An expert told us exactly how a predator chooses his victims.

It's 09:30pm and you're walking home from a friend's house alone when you sense that a car is following you. 

When you walk faster, the car speeds up. When you make a turn, it does too.

Suddenly the car stops, and a man jumps out in front of you and grabs you by the arms. He starts physically trying to push you into his backseat. 

As women, we've been hard-wired to believe that the worst thing we could do in this scenario is antagonise a predator and make him angry. We've been taught to submit in order to survive.

It's a mindset former police officer-turned-sex crime educator Brent Sanders faces every time he holds a seminar at a school or a workplace, featuring young women and girls, where he's painted this hypothetical scenario.

Listen: To Brent's chat with True Crime Conversations. Post continues below.

Next he tells the group, "I want you to picture yourself in that situation yelling and screaming at the top of your voice and physically attacking your attacker."

Most of the time, he is met with laughter.

"I've discovered the laughter is the thought that they would actually see themselves fighting back against a male attacker. It's like 'yeah right, as if you'd do that!'" he told Mamamia's True Crime Conversations.

Then he asks the group, "What would happen if you did that? What would happen if you fought back?"

"He'd get more angry," they reply. "The situation would get worse... I'd get more hurt."

As someone who has studied the psychology of sexual offenders, Sanders can say with absolute certainty that this escalation assumed by the women he teaches is, more often than not, completely untrue.

"If you look at any studies on this, the success rate of women yelling and screaming and fighting back against unarmed sex offenders is over 90 per cent," he explained.

"You couldn't find a study that would dispute that... All the research, all the studies, all the psychology provides the totally different information and knowledge than the conditioning."

Of course, Sanders wishes he didn't have to teach this kind of thing at all. He "agrees 100 per cent" that it is men who need to change their behaviour, not women. 

But, "that's not going to help a woman who, this afternoon, is confronted [by a sexual predator]," he says.

A man attacking a woman he doesn't know in the street or in their house is rare, but unfortunately it does happen. It's many women's worst fear as they watch the news headlines and see stories like that of Eurydice Dixon or Aiia Massarwe.

Sanders has spent much of the past 30 years trying to arm people with the tools to protect themselves from violent men. But as he explained on True Crime Conversations, he's recently stopped actively teaching tactical strategies because of the small but loud amount of vocal pushback he's received.

"I've always walked this thin line as a male presenting this stuff, as an ex-police officer... In the eyes of many 'I had the audacity to share strategies with young women.'"

As a (relatively) young woman myself, who has recently read Sanders' book of strategies and sat down with him for a one-hour interview, I can confidently say his teachings did nothing but inform, prepare and inspire me.

As he explained, "If I walked out of here today and somebody attacked me in a side street here and wanted my wallet, I'd probably hand it over to them. Now, when we flick that over to sexual crime, why is my message different? Because the psychology of the person who selects a young woman to commit a sexual offense is a totally different psychological study than the person who confronts me."

Sanders asks the women he teaches whether a guy driving past would stop the car and target him. He's always met with a chorus of "nos", and given the explanation that "you look like you could fight back".

"So it's interesting here, isn't it? They're saying the reason he'll drive away from me is 'you look like you'll defend yourself.' The reason he selects them is they look like they won't, and then they're told [by society] not to."

According to Sanders, the men who do things like this aren't strong and powerful. In fact, they're usually going out to commit these crimes because they're compensating for a lifelong perception of inadequacy.

"They're looking for someone who will follow the script they've written for them," he says. "If he had a crystal ball, and he drove past you and he could see you yelling, screaming, running [and] fighting back — every single offender I have ever interviewed, or ever studied ever, will just keep on driving.

"They're absolutely paranoid [about] getting caught, and they're totally unprepared for anything other than submission."

What about if they have a weapon, you might ask? Well according to Sanders, sex offenders in Australia hardly ever carry weapons — but he has strategies for that too. You can read more about them in his book.

But the other main lie women have been taught is that they (usually) can't win a fight against a man. 

The myth that women have to physically overpower someone to escape or come out on top has been perpetuated forever, but it's simply not accurate, said Sanders.

"There's not one martial art that you and I could study anywhere in the world that will teach us how to overpower an attacker," he said. However, "the first thing they show you is how to identify your opponent's weakness.

"If I grab you, I'm 105kg, you're not. You can't overpower me — not because I'm better than you, that's just my advantage. So don't play to my advantage. If you want to defend yourself, identify my weakness."

And what is that, exactly? 

"Eyes, nose, throat, groin, feet."

Sanders blames TV and movies for the conditioning that has taught women the wrong ways to protect themselves in these types of scenarios. 

"Boys aren't told not to fight back," Sanders told True Crime Conversations. "Boys are told, if you don't [fight back], there's something wrong with you. So it's only 50 percent of the population [who are told], 'Goodness me, don't do that. It's about challenging that."

Feature Image: Getty.