De-escalation - Saying Sorry

I’ve written about de-escalation before however some good questions arose, when we worked through various scenarios, in our women’s self-defense/self-protection class today. One of the things I like to get people to first address in any scenario we place them in, is whether they are dealing with a pre-meditated situation or a spontaneous one – pre-meditated situations involve predatory individuals who have planned and orchestrated their assaults (such as muggers, rapists etc.) whereas spontaneous ones occur, when an individual has become aggressive and angry due to your behaviors and actions (spilling a drink over them, taking a parking spot etc.) whether real or perceived. When setting up scenarios it is important to distinguish between the two as predatory individuals almost always set up their assault through dialogue, and the creation of socially awkward situations, which places them in close proximity to us, where it is almost impossible to back away and create space, before they make their assault e.g. most sexual assaults on women are committed not by strangers, but by friends and acquaintances who have already gained a certain level of trust and so are able to make their assaults, in situations where they are already standing or sitting close to their victim – standard assertiveness training simply doesn’t cut it in such situations e.g. it is hard to tell somebody to get back etc. when they have created a situation where they are sitting next to you etc. It is really only spontaneous situations, where the aggressor has no definite agenda – such as mugging or raping you – where de-escalation is appropriate.

One of the things we talked about concerning de-escalation, was around apologizing for an action or behavior, and whether this would be taken as a weakness (encouraging further aggression and violence) or not. There are a few cultural aspects to this. In the UK, where I come from, apologizing and saying sorry is a default response to almost every action and behavior you make, whether it causes someone harm, inconvenience or not etc. In the U.S. I have found, on the East Coast for certain, that nobody expects you to apologize for something you have done and expect you to respond to them aggressively, and as a result don’t here it when you do; because it’s so unexpected it’s not processed. This is of course a generalization, however it raises an important cultural point; that if people are used to disputes where people rarely apologize but instead argue their case, they may not pick up on an apology when it is made, or instead interpret it in an aggressive way. If culturally, it is expected that an apology is made, then not making one will be seen as an aggressive statement.

There are also many different ways to say sorry and apologize. You can do it positively, subserviently and aggressively etc. Once in London when I was on the tube, a woman knocked her bag into me, when I had a dislocated shoulder – when she did it I winced/grimaced, and noticing the look on my face which she interpreted as being confrontational, rather than as somebody in pain, started to “posture” back to me, apologizing in an aggressive manner, and justifying/arguing why it was my fault that she knocked her back into me. Such an apology really doesn’t mean much, and against a highly adrenalized and emotional individual would only escalate the situation. I have also seen individuals apologize in such a subservient and scared fashion that they have encouraged their aggressor to continue their verbal onslaught as they realized that the person they were dealing with was so scared of confrontation, that they’d never be challenged. There’s also a third/middle way, where you apologize, in a confident manner, accept responsibility for your actions and help your aggressor find non-violent solutions to the situation.  

Whilst an apology may be necessary, it will achieve little, unless it is accompanied by some dialogue that allows the aggressor to consider non-violent solutions to the situation. If this isn’t feasible, then this is where the assertive posture and dialogue starts to come in, and not before e.g. shouting at a person who you have just spilt a drink over, to get back, is really adding insult to injury – if they aren’t able to formulate a non-physical solution, with your aid, than such an assertive response may then be applicable. Saying sorry, is rarely enough, as an injured party is looking to achieve some sort of solution, rather than just having you acknowledge their situation. They are looking for an outcome not merely acknowledgment, or trying to ignore them – aggressive people don’t simply go away, they need to be presented with an alternative to violence rather than being ignored.

There are the times to say sorry and apologize, there are the times when it is more productive to skip this and move on to other ways of de-escalating and diffusing the situation, but it is certainly true that saying sorry isn’t enough. A predatory individual doesn’t care about your response unless it is to acquiesce to their demands, and a person who has become aggressive due to your actions whether real or perceived is unlikely to be looking for non-confrontational signals, which means apologizing will rarely increase your chances of being assaulted in spontaneous instances of aggression and violence.