I believe you HAVE to plan for retaliation from an opponent. If I am in a confrontation and the other party is staying at the location then I make an immediate exit. If the other group leaves, I stick around for a short time alert for the chance they are coming back from their car with a weapon. But then I leave before they have time to round up a crew and come back.

If they know where you live, there is a chance they can retaliate. I said a chance. I believe that most of the time the blowhard that finally meets someone that stands up to him is so embarrassed that they make tracks for somewhere else and you are fine. Especially if you have made it clear that you will always stand up for yourself (and call the cops) anytime and every time.

The bad news is that there are plenty of cases I know of first hand where the beaten opponent comes back to retaliate, if not physically against you, then against your property. This seems to be the most common. You call their bluff and they vandalize your house or your car. I was personally involved with a loved one that called a punk's bluff, made the guy back down and then was the target of some horrendous, vicious vandalism. I've also had a couple of guys (construction workers) retaliating against something my wife did by trying to vandalize my home. There are also numerous people whom I’ve arrested who would have cause for retaliating against me. For someone like myself that works in law enforcement, security and private investigation, I have the opportunity to make a lot of enemies. You don’t say what the problem is or what you do for a living…but cops, bouncers and others prepare for this all the time.

I've heard of stories where a punk was beat up by someone and then came back, actually invading this guy's home.

Some of the hard-core gangs have a principle that an insult is never ignored, so you can expect retaliation of some sort.

What I have found is a couple of things.

One, if you are constantly alert and are willing to defend, investigate, prosecute and do some (legal) retaliating of your own, the bad guys will eventually move on to someone else. That might include photographing the guys, setting up a video camera or security camera to capture evidence. You should get the guy’s license plate and make sure they see you writing it down.

Two, if you make it clear that you will NEVER back down (in a figurative sense, since you might have to make some tactical retreats) they get tired of you.

Three, if you have a reputation, many guys will avoid you. Ken Good of Combative Concepts says it is important to develop the mindset that you will hunt down anyone that harms your family. Jerry Peterson of SCARs fame says basically the same thing. You have to develop an offensive mindset with which you draw a line and are willing to defend it. No one likes to deal with someone like this. Jeff Cooper says that you know that you’ve reached the desired level of self-defense training when the person that attacks you is in more trouble than you are from being attacked by him.

Of course, you need to have the skill to back this up. Even the famous Geoff Thompson relates that he kept a loaded firearm in virtually every room in his house just because of the real possibility of comebacks by opponents that he defeated.

As far as hiring groups to hit you, that usually only comes up on murder for hire jobs. But there are groups that like nothing better to do than screw with people. They might do it in exchange for goods, drugs, alcohol or the promise for some fun. But, again, if the price for them to screw with you is high enough, many in the groups will think twice because it’s not their fight. In one of the situations I noted earlier, police caught a 20-year-old with the group of 16-year-olds that were doing the vandalizing. From what I heard, he was extremely embarrassed and ashamed that he was going to do some hard jail time for running around with a bunch of juveniles who were going to be released to their parents. (A side note to this story, the punk that was orchestrating all of this apparently screwed around with the wrong person because he was caught alone and hospitalized after being beaten severely by someone with a baseball bat. Not surprisingly, there hasn’t been anymore trouble from this crew).

However, after all of the offensive ideas and concepts I’ve forwarded here, you should also realize that retreating might be your best option. Once I found myself in a situation that was so destructive and tenuous from a retaliating group that we moved. We literally sold our house and moved to a different neighborhood. While I could have fought and fought and fought to prove we were right, it made more sense to move and feel happy again.