The son of a master thief asked his father to teach him the secrets of the trade. The old thief agreed and that night took his son to burglarize a large house. While the family was asleep, he silently led his young apprentice into a room that contained a clothes closet. The father told his son to go into the closet to pick out some clothes. When he did, his father quickly shut the door and locked him in. Then he went back outside, knocked loudly on the front door, thereby waking the family, and quickly slipped away before anyone saw him. Hours later, his son returned home, bedraggled and exhausted. "Father," he cried angrily, "Why did you lock me in that closet? If I hadn't been made desperate by my fear of getting caught, I would never have escaped. It took all my ingenuity to get out!" The old thief smiled. "Son, you have had your first lesson in the art of burglary."
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/zen-for-neighbours.pdf
... I was long thinking of an answer to you but nothing sounded right.
If you wouldn't have survived your own story, you wouldn't be here to confirm it. Same counts for me. The story of violence or trauma needn't dominate our lives. We need all our ingenuity to get out of our closet.
It does not seem appropriate to me to teach people to fear each other, except when the lesson corresponds to the above.