SECURING YOUR HOME
Your families safety is the most important thing to you, so securing your home at this time in South Africa is a necessity, shouldn't you then get assistance for this important task from a security expert ?
Of all the trauma counselling I am involved with I find that among the most traumatic incidents are home invasions. A large part of the trauma comes from the not knowing what the outcome will be, are they going to kill us? are they going to rape the women? are they going to harm our children? when do we retaliate, etc.
We find that burglaries have decreased and home invasions have increased, the reason for this is what the criminals are now after, no longer do appliances interest them that much, they are after valuables that are small enough to easily carry, enabling them to do a few hits in one night. The three main objects they ask for are; guns, cash and jewelry, and if you have any of them they are normally kept in a safe, they can only get into the safe if you are home, hence the increase in home invasions and decrease in burglaries when you are not there.
My philosophy on securing a home
Using the diagram above as reference as a birds eye view of you property with the green square being your house and the Black line around it your external walls.
The RED cross represents the criminals and they are in the street outside and the BLUE cross represents you and your family inside your house.
You need to build as many lines of defence between you and them, the numbers represent lines of defence, this is only a guideline and not set in stone, you could create far more lines of defence than my example above. So lets take a look at what the numbers (lines of defence) could represent:
1st line of defence - One of the most common modus operandi for home invaders is to hit you in your driveway when you arrive home, the one way they can do this is to hide behind a bush, tree or obstacle, so clearing your paving of all tress and bushes would be your first line of defence.
2nd line of defence - have lots of lighting around your driveway
3rd line of defence - If you have an armed response company, make sure you have visible signage displaying this, it is a big deterant.
4th line of defence - have something on top of the wall which makes it more difficult for the criminals to climb over, e.g. electric fencing, spikes, razer wire, palasade fencing, broken glass, etc. The pro's and con's of all of these are discussed in our Home safety courses.
5th line of defence - Having lots of visible lighting in your garden, this needs to be on through out the night, not only come on when there is movement.
6th line of defence - Having dogs, the dogs should be outdoors during the day and indoors at night.
7th line of defence - Having beams in your garden, the modern beams are impossible to get past and this by far is one of the best forms of security.
8th line of defence - Could be burglar bars on your windows covering the entire window, the pro's and con's of all different types of burglar bars and installations are discussed in our courses.
9th line of defence - Security gates on all doors leading in and out of the home.
10th line of defence - Creating a safe haven in your home, i.e. having a security gate installed in the passage to secure the bedroom areas.
11th line of defence - securing your trap door to insure they do not come in through the ceiling.
The above are all examples of what I refer to as installation safety, we also have lines of defence linked to behavioral safety, in other words, how we need to change our behavior to reduce our risk, this is discussed in more detail in our training courses.
SHOULD YOU NEED ONE OF OUR EXPERTS TO GIVE YOU A HOME SECURITY ASSESSMENT, PLEASE SEND THE REQUEST ON OUR CONTACT PAGE