Every fall, when it starts to get dark earlier, we see a deluge of messages on social media aimed at telling women how to stay safe (and yelling at men because they don’t have to pay attention to such things). These messages – which include things like holding your keys in your hands and not going out alone at night – are usually well-meant and mostly wrong.
There are also ongoing debates about how to deal with violence against women in our society, with many people arguing that the focus should be on those who commit the violence. These people think it’s unfair to encourage women to learn self-defense, since they’re not the cause of the problem, and advocate for programs aimed at perpetrators.
Unfortunately, even improved laws and law enforcement around sexual assault and rape – and such improvements are scant – don’t help when someone’s being hurt, and the training programs aimed at stopping men from harming have been unsuccessful.
What has been most successful, as Meg Stone points out in her excellent and thorough new book The Cost of Fear: Why Most Safety Advice Is Sexist and How We Can Stop Gender-Based Violence, is the approach taught as empowerment self-defense, a feminist-based system that includes both training in effective physical techniques and a number of other skills such as boundary-setting that can prevent a difficult situation from getting out of hand.
Stone is the executive director of IMPACT Boston, one of a number of groups worldwide teaching effective self defense as more than just fighting back. She’s also worked in the area of preventing gender-based violence for over thirty years and, as this books illustrates, she is very skilled at presenting the issues in a way that changes the response without provoking more of a fight – a very useful self-defense skill.
As Stone points out in detail in the book, linking to studies, unlike the short programs aimed at convincing, say, male college students not to attack women, empowerment self defense classes such as those taught by IMPACT and similar programs have been shown to reduce the number of assaults and to otherwise give women the power to make their position safer.
As Denise Velasco, a participant in a program teaching self defense to janitorial workers at risk of assault, told Stone:
I came to a point where I understood that self-defense wasn’t just about defending yourself; it was about changing the way you looked at the world in terms of your own power.
In these chaotic times – especially with known sexual abusers in top positions in the U.S. government and their efforts to dismantle programs aimed at stopping gender-focused assaults – changing the way we look at the world in terms of our power is more important than ever.
For one thing – and this point is clearly made in The Cost of Fear – women are at most risk of rape, sexual assault, and murder at the hands of people they know, mostly men. We’ve been fed the myth of stranger danger for so many years, but in fact it’s often those men who claim to protect women who are the biggest danger.
It’s not that stranger attacks don’t happen, but that they are not the biggest problem. And the advantage of empowerment self defense is that it gives you the skills to deal with all kinds of attacks. The guy who jumps out of the bushes to grab you can often be stopped by a quick knee to the groin and running like hell, while the co-worker who tries to grab you in the hall may require a firm, but verbal, setting of boundaries.
Less effective self-defense programs – such as the compliance-based ones often run by the police or by some male martial artists – focus only on teaching a few physical techniques and on lecturing women about how to avoid trouble. Stone entitles the chapter on those programs “How Not to Get Strangled by Your Ponytail,” which highlights the absurdity of the assumption that how women dress is the problem. In a further chapter discussing what the evidence shows, Stone notes:
The difference between feminist and compliance-based self-defense programs is not widely understood, but the differences in the evidence are stark.
The point isn’t that empowerment self defense training is the only solution – we need changes to law and culture to go along with it – but rather that it provides a solution regardless of whether those other changes happen. As Stone says:
Embracing self-defense doesn’t mean giving up on legal and political change. What it means is knowing when not to depends on institutions or the law for our immediate safety. [emphasis added] … Because gender-based violence is intimate and personal, strategies for stopping this violence need to be intimate and personal too.
The book does not minimize the more complicated self-defense issues for transwomen or the fact that racism puts Black women and others at greater risk, since if they defend themselves they might end up charged with a crime. The fact that their situations are more complex does not minimize their need for training, but does make it clear that a basic kick to the groin is not the solution in every situation.
While this book discusses many effective self-defense techniques, it is not intended to teach those skills. It is my hope that reading it will convince many more people to get good self-defense training of the kind offered by IMPACT and other groups.
As Stone observes in her conclusion:
Other people’s violence is not your fault. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do about it.
For those of you who like podcasts, here is an excellent interview with Stone about the book.