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.
Continue reading “The Cost of Fear: A Great Book on Self-Defense”…