Student Safety: Security, Safeguards, & Self-Defense Tips

Back-to-school season ignites campus with friendship reunions and gameday chatter. With so much excited commotion, we can often find ourselves unaware of harmful situations arising around us. While you cannot predict what may occur in your day-to-day life, following standard safety practices can help prevent you from finding yourself in dangerous situations. And when the unpredictable does appear, knowing self-defense tactics can often save yourself and others.

Best Practices to Avoid Dangerous Situations

While UMN strives to provide a secure environment, it is still important for students to take their own safety measures.

• Who you came with is who you leave with. A trusted group of friends is your best protection on a night out. Ensuring the whole group is together before heading home is essential to keeping everyone safe.

• Use ride services to get home. When public transportation may not be available or you may not feel safe riding alone, UMN offers the Gopher Chauffeur service to drive students back home. 

• Don’t allow others to follow you into campus buildings. While our Minnesota Nice often shines through, we should avoid holding secure UMN doors open for strangers.

• Take the busier path. While shortcuts may feel tempting, it’s often safer to stay in busier, well-lit areas of campus especially when walking at night.

• Stay alert. Despite every safety concern voiced to us, many of us walk with our airpods in and heads down. It's important to keep your phone accessible, but not let it steal your attention.

Student Self-Defense: Why it’s Important and What to Remember

One of the most valuable life skills, not just in Dinkytown, but in life, is knowing self-defense. People who know self-defense are 60% more likely to leave a dangerous situation unharmed than individuals who have zero self-defense training, according to the Center for Violence Prevention and Self Defense Training. Being mentally prepared and having situational awareness can help avoid a bad situation in itself. Learning these skills is important for everyone and can help students who feel uneasy within Dinkytown.

Trust your instincts

Before engaging in any type of self-defense, it’s best to use situational awareness. If walking alone at night or you feel like the situation is unsafe, then leave. Even if you’re not 100% sure, it’s better to be safe than sorry. 

Be confident

To avoid looking vulnerable and presenting yourself as an easy target, project confidence through your body language.

Use your voice and be assertive

Use a strong tone and voice before engaging in physical confrontation to tell the attacker to stop. Even just shouting “stop” in a loud voice can cause someone to back off.

Aim for vulnerable areas

If you have to resort to physical confrontation to protect yourself, then aim for areas such as eyes, nose, and throat.

Use palm strikes

Use the base of your palm to aim toward vulnerable areas on the face such as eyes, nose, and throat.

Practice self-defense skills

Self-defense is not something you learn once and forget about. It’s a skill just like any other skill that has to be practiced. When facing a dangerous situation, it’s easy to go into flight or fight mode and forget all the skills taught in self-defense. Practicing what to do will allow your body to remember what you learned and actually utilise the skill. 

How self-defense has helped a student at the UMN

After speaking with another UMN student, we learned of an instance where taking a self-defense class helped her in an uncomfortable situation. When walking through campus to catch the bus, she noticed someone on a bike following her. Even when she tried to change directions and cross the street, the man continued to follow her. As she kept walking, she started to feel more uneasy. When she realised he was still following her, she turned and shouted at him to back off. This confrontation made him leave immediately. She could have tried to ignore him and hope he would leave, but it was her confidence and tone that ultimately made him leave. By practicing these skills in her self-defense class, she knew what to do and was able to protect herself.

Although self-defense may seem like a last resort, it’s an important life skill that everyone should know. Even when taking measures to avoid dangerous situations, self-defense can be valuable when encountering unexpected threats. When facing a dangerous scenario in Dinkytown, knowing what to do and how to respond can make all the difference.