Cayman Prep students learn self-defense

By Christopher Tobutt

A group of Year 13 young people from Cayman Prep & High School spent a couple of extremely valuable hours down at the D Dalmaine Ebanks boxing gym, learning the art of Self Defense. Head of Year 12, Dan Baker, said, “Wen we were looking for feedback in which we could improve our pastoral care, a student in my form suggested we did self-defense, so I got in touch with the boxing club and we decided on organizing a sessions for the Year 12s and Year 13s. A lot of our students are going into the big wide world of universities in Britain, Canada and the US, so we feel that we want to kind of give them the skills of self-defense just in case they do get into kind of trouble in the future. We want to empower them and make sure that they have the confidence to deal with any such situation because otherwise we’re doing them a little bit of a disservice.”

Jasmine lambert-Wragg, 18, said, “I came here to learn something for when I leave for university because England is a completely different place from Cayman, and I know there’s a lot more street violence that goes on compared to here. I just wanted to learn something useful, so that if someone would attack me, I would know how to defend myself so that I could get away and alert the authorities. I learned how to diffuse a situation before I got injured. If a person attacked me I can say, ‘Back off!’ and I can get in a ‘ready’ position. If they go to harm me I could push them away with a palm strike or a quick jab, and then just run.”

Troy Oneil helped facilitate the session. “I took them through ‘proper stance’ which is pretty-much a boxing stance, with legs apart, strongest leg at the back, and hands up when you’re talking, not up in an aggressive way, more in an assertive way. If anything happens from here, I am all ready to block, defend, or punch, all that stuff. I also took them through trying to avoid confrontations which means don't be too aggressive, don’t escalate a fight but also don’t be too passive either. For example, if you bump into someone and they say, ‘Hey you spilled my beer!’ Then you can respond, ‘it’s alright, calm down, can I buy you a next one?’ then, If that doesn’t work you get more assertive and say, “Listen, I think you’ve had too much to drink. Now back off – you’re in my space.” If they’re still coming, then you have to do whatever you have to do to defend yourself. I also showed them some simple knife blocks too, because there are a lot of knife-fights happening now.”

Kayla Parsons, 18, said, “I came here to learn some self-defense for the reason we just don’t know what’s going to happen in life and it’s good to know how to defend yourself in the outside world. I really learned how to keep an attacker off me and how to defend myself, not to be the attacker, but to be the defender of yourself, and really to just keep away anyone who is trying to cause major harm to you like knife attacks and physical assault and anybody that comes up from behind, how to break free from them.”