Flecc - please tell us about the vulnerability to which you refer!
The universal vulnerability is that everyone ever born wants to be loved, liked, respected, call it what you will. It's the one opening that's always there, it's only a matter of knowing how to exploit it. The most skilled salesmen do it all the time.
Also, it would be very good to know in detail what happened when you avoided the conflict and ended up walking with your would be assailant. I can imagine such an outcome - but not the way it was achieved...
Strategies for dealing with potentially dangerous encounters, especially once they have started, might be of genuine value- particularly if they are counter intuitive or counter instinctive.
You've accidentally hit the nail on the head with counter instinctive Andy.
With an apparent young nutter of around 18 in the darkness of a Tooting Bec Common path suddenly face to face with me and whipping out a large knife from the back of his belt and holding it against me, I did the ridiculous. I said with a big smile, "Hi, I'm Tony" and reached out to his free left hand and gave it a sort of handshake type squeeze. For what seemed ages he looked stupefied until I casually remarked how boring it was around the area! He relaxed and agreed, lowered the knife and backed off a bit, then remarked "You look as though you can handle yourself". I diffidently agreed in a way not to seem challenging, adding that he looked as though he could to. That was the crucial bit of praise that opened the door to the continuing conversation. I told him which way I was heading home, asked if that was his way too, so then we walked away together chatting. When we came to where we were heading different ways, I said it was good meeting him, got a "you too" in response and that was that.
There's background to all this though. I'd spent some years in the Army, all but one with rank including four as a sergeant handling the national service intakes which included all sorts of would be hard cases so had plenty of experience of handling "difficult" situations, particularly when the hard cases had been drinking.
Following that during my working years I did a total of 28 years in various chunks of voluntary work with young offenders, some independently and some with SOVA, on Home Office schemes and working in both formal and informal relationships with the Metropolitan Police L and Z divisions. Alex will probably recognise L division as covering some of those Inner London boroughs mentioned, Z division covering Croydon and district.
Since I also employed a couple of "clean" employees, I'm not revealing confidences in saying that for my last 18 working years I almost exclusively employed young offenders for all my manual vacancies including those out of custodial sentences and active heroin addicts. Contrary to popular ill-informed opinion, addicts are perfectly capable of living active useful lives of given the chance. Those young offenders handled up to £4 million of goods every year and my location had the best stock record in the company, almost perfect with no unexplained losses.
It follows from all this that I have considerable experience of handling the most difficult young people in our society. Although I gave up all the formal work of this kind when I retired, I have informally handled three local cases since, so I'm not exactly out of practice in this London borough.
This also explains why my friends in my 70s are all in their 30s to 50s, they are the successes leading useful lives, ex clients and ex employees from over the years, mostly living in those Inner London boroughs in which I still visit them. And shock, horror for some, my best friend is a life long heroin addict!
I've already taken up too much space in this forum with this somewhat off-subject discourse, but if you want two or three more examples of handling difficult situations involving the young, I'll happily post them in the Charging Post forum.
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