9.26.2009
9.18.2009
Battery: Olga and His Honor
The following is a guest essay from Morton H. Goldberg, DMD, MD:
To strike...violently or often, to beat out of shape. The dictionary definition of battery doesn't even begin to describe the effects of fists or metal or missiles on the fragile bones of human face or the soft tissues overlying them. The jaws and face can be easily battered out of shape or beaten into a mass of shapeless pulp. The bones of the mid-face, the upper jaw, cheek, nose and lower edge of the orbits are eggshell thin in places, and when struck violently or repeatedly will shatter, much like Humpty-Dumpty -- and they can be just as difficult to put back together again. The skin and muscles of the face, when crushed, will heal by scarring, which may be amenable to repair or revision, but often with a result which, while acceptable elsewhere on the body forever changes the facial appearance or self-image of the patient. Once damanged, nerves, both sensory and motor types, may never fully recover.
In my experience, battered men are commonly those who are assaulted by other men during arguments, muggings, and barroom brawls or drug deals gone awry.
Battered women, however, are almost exclusively victims of domestic violence by husbands, boyfriends, significant others or dates, as well as by fathers or brothers. The perpetrator's rage may be triggered by alcohol, drugs, jealousy, sex or psychoses, or may be just lousy habits learned from their family or culture.
This horrendous social disease -- the rampant, recidivistic and even ritualistic physical abuse of women -- crosses all economic, educational and ethnic lines. It occurs in the suburbs and in the ghettos, as well as on college campuses and in the barrios. Witnesses, the newspaper stories, television documentaries and published and heralded sociologic studies fill a battered women's shelter with all the paper they have been printed and reprinted on.
And it still persists. Bludgeoning of women by men has probably been species characteristics since we climbed down from the trees and started walking upright on the savannah. When women are considered chattel by legal, social and theological tradition, they are treated as cattle...or worse. Yet, despite the political, economic and reproductive freedom now available to western women, they still live under the threat of violence, real or potential, in their homes, on their jobs or just while walking across a supermarket parking lot. The latter tends to be chance and episodic, unless they are being stalked, but at home it can become chronic, recurrent, systematized and sadistic.
The highly publicized 1987 New York case of the batterer Joel Steinberg, his chronically battered and disfigured lover Hedda Nussbaum and their dead daughter is a case in point.
Olga was young, petite, pretty and fragile appearing. She was the single mother of two infants, fathered by her live-in boyfriend. In the clinic, an intern was attempting to remove sutures from her still-swollen lip and, on closer inspection I could see her two broken front teeth.
Neither she nor I was bilingual. Anything more than an abbreviated medical history in Spanish is beyond my talent, which precluded obtaining an extended social history. Her chart provided a few answers - a fractured nose from a punch a few months earlier, and later a kick to the abdomen, all courtesy of the boyfriend. Social Services had been alerted, but appointments were never kept and doorbells never answered.
Through an interpreter, I asked if she was going to return to her apartment. She nodded. "Will he be there?" Again a "yes."
"Why, if he keeps hurting you?" No answer. "Will you meet the social worker?" "No, he wouldn't like that."
"How about the police?" She quickly exited the clinic.
Olga wasn't unique. There are a lot of Olgas out there and I've never understood why. Why take such abuse and go back for more? It will never get better...leave, go to a shelter...call the police...there are laws and judges to enforce them! Yes, indeed!
I next encountered Olga in the ER. The message, "Olga Rodriquez in Room One" caught my attention. Room One is the largest and best equipped of the Hartford Hospital ER trauma treatment rooms, usually reserved for the most severely injured, those from automobile or motorcycle accidents, others critical from gunshot wounds.
Her neighbors in the apartment building had called the police, and they, in turn, had requested the ambulance. She had been loudly accused of an infidelity, which she had emphatically denied. There had been a few screams, a long series of dull "thuds" and then silence. No knuckles or shoes this time. He had used a section of heavy metal pipe swinging blow after blow to her face, which he battered, beat, brutalized, hammered and crushed. Miraculously, or perhaps intentionally, her skull had escaped injury. A few fingers were broken, defensive wounds as she tried to ward off the earliest hits. Almost every bone in her face had been fractured, many into small multiple fragments - lower jaw, upper jaw, nose, cheekbones, orbits - and there was hemorrhage in one eye. Palpation through the grossly swollen blue-black unrecognizable face felt like a squishy "bag of bones," all moveable, rather like short stalks of asparagus buried in thick mashed potatoes.
Primary surgical repair followed by secondary grafting and reconstruction required a team of oral and maxillofacisurgeons, plastic surgeons, and ophthalmologic surgeons, as well as nutrition, prosthetic dentistry and finally, at last, social services. Months later, Olga was alive but her face would never again be the same, never young, never beautiful. Her face drooped and her cheeks and lips were thickened by scar tissue. She removed all the mirrors from her apartment. A man might have attempted camouflage with a beard or mustache, but we found a cosmetologist for her. Olga used dentures, but uncomfortably.
The subsequent newspaper article stated that the boyfriend, Olga's assaulter, had been sentenced to two-to-five years. Two to five! I was shocked. He could be out in 18 months. He was probably boasting that he could do the time standing on his head. After a few carefully-placed inquiries, I had the name of the presiding judge and his home phone number. I introduced myself, apologized for the evening call and asked about the light sentence. "Won't he be out in 18 months?That's not much time considering what he did to her". "Well, doctor," he responded with an authoritative judicial voice, "the jails are crowded!"
"He crushed her face with a lead pipe...broke every bone...it took a team of us months to fix it. I have pictures of her injuries...I would have shown them and testified for her."
"Doctor, women like her don't want long jail terms for their men...she cried when I sentenced him."
"I know, I know about the denial and crazy guilt and emotional dependency of battered women...but if they can't be rational about their risks, then we have to be. He mutilated her and as far as I'm concerned, it was attempted murder not just a damn slap! And, I've taken sociology 101!"
"Easy, doctor. easy."
"You should know that if this guy came out to the suburbs and did this to your wife, he'd be away for a very long time. What...are you telling me that we have a two tier judicial system?" I countered.
"Dr. Goldberg," he interrupted, "I think this conversation is over." "Not yet! Is he going to get psychiatric counseling?" A short laugh. "Doctor, if you can find a Spanish-speaking psychiatrist in our penal system, let me know his name...I'm going to hang up now." "Don't! He's going to kill her...you must know that...can't you at least issue a restraining order for when he gets out?" "They're unenforceable! Good night, Doctor!"
It was almost two years later and my first day back from a vacation. As I crossed the hospital lobby heading for a cafeteria breakfast with OMFS residents, I was stopped by the hospital CEO.
"Too bad, Mort, about that patient of yours," he consoled.
"Uh...I've been away John, who...?"
"That girl...the lead pipe...she was here for months...Rodriquez." He hesitated and then..."DOA, Mort, 60 stab wounds."
This time, DOA...times sixty.
Later, another judge at the murder trial was somewhat more concerned and punitive - a twenty-to-life sentence. With time off for whatever, Olga's murderer could be out in less than fifteen - that's one year for every four thrusts of the knife. The children were in foster care while relatives were being sought in Puerto Rico.
Olga, Olga, Olga - Why? Por que, por que? Why did you take it for so long? Was it paralyzing fear? Was it just blind denial? Or a twisted sense of guilt - your fault? Was he the master and you the slave? Did you truly believe that things would improve? Did you stay and wait because you had no place to go, no skills for work or to support the children? Had you seen your mother battered? Had he watched as his mother was brutalized? Por que, por que?
I was angry. Angry enough to want to call His Honor again and tell him that his bigoted ignorance and cavalier arrogance was a disgrace to the Judiciary, and that her death had been preventable. In my opinion he was an accessory to murder! And I was angry with myself. Perhaps I should have been less confrontational with the judge and pursued the obvious threat to Olga's life with more concern, but through other channels.
This time I would try to be more subtle and less confrontational. I made an appointment with an sssistant state's attorney. He was seated in a black faux leather swivel chair behind a large desk partially covered by case folders, in a carpeted office whose walls shelves were stacked with bound law journals. He listened politely and nodded knowingly, while in a level moderate voice, I described Olga's battering and stabbing and my totally unrewarding discussion with His Honor.
He was pleasant, too pleasant. He said that he understood my concerns and was sympathetic. I can recognize condescension; I think I know when I am being patronized. He offered a reprint of an article he had written for a law journal. "It's graph", he pointed out, "shows the correlation between age and violent behavior. You see, young men do these things," he explained to me, as if I didn't know how to read a simple graph. "He'll be at least forty when he gets out - highly unlikely that he will repeat."
I was unconvinced and under whelmed by his dissertation. Not much consolation for Olga or her kids. It didn't address the issue and I said so.
"Is this judge an aberration and where is he on a graph of judicial competence? Isn't there a judicial review process? Doesn't someone track the records of judges' decisions? Isn't he accountable somehow? Don't you agree that his bad judgment contributed to Olga's death?" I asked.
"Is there a review process in your hospital, for doctors' results," he countered with a thin-lipped smile.
"Good point," I conceded. "Yes, there is." My brief description of Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conference didn't seem to impress him; neither did my discussion of my obligation as department chairman to keep ongoing records of less than optimal surgical outcomes. I outlined, without benefit of graphs or charts, the chain-of-command in the hospital and how I could bump a competence issue up to the hospital CEO or medical staff council if I couldn't resolve a solution with the surgeon.
"I would hope that there is a similar review mechanism for the judiciary," I concluded.
"Dr. Goldberg...do you wish to bring formal charges against this judge...who had been on the bench for many years? It would be unprecedented inasmuch as you are neither a member of the bar or even a principle in the case..."
He then suggested that I might contact my state legislator about our prisons and present my opinion to him. And did I know my legislator's name? I should have - he lives around the corner from me and I'd voted for him often enough, but I couldn't come up with his name. "You see, Doctor - the public really needs to be more participatory in government!"
It was apparent that control of this meeting was completely his and I would, again, achieve nothing. But I persisted and was informed that I would need a court order - from a judge - to gain access to any judicial records! When I stated to opine (good legal verb) about institutional self-regulation (I didn't quite get to foxes guarding chicken coops), he interrupted and again directed the discussion into the subject of the failure of medical societies to discipline errant doctors.
My time was being wasted in this hopeless and pointless meeting, but I gave it one last shot. "Why," I asked, "is the penal system so overcrowded and lacking rehabilitation and psychiatric personnel? Why can't the Judiciary or states' attorney's office demand changes or reform? And why can't someone in this system step outside their so narrowly-defined professional sphere, even if it's just for the sake of one dead woman and couple of orphans? Hell! I'm doing it - right now - here, this afternoon!"
Another patronizing smile..."You're to be commended, doctor."
I had lost. I was no match for him. Lawyers are trained to argue, debate, persuade, convince and control. Surgeons are not. He was too smooth - so slick that I wouldn't have even been able to find a spot on him to strike the proverbial match to light a fire under him or the "system."
I am just a small cog in the vast American Medical Machine. I still see them, the women with split lips, broken teeth, bruised cheeks and fractured jaws. I patch them together and fill out the reports and send them into the great maw of our social justice system. Fortunately, there are now more shelters for battered women, and I have seen the posters in the ER and in doctors' offices: YOU DON'T HAVE TO TAKE IT. And there are now lectures about battered women given to students in public schools. I hope everyone is reading the posters and listening to the lectures given by The Family Violence Intervention Program.
Olga is gone. The system failed her. So did I. Who knows how her children will turn out? I doubt that their father or the state's attorney will have changed much with the passage of years. His Honor served out his career. I'm just a bit older and slightly more cynical, inasmuch as the Connecticut legislature has given us the Family Violence Prevention and Response Act which requires the police to make an arrest if violence has occurred, but gives the battered women the right to refuse to testify!
And Joel Steinberg was released from prison, June 1994
To strike...violently or often, to beat out of shape. The dictionary definition of battery doesn't even begin to describe the effects of fists or metal or missiles on the fragile bones of human face or the soft tissues overlying them. The jaws and face can be easily battered out of shape or beaten into a mass of shapeless pulp. The bones of the mid-face, the upper jaw, cheek, nose and lower edge of the orbits are eggshell thin in places, and when struck violently or repeatedly will shatter, much like Humpty-Dumpty -- and they can be just as difficult to put back together again. The skin and muscles of the face, when crushed, will heal by scarring, which may be amenable to repair or revision, but often with a result which, while acceptable elsewhere on the body forever changes the facial appearance or self-image of the patient. Once damanged, nerves, both sensory and motor types, may never fully recover.In my experience, battered men are commonly those who are assaulted by other men during arguments, muggings, and barroom brawls or drug deals gone awry.
Battered women, however, are almost exclusively victims of domestic violence by husbands, boyfriends, significant others or dates, as well as by fathers or brothers. The perpetrator's rage may be triggered by alcohol, drugs, jealousy, sex or psychoses, or may be just lousy habits learned from their family or culture.
This horrendous social disease -- the rampant, recidivistic and even ritualistic physical abuse of women -- crosses all economic, educational and ethnic lines. It occurs in the suburbs and in the ghettos, as well as on college campuses and in the barrios. Witnesses, the newspaper stories, television documentaries and published and heralded sociologic studies fill a battered women's shelter with all the paper they have been printed and reprinted on.
And it still persists. Bludgeoning of women by men has probably been species characteristics since we climbed down from the trees and started walking upright on the savannah. When women are considered chattel by legal, social and theological tradition, they are treated as cattle...or worse. Yet, despite the political, economic and reproductive freedom now available to western women, they still live under the threat of violence, real or potential, in their homes, on their jobs or just while walking across a supermarket parking lot. The latter tends to be chance and episodic, unless they are being stalked, but at home it can become chronic, recurrent, systematized and sadistic.
The highly publicized 1987 New York case of the batterer Joel Steinberg, his chronically battered and disfigured lover Hedda Nussbaum and their dead daughter is a case in point.
Olga was young, petite, pretty and fragile appearing. She was the single mother of two infants, fathered by her live-in boyfriend. In the clinic, an intern was attempting to remove sutures from her still-swollen lip and, on closer inspection I could see her two broken front teeth.
Neither she nor I was bilingual. Anything more than an abbreviated medical history in Spanish is beyond my talent, which precluded obtaining an extended social history. Her chart provided a few answers - a fractured nose from a punch a few months earlier, and later a kick to the abdomen, all courtesy of the boyfriend. Social Services had been alerted, but appointments were never kept and doorbells never answered.
Through an interpreter, I asked if she was going to return to her apartment. She nodded. "Will he be there?" Again a "yes."
"Why, if he keeps hurting you?" No answer. "Will you meet the social worker?" "No, he wouldn't like that."
"How about the police?" She quickly exited the clinic.
Olga wasn't unique. There are a lot of Olgas out there and I've never understood why. Why take such abuse and go back for more? It will never get better...leave, go to a shelter...call the police...there are laws and judges to enforce them! Yes, indeed!
I next encountered Olga in the ER. The message, "Olga Rodriquez in Room One" caught my attention. Room One is the largest and best equipped of the Hartford Hospital ER trauma treatment rooms, usually reserved for the most severely injured, those from automobile or motorcycle accidents, others critical from gunshot wounds.
Her neighbors in the apartment building had called the police, and they, in turn, had requested the ambulance. She had been loudly accused of an infidelity, which she had emphatically denied. There had been a few screams, a long series of dull "thuds" and then silence. No knuckles or shoes this time. He had used a section of heavy metal pipe swinging blow after blow to her face, which he battered, beat, brutalized, hammered and crushed. Miraculously, or perhaps intentionally, her skull had escaped injury. A few fingers were broken, defensive wounds as she tried to ward off the earliest hits. Almost every bone in her face had been fractured, many into small multiple fragments - lower jaw, upper jaw, nose, cheekbones, orbits - and there was hemorrhage in one eye. Palpation through the grossly swollen blue-black unrecognizable face felt like a squishy "bag of bones," all moveable, rather like short stalks of asparagus buried in thick mashed potatoes.
Primary surgical repair followed by secondary grafting and reconstruction required a team of oral and maxillofacisurgeons, plastic surgeons, and ophthalmologic surgeons, as well as nutrition, prosthetic dentistry and finally, at last, social services. Months later, Olga was alive but her face would never again be the same, never young, never beautiful. Her face drooped and her cheeks and lips were thickened by scar tissue. She removed all the mirrors from her apartment. A man might have attempted camouflage with a beard or mustache, but we found a cosmetologist for her. Olga used dentures, but uncomfortably.
The subsequent newspaper article stated that the boyfriend, Olga's assaulter, had been sentenced to two-to-five years. Two to five! I was shocked. He could be out in 18 months. He was probably boasting that he could do the time standing on his head. After a few carefully-placed inquiries, I had the name of the presiding judge and his home phone number. I introduced myself, apologized for the evening call and asked about the light sentence. "Won't he be out in 18 months?That's not much time considering what he did to her". "Well, doctor," he responded with an authoritative judicial voice, "the jails are crowded!"
"He crushed her face with a lead pipe...broke every bone...it took a team of us months to fix it. I have pictures of her injuries...I would have shown them and testified for her."
"Doctor, women like her don't want long jail terms for their men...she cried when I sentenced him."
"I know, I know about the denial and crazy guilt and emotional dependency of battered women...but if they can't be rational about their risks, then we have to be. He mutilated her and as far as I'm concerned, it was attempted murder not just a damn slap! And, I've taken sociology 101!"
"Easy, doctor. easy."
"You should know that if this guy came out to the suburbs and did this to your wife, he'd be away for a very long time. What...are you telling me that we have a two tier judicial system?" I countered.
"Dr. Goldberg," he interrupted, "I think this conversation is over." "Not yet! Is he going to get psychiatric counseling?" A short laugh. "Doctor, if you can find a Spanish-speaking psychiatrist in our penal system, let me know his name...I'm going to hang up now." "Don't! He's going to kill her...you must know that...can't you at least issue a restraining order for when he gets out?" "They're unenforceable! Good night, Doctor!"
It was almost two years later and my first day back from a vacation. As I crossed the hospital lobby heading for a cafeteria breakfast with OMFS residents, I was stopped by the hospital CEO.
"Too bad, Mort, about that patient of yours," he consoled.
"Uh...I've been away John, who...?"
"That girl...the lead pipe...she was here for months...Rodriquez." He hesitated and then..."DOA, Mort, 60 stab wounds."
This time, DOA...times sixty.
Later, another judge at the murder trial was somewhat more concerned and punitive - a twenty-to-life sentence. With time off for whatever, Olga's murderer could be out in less than fifteen - that's one year for every four thrusts of the knife. The children were in foster care while relatives were being sought in Puerto Rico.
Olga, Olga, Olga - Why? Por que, por que? Why did you take it for so long? Was it paralyzing fear? Was it just blind denial? Or a twisted sense of guilt - your fault? Was he the master and you the slave? Did you truly believe that things would improve? Did you stay and wait because you had no place to go, no skills for work or to support the children? Had you seen your mother battered? Had he watched as his mother was brutalized? Por que, por que?
I was angry. Angry enough to want to call His Honor again and tell him that his bigoted ignorance and cavalier arrogance was a disgrace to the Judiciary, and that her death had been preventable. In my opinion he was an accessory to murder! And I was angry with myself. Perhaps I should have been less confrontational with the judge and pursued the obvious threat to Olga's life with more concern, but through other channels.
This time I would try to be more subtle and less confrontational. I made an appointment with an sssistant state's attorney. He was seated in a black faux leather swivel chair behind a large desk partially covered by case folders, in a carpeted office whose walls shelves were stacked with bound law journals. He listened politely and nodded knowingly, while in a level moderate voice, I described Olga's battering and stabbing and my totally unrewarding discussion with His Honor.
He was pleasant, too pleasant. He said that he understood my concerns and was sympathetic. I can recognize condescension; I think I know when I am being patronized. He offered a reprint of an article he had written for a law journal. "It's graph", he pointed out, "shows the correlation between age and violent behavior. You see, young men do these things," he explained to me, as if I didn't know how to read a simple graph. "He'll be at least forty when he gets out - highly unlikely that he will repeat."
I was unconvinced and under whelmed by his dissertation. Not much consolation for Olga or her kids. It didn't address the issue and I said so.
"Is this judge an aberration and where is he on a graph of judicial competence? Isn't there a judicial review process? Doesn't someone track the records of judges' decisions? Isn't he accountable somehow? Don't you agree that his bad judgment contributed to Olga's death?" I asked.
"Is there a review process in your hospital, for doctors' results," he countered with a thin-lipped smile.
"Good point," I conceded. "Yes, there is." My brief description of Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conference didn't seem to impress him; neither did my discussion of my obligation as department chairman to keep ongoing records of less than optimal surgical outcomes. I outlined, without benefit of graphs or charts, the chain-of-command in the hospital and how I could bump a competence issue up to the hospital CEO or medical staff council if I couldn't resolve a solution with the surgeon.
"I would hope that there is a similar review mechanism for the judiciary," I concluded.
"Dr. Goldberg...do you wish to bring formal charges against this judge...who had been on the bench for many years? It would be unprecedented inasmuch as you are neither a member of the bar or even a principle in the case..."
He then suggested that I might contact my state legislator about our prisons and present my opinion to him. And did I know my legislator's name? I should have - he lives around the corner from me and I'd voted for him often enough, but I couldn't come up with his name. "You see, Doctor - the public really needs to be more participatory in government!"
It was apparent that control of this meeting was completely his and I would, again, achieve nothing. But I persisted and was informed that I would need a court order - from a judge - to gain access to any judicial records! When I stated to opine (good legal verb) about institutional self-regulation (I didn't quite get to foxes guarding chicken coops), he interrupted and again directed the discussion into the subject of the failure of medical societies to discipline errant doctors.
My time was being wasted in this hopeless and pointless meeting, but I gave it one last shot. "Why," I asked, "is the penal system so overcrowded and lacking rehabilitation and psychiatric personnel? Why can't the Judiciary or states' attorney's office demand changes or reform? And why can't someone in this system step outside their so narrowly-defined professional sphere, even if it's just for the sake of one dead woman and couple of orphans? Hell! I'm doing it - right now - here, this afternoon!"
Another patronizing smile..."You're to be commended, doctor."
I had lost. I was no match for him. Lawyers are trained to argue, debate, persuade, convince and control. Surgeons are not. He was too smooth - so slick that I wouldn't have even been able to find a spot on him to strike the proverbial match to light a fire under him or the "system."
I am just a small cog in the vast American Medical Machine. I still see them, the women with split lips, broken teeth, bruised cheeks and fractured jaws. I patch them together and fill out the reports and send them into the great maw of our social justice system. Fortunately, there are now more shelters for battered women, and I have seen the posters in the ER and in doctors' offices: YOU DON'T HAVE TO TAKE IT. And there are now lectures about battered women given to students in public schools. I hope everyone is reading the posters and listening to the lectures given by The Family Violence Intervention Program.
Olga is gone. The system failed her. So did I. Who knows how her children will turn out? I doubt that their father or the state's attorney will have changed much with the passage of years. His Honor served out his career. I'm just a bit older and slightly more cynical, inasmuch as the Connecticut legislature has given us the Family Violence Prevention and Response Act which requires the police to make an arrest if violence has occurred, but gives the battered women the right to refuse to testify!
And Joel Steinberg was released from prison, June 1994
9.17.2009
Help Save the Antelope Video
An excellent video of man saving the African antelope from a certain doom.
9.08.2009
Recession Causes Increase In Crime?
Recession Increases Crime?
As the economy shrinks the muggings, burglaries and thefts seem to grow. You want to be aware of the situation around you. Here are some personal safety tips that can help reduce the chance of you becoming the next victim.
Think Like A Criminal
If it is possible for you do so try to think as a criminal would. Train yourself to think like a mugger. This will help you identify a potential criminal. And, forewarned is forearmedAs you go about your daily routine, take special notice of hiding places that you encounter. If you live in an apartment building, pay attention to walkways and entryways. Look at the landscaping for overgrown bushes that a mugger could hide behind. The same goes for your own home. Cut back any overgrowth.
Be smart and use a four-prong strategy to prevent yourself from becoming a crime victim.
Be Alert
Being alert to your surroundings is the most critical strategy to staying safe. Muggers and carjackers count on the element of surprise for their crime to be successful. Muggers hide and come up behind you or jump out in front of you to frighten and disorient you. Carjackers use the blind spot in your mirror to mount a sneak attack.An intoxicated person is ten times more likely to be mugged than a sober person. The odds are even higher for intoxicated women that appear to be by themselves.
Preventive Action
Keep your car doors locked at all times. A carjacker will need to smash the window and try to unlock the door or threaten you to get out of the car. Lay on the horn and speed away if possible. If the carjacker reaches in the car to grab you or the door handle, bite down on his arm or hand as hard as you can. If you carry pepper spray or a stun gun, let him have it. Don't let up until he screams in agony. Remember he was going to harm you and steal your car.Have deadbolt locks installed on all the exterior doors of your home and keep them locked.
Install window and door alarms
Stay in well-lit areas. If you park your car in an area you are not familiar with, make certain it is well-lit. If you park during the day but know it will be dark when you return, look to see if there are lights in the lot or area. Let’s just hope they work. If you come out and the parking lot is dark, see if you can get a friend to walk you to your car. Rather safe than sorry.
If you walk or jog for exercise, always carry a personal alarm, pepper spray and/or a stun weapon.
Take Precautions
- Never allow someone into your home or car that you don't know or barely know.
- Always know your escape route ahead of time. Scope it out before you need it.
- Have your cell phone or cordless phone with you all the time, even at home.
Be Prepared
Get and have several personal security items with you. Pepper sprays, personal alarms on a key chain and perhaps a stun gun or taser.Learn how to defend yourself. Police sponsored classes are the best and most effective. They give practical and simple ways to defend yourself. Whereas, martial arts require much longer to master. It's okay to take martial arts classes for additional skills and stamina. But, learn some down and dirty skills right away.
Never give up your defensive actions. Fight with everything you have, bite and pull hair, poke the attacker's eyes, kick, scream and run. Use your pepper spray or stun gun. If the attacker falls to the ground and if you can, kick him in the face and head. Don't stop until you can get away or he runs away.
Never leave home without your personal protection products. It doesn't matter if you're going to see your mom or just running to the corner convenience mart. It's the going and coming that always presents the danger, especially if you have set routines and everyone does.
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