Self Defence and Personal Safety For Women

3 Self Defence Gadgets You Can Carry Tonight

• Julie Waite • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Walking home, waiting for a taxi, or heading back to your car at night - these everyday moments can feel unsafe. In fact, 4 in 5 women in the UK say they don’t feel safe walking alone after dark.

In this quick 10-minute tips episode of Self Defence for Women – Live an Empowered Life, Julie Waite (women's safety advocate and Co-Founder of Streetwise Defence) shares three simple, legal gadgets you can carry tonight that give you time, attention, and options when it matters most.

You’ll discover:

  • The small device that can instantly disrupt and draw attention.
  • Why light is one of the most underrated safety tools.
  • The truth about safety apps - and how to set them up properly.

These gadgets aren’t about false security, they’re about layering confidence and preparation into your everyday life. And when combined with awareness and practical self defence skills, they can make a difference.

👉 For links to the exact gadgets we recommend, check out our blog: Best Self-Defence Gadgets

If you find this episode helpful, please follow, rate, and review the podcast—it really helps more people find practical safety strategies.

And don’t forget to share this episode with a friend, colleague, or family member who could use an extra boost in confidence and safety.

Want to feel safer, stronger, and more prepared?
Join our community of people taking back control of their safety - and get instant access to our free self defense and safety tip downloads.

👉 Head to Streetwise Defence to grab your free resources and start your journey today.

💡 PS – As a podcast listener, you also get 25% off our online self defense courses. Just use the code PODCAST25 when you’re ready.

Julie Waite (00:00)

Every day women tell us they feel unsafe walking alone, waiting for public transport or even just heading back to their car at night. These aren't just passing worries. Surveys show that four in five women in the UK don't feel safe walking alone after dark. The good news? There are three simple everyday gadgets you can carry that give you time, attention and options when you need them most. Welcome to Self Defence for Women, Live an Empowered Life, the podcast that helps you stay safe, feel strong

 

and take control of your personal security both physically and emotionally. I'm Julie Waite, Women's Safety Advocate and co-founder of Streetwise Defence. And we share real-world safety strategies, expert insights and practical tips to help you feel more confident wherever life takes you. And before we dive in, if you find this helpful, please follow the podcast and leave us a review. It helps more people find this.

 

On to today's episode. Not every situation where you feel unsafe will end up in an attack, but having small, simple tools you know how to use can shift the odds in your favour. In this Quick Tips episode, we're sharing three legal, everyday gadgets that give you confidence on the go. You can find all of these on our website blog with links to the exact models, and I'll link that in the show notes.

 

The first gadget that we're going to look at is a personal safety alarm like this one here. This one has a strobing light on it as well and really easy to use. just pull this, ⁓ it only has a pin in it of some sort. You pull it to activate it. That is very, very loud.

 

Like I say, if you've got one with a strobing light as well, then at night you've got some additional attention that's being drawn there. They're really affordable, generally between £20 £30. I've tested loads over the years. I've had loads of these and I've still got lots of different ones. I've got them on all my bags, on my kids' bags. I've got them in my car doors. I've taken them on holiday, taken them when I've gone to things like festivals, had it in the tent next to me.

 

in I needed to activate that. It's just a handy deterrent that you've got with you that you can use early in a situation if you ever need it. The one that we recommend is the Vantamo alarm. It looks very similar to this. This isn't it. And the reason we don't recommend this one is because there's no, you can't recharge it. This actually was on my daughter's bag and we tested all our alarms and this is what happened.

 

It's run out. So that's that's one of the things about when if you've got an alarm, you need to test it regularly.

 

because there's just no point having it on your bag or in your car or wherever for years on end and then you come to try and use it one day and the battery's dead. Now this one, there's no way of opening it. So this is now just going to landfill. But the one that we recommend that we've got on our website, you can recharge it and you just plug it into your laptop or whatever and you can recharge that. So that's really good.

 

These are helpful as part of your self-defence so long as you use it early. think with any self-defence gadgets you need to remember that they can't fight off an attacker it needs to be used early. So if you were for example walking along and you were worried about someone following you, you could activate it to scare them off potentially to attract attention.

 

It's going to depend on where you are. If you're in a very isolated area in the middle of nowhere, it may not act as a deterrent because ⁓ no one's coming to save you. So it's all about knowing when and how to use it. We always say use it early. So if someone gets close to you and is trying to grab you, that is not the time to be trying to activate an alarm. That's the time to be getting ready to respond physically. But in advance, then,

 

they're great to have.

 

The second self-defense gadget that we're looking at is...

 

Might be bit surprising, it's a torch, a little compact torch like this. Now I know a lot of people these days use torches on their phones but if you're out at night walking alone, walking the dog or you're walking home and you use to use the torch on your phone you could be setting yourself up then for someone that wants to snatch a phone. If you've got a torch, one this is like super bright.

 

really really bright also it's got it's flashing it's it's got different modes so you've got like I'm gonna turn this off now because it's going crazy with this one that we recommend there's just the normal light and then there's a flashing light and then it even does an sos sign so I mean if you would ever use that I don't know but the way that I use this is if I'm out walking my dog

 

and it's dark and I'm not feeling particularly safe. I know a lot of streetlights these days are turned off in different areas or there aren't many streetlights.

 

If you are walking along with a torch, you look much more confident and prepared. again, it's all about sending out those signals that you're not an easy target, they don't want to pick you, and that you're confident. So, and of course as well, it allows you to see if you're using this a little bit ahead of you, you can see if there's someone in an alley or in a dark corner. So that's something that I have on me when I go out walking the dog. This is about eight or nine pounds.

 

off Amazon and it's a really good torch and again you can recharge it and you just plug the cable in and recharge it doesn't need batteries so that's great.

 

final safety app that I'm going to talk about today is the different safety apps that you can get on your phone. We use Life360 for our family but there's loads and loads of them and again it's about remembering that none of these things can keep you safe in that they can't fight anyone off.

 

They can't stop someone from attacking you but it just means that people can know where you are. They have panic buttons. Some of them have...

 

safe places where you can stop and go in and it's just an extra thing so if you're walking home and you want to tell someone look I'm leaving now I'll be back in 15 minutes they can keep an eye on your route and again you can have the panic button that you can set off but once again if your phone is locked away in your bag then how can you activate that you'd have to have your phone in your pocket and your hand on it so that you can activate the panic alarm and then you need to think

 

realistically

 

about how quickly is someone going to be able to get to you. In all honesty, if you set that panic button off, the likelihood is that no one is going to be able to get to you in time because most attacks happen very, very quickly. But it's just an added way of keeping in touch with people and having someone know where you are at certain time.

 

So there's three things there that you can go out and get that will help you stay safer. The personal alarm, the torch and the phone safety app. Remember you can't rely on these to keep you safe, but they can be part of your safety plan. If you can't answer the question how...

 

Would I fight someone off physically? How would I protect myself physically? Then we recommend you invest in yourself, get some self-defence training. That's something that we offer. We go into schools, businesses, community groups, we do online training and we've got pre-recorded online courses as well where you can watch the demonstrations. You can watch me doing the demonstrations with Dene and we teach really simple techniques. There's no martial arts.

 

inclusive for everybody so I'll link that below but you can take a look on our website

 

So thank you for listening to this quick tips episode today. If you found it helpful, please share it with someone who will benefit from this knowledge. If you could give us a review, subscribe and share, that would be brilliant. And until next time, stay safe.