- Ozer & Bandura, 1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — mastery modelling and self-defence.
- Hollander — Empowerment Self-Defense, in Orchowski & Gidycz (eds.), Sexual Assault Risk Reduction and Resistance.
- Crann & Senn — follow-up of 445 graduates of the EAAA resistance programme.
- The origin of the “90% of fights” claim: a 1988 review of Los Angeles Police Department arrests, in which 62% of arrests ended on the ground.