Avoidance is used for reducing and/or eliminating someone’s intent and/or means and/or opportunity to do you (or someone else) harm. This result is achieved primary by not being in close proximity to a potential attacker.
If a person doesn’t have the means and/or opportunity to physically touch you somehow, then he (or she) cannot physically harm you regardless of his bad intent.
You use avoidance to literally avoid being victimized. Anything that you do that keeps you out of reach of a potential attacker(s) is avoidance. That includes not entering in certain areas, by-passing potentially dangerous places, evading suspicious individuals and groups of people, fleeing when necessary.
A key aspect of Avoidance is your ability to identify possible threats to your safety and avoid them. In order to do so, you will need to have an understanding of criminal and predator behavior.
Another aspect of avoidance is to avoid being targeted by someone looking for a victim. That may mean avoiding areas where predators frequent, or it may mean avoiding specific people who could be predators, or it may mean avoiding certain behaviors that are likely to attract the attention of a predator.
Avoidance is a large set of strategies and tactics that goes well beyond the aspect of only running away.